Kevin Rutherford:
0:05
It's business 101, for the most part, here's a statistic, over 90% of single truck owner operators have no accounting system whatsoever, none, none. They wait. They throw their receipts in a bag or a box. They wait till the end of the year. They dump it on their tax preparer and say, I need a tax return done. That's the extent of their accounting, and it's over 90% welcome
Blythe Brumleve:
0:32
into another episode of everything. Is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. We are proudly presented by SPI logistics, and I am your host, Blythe Milligan, and we've got another great show for y'all today. We have Kevin Rutherford. He is a CEO of let's truck. He's coming back on the show. We're going to talk about how to make trucking great again in 2025 and beyond. So Kevin, welcome back to the show. Well, great to be here. So 2025 already, huh? I know we are recording this a few days before Christmas. For anybody who is listening, we plan to drop this episode the first week of January. So Kevin and I just just had a good little therapy session before we got started about social media. And you know, a lot of just holiday stress that's going on. And you know, stress is really no different, I think, than any other. Well, stress in this industry, there really is no time frame for it to exist. It kind of is just always there, right? It is. And you know what I would even say in our in our life today, stress is just so predominant, and it's stress that our body's not used to. This is actually a big topic of mine. I spent about two years working on a stress protocol to help people deal with stress, because what we were seeing was, we started about 10 years ago, helping drivers get healthier with diet, and we had tremendous success, and people have maintained it for the last 10 years. Right around the end of 2020
Unknown:
2:02
we started seeing people with with bad results that hadn't had bad results in years. Some of their markers were starting to change. They were gaining some weight again. And at first I thought, Well, okay, you've just kind of fallen off the bandwagon. We just got to tighten things up. And it wasn't the case at all. And we I just kept digging and digging, and I thought, You know what? This is just stress. And I mean, 2020, was a pretty darn stressful year, and that's when we started to notice it. And I started working on a protocol. One of the things I figured out most advice about stress is to just try to avoid it, like you got to go, take a walk in the park, and you got to go, you know, meditate and go, you know, watch a good movie or whatever, which is fine, except what we were finding was you could take two weeks off and meditate all you wanted, and an hour after you were back into the stressful situation, You were a wreck again. And I realized that the best way I can describe this stress is like a muscle. Our stress response is like a muscle, and the more we have to use it, the weaker it gets. And if you were to sit around on the couch all the time and all your muscles got weak, sitting around on the couch more isn't going to fix it, and that's that's what we are seeing. People just keep using these strategies to avoid stress, and it worked as long as they could avoid stress. But what we have to do instead is we have to build that stress response so that we're able to manage more stress, because you can't get away from it. And it turned out to be things like cold plunges, short duration, high intensity resistance training, some infrared therapy, some breathing work, and we track it through HRV, and we were able to get people's HRV back up, and then all of a sudden they would say, Well, you know, things just aren't as stressful anymore. When nothing really changed, the stress was exactly the same. It was their response to the stress. The problem is that you got to do these things pretty often and and then people are stressed out like, well, I don't have time to do my stress protocol? Well, I don't know what to do about that yet, so that was a big deal for us. I spent a lot of time on that, and I'm glad we're kind of just getting right into it, because one of the bigger topics that you focus on, especially with let's truck, is that you've been helping drivers for years, helping them get financially and physically fit, and it sounds like mentally as well. And I guess it's sort of, you know, my, my to piggyback off of what you just said, because I want to, I want to know how people can get started. But maybe you've already recognized that there are certain issues in your life. So how do you how do you know where to start? How do you know. If it's physical, if it's mental, if it's, you know, something financial, if it's all of the above, how do you kind of give your yourself a life assessment? Yeah, you know the the one thing, and you said this the way we've always said it. We should probably stop doing this. We've always separated. Everybody does it. We separate physical and mental. Why do we do that? It's our body. Our brain is an organ. Our heart is an organ, our kidneys an organ. We don't treat any organ differently, except the brain. And we thought that the brain functioned differently, and it really doesn't. All of the problems we see in the brain are the same metabolic problems we see in the entire body. So when we feel physical pain in a joint or a muscle, we know there's inflammation, right? Well, your brain can't feel pain, so when your brain is inflamed, there's no pain. What there is is dysfunction, brain fog, Alzheimer's, all of the mental conditions involve inflammation of the brain, and the same things we do to get somebody metabolically healthy for their body also fix the same problems with the brain. The other issue with with a lot of the stress in our thought process, is how many people today are on SSRIs, antidepressants, anti anxiety medication? It's rampant. I think it's like the second most popular class of drugs. Now we have kids on them. Now, what turns out, the neurotransmitters that they're trying to manipulate with these drugs. 80% of them are created in our gut. It's our gut bacteria that creates our neurotransmitters. So if you've got a how many people do you know with digestive disorders? Now, if you've got a digestive disorder, you've got a brain disorder, and that's where a lot of the stress comes from. So, so we can just, we can treat the human body as one, one entity, and the things we do to fix all the metabolic stuff, which is just a really clean diet, is number one. And clean, that word gets so overused, but, but what it means to me is the more foods you can eat that doesn't have an ingredient list, the better off. You're going to be real whole food, the way we see it, Nature doesn't have ingredients, and the more of that food we can eat, the healthier we're going to be. And that's brain health. It lowers stress levels. It's not a fix all, because the people that I first identified this in including myself, have really cleaned up their diet. We're coming up on 10 years now, and a lot of these people have been doing it for 10 years, very successfully. So the mismatch now is our nervous system. So here's the other thing that I think helps people understand this, every stress response in our body is really the fight or flight response. That's what stress is, when, when we when we are in what we call the the parasympathetic mode, which is also the rest and digest mode. That's that's out of stress. Stress isn't affecting our body, when we go to fight or flight, that's when the body releases cortisol, adrenaline. You know, we get that that rush. Now, can't you see that that fight or flight response feels a lot like stress? That's really what it is stress. The fight or flight response shuts down our digestion immediately. So the longer you're in stress, the worse your digestion is going to be. And then it's a vicious circle. When your digestion is messed up, it's going to mess up your stress response. So we just have to understand that that our fight or flight response, which served us really well as hunter gatherers kept us alive, is destroying us in today's world, because we're surrounded by stress. Some people never get out of that mode. And it all really starts with your diet. It does. And so it starts with your diet. And so if you, if I because what you're, you're, I coincidence. I just got the Callie or Casey means the book for my mom, because she was going through some health issues they wanted to put her on, you know, pre diabetic medicine. She suggested maybe I could change my diet. And the doctor literally told her that if she wanted to just focus on her diet then, then she could find a new doctor. She said, To hell with him. And she started a new diet, and she's lost 20 pounds since then. And so I got her this book, hopefully, you know Well, this show will air after Christmas. So I got her this book for Christmas to help her with that. In that regard, that is a great. Book, by the way, and I had Casey on my show. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, she was fantastic. And I think I got really lucky. I had a pre release copy of the book, and then I asked her to come on the show, so I had her on the show pretty early. And then obviously, you've seen how popular she has become. Now she's doing podcasts with Joe Rogan and Tucker, and I'm pretty sure I, although now I have the relationship, I could get her back on the show, but had I not gotten around early, I probably wouldn't have, wow. So because, yeah, it was just ringing true that, you know, I had heard her for the first time on Tucker, and it that episode kind of changed a lot of things for me, you know, diet wise, just mental health wise. So some of the things you were saying, it sounded like that, a lot of the things that she had been preaching, how, how long, I guess, to have a lot of these. I guess, sort of, because what she really speaks to, and I'm sure your episode covered, that is just the the infrastructure, or the institutional infrastructure, of our diets, of our food systems within this country, you know, just really have a negative impact on all of our bodies, not just truckers, but it seems maybe, you know, truckers with their, you know, sedentary lifestyle, it impacts them the most. Is that a fair statement, it is, but I'll tell you, it's not as much the sedentary lifestyle as people think. It really is the fact that look at their access to food. The worst place you can eat in today's world is at a restaurant. They are awful. All of them are awful. They all use seed oils. They all use all kinds of preservatives and pre packaged foods, and eating out today is just toxic, and these guys are gone two and three months at a time. For some of them, they're eating every meal out. They're eating the wrong foods when they eat it, but even if you eat the right foods when you're out, you're still going to struggle. So we teach them how to pressure can their own meat. So they can take, you know, a month or two worth of supply of meat with them without needing refrigeration. We have them fermenting vegetables so they can do the same thing. So the real key for them isn't the i Here's the other thing I tell people, typical client for me might be 350 pounds. 400 isn't out of the question. I mean, I get this all the time, and I will tell them right up front. I know you've heard it over and over and over. It's like the two words are interlinked forever. Diet and exercise. Stop saying it. Two totally different things. They accomplish, two totally different things. We shouldn't talk about them together. The last thing a 400 pound person wants to hear is you have to exercise how they can barely get out of their chair, and you want them to go to the gym and try to maintain some heart rate for an hour. It's not going to happen, and it's not necessary. Turns out, exercise is not an efficient way to lose weight. It doesn't work very well at all, because while it's burning calories, and calories are almost meaningless. It is also increasing appetite, and then you have to try to starve yourself, and nobody wants to do that, and that's why it doesn't last. I have helped people lose 200 pounds without one single minute of exercise. I They don't change their activity level at all. Weight loss is about the food we put in our mouth. The other the way it can say, this is there's health and there's fitness. Those aren't necessarily the same thing. At the moment, I'm not very active because I'm busy all the time, and you know, in the summer, I'm a lot more active. I'm healthy right now, but I'm not all that fit. I've been pretty sedentary for a couple months now, since summer ended, and I'm not fit, but I'm very healthy. My blood pressure's low, my blood sugar's where it needs to be. I don't have any weight issues. I don't have any joint pain. I'm not on any prescriptions, but I can't call myself fit. Fit comes from exercise and activity, and I'm a bigger believer in resistance training than aerobic training, but, but we do those kind of things for fitness. Health is all about diet and our environment, getting keeping the toxins out and, you know, cleaning up, think about all of our personal care products. You know, think of all the stuff we slather all over our body. Our skin is our biggest organ, and we absorb things right through our skin, and we slather toxins all over our body all day long. So I help people clean up all their personal care products and cleaning products at home. You know, we're to the point now where we have one cleaner for light bulbs and we have a cleaner for a floor, and we have the cleaner for the sink and we have one for the counter and we have one for stainless steel, and they're all toxic, and we're using, you know what works really good, a vinegar based cleaner will clean everything you. It cleans glass, it cleans Chrome, it cleans your your dirty stove. They make, they make concentrations up to 30% that'll almost take paint off. And yet, they're all natural. Nothing toxic about them at all. And you know, so you just look at our environment has become so toxic itself, so the weight and the health is about food and environment. Fitness is about activity and exercise. But I think we should separate the two, because we always tell people, you have to diet and exercise. Even the commercials for ozempic, ozempic, along with diet and exercise, they always say, Well, I can help you here. Throughout the ozempic, we don't need it. Forget the exercise for right now, focus on the diet will get you to your normal Are you in freight sales with a book of business, looking for a weight. new home? Or perhaps you're a freight agent in need of a better partnership? These are the kinds of conversations we're exploring in our podcast interview series called The freight agent trenches, sponsored by SPI Logistics. Now I can tell you all day that SPI is one of the most successful logistics firms in North America who helps their agents with back office operations such as admin, finance it and sales, but I would much rather you hear it directly from SPI freight agents themselves. And what better way to do that than by listening to the experienced freight agents tell their stories behind the how and the why they joined SPI. Hit the freight agent link in our show notes to listen to these conversations, or if you're ready to make the jump, visit SPI threepl.com, and that almost feels more attainable at first, because I feel like if you're if you're that significantly overweight, you know you have a problem, but it all feels so daunting, and you don't know which direction to go to, yeah, yeah. And telling somebody you have to restrict calories to lose weight will never work in the long term, the only way to restrict calories is to be hungry. If you weren't hungry, wouldn't be restricting calories. You would just eat till you were satisfied. And that's what people do. When you eat the right foods. That is how you should eat. I tell people when, when I show you what foods you should be eating. I never want to hear you say you were hungry, and I never want you to think if you if you're hungry, but you don't eat one more thing that's going to help you lose weight, it won't. If you're hungry, eat if you eat and you're still hungry, eat more when you're not hungry, don't eat, don't don't mindlessly snack or just eat because you're bored. But if you're hungry, eat, and you should not be hungry. And I've helped people lose and that's why they can lose 200 pounds and maintain it for eight years, because they're not fighting hunger all the time. If you're counting and restricting calories, you're going to be miserable. And that that was, you got into a little bit of drama this this week, while we're well, during the holidays, where a lot of people were not too happy with your you know, calories don't matter. Sort of, you know, mindset for people who may not be aware, you know, I would imagine that that, you know, everything you just said, is why you believe that calories don't that the calories in, calories out, don't matter. So what should people do instead? Is it because I know you're on an all carnivore diet? I believe right. I promote all carnivore. What I recommend is some form of we could call it a paleo diet, and paleo just means we're only going to choose from foods our hunter gatherers ancestors had access to, so and then you can get into some controversial things, like dairy and that kind of stuff. But for the most part, our hunter gatherers there were no food factories. The only foods they had access to existed in nature, and they ate them the way they existed in nature. That's the start. So, so those are the foods we can choose from if you want to be healthy. That eliminates preservatives, it eliminates added sugars, it so that's the start. But we found that people are so sick that's not enough, that the more metabolically sick somebody is, the more foods we have to eliminate out of the diet. The ultimate is what we now call the lion diet. Have you heard of that one yet? No, I haven't heard of that one. So here's the lion diet, beef, salt and water. Oh, wow, that's it, that that's the most extreme we and we actually call all of these diets elimination diets. We're going to eliminate Whole Foods, or whole classes of foods, and there's been tons of them over the years. What we're now learning is the more food. You eliminate, the more healing that diet becomes. So the more sick somebody is. I had a I had a woman on my show just a couple weeks ago. She was five nine, and she had had mental issues since she was a teenager, with anorexia and anxiety and depression and all kinds of things. At five nine, she had actually gotten down to 70 pounds. Oh, my God, and had horrendous mental health issues, schizophrenia. I mean, she was in bad shape. Her life was miserable. She went 100% carnivore, and it's gone everything, wow. She She works out now she strength trains. She's, she's, you know, really tall and lean. But you look at her old pictures, and you look at her now, and she just looks fantastic. And now she teaches this. And you know, that's why I had her on the show. But the sicker somebody is, the more foods we eliminate and get down to beef is the most nutritious of the animals we eat, and water is the only liquid humans need to survive, and a little bit of salt. And we see people heal like that, and some of these people decide not to ever come off of that. And we try to help people, you know, add back in. So I eat a my diet would be better described as keto, very high fat, because I thrive on fat. That's just something I've found about myself. I can eat about 80% of my calories in fat. Oh, wow. And really do well, that's saturated fat, beef tallow, duck fat, pork lard, all of it butter, moderate protein for me, and low carb. And the lower carb I go, the better I feel. So mostly mine is animal products. I love dark chocolate. So I eat dark chocolate every day. I think their honey has some pretty special properties. So some local honey as a sweetener, a little bit of right white white rice, maybe once a week, or once every couple of weeks, and fruit, and that's primarily my diet, and I feel fantastic. I mean, 61 no prescriptions, no weight issues, no joint pain, my digestion. I tell people I don't know that I have a digestive system, and they look at me like what I don't know that it exists. There's no feeling. There's no sensation. I it just everything works the way it's supposed to work, and I went through 50 some years of fighting digestive issues, and they're gone, and it's all from your diet, from what you're putting in your body, food. Yeah, it we, I, I'm, I'm not a huge believer in throwing supplements at everything. There are supplements that work, there's no doubt about it. And I sell supplements, and I use supplements to help people, but my approach is, if somebody comes to me first time we're talking, they want to know what to do. Here's the first test I give them. I want you to see if you can go seven days without eating anything except animal products, meat, fish, eggs and dairy. Eat as much of that as you want, but don't need anything else for seven days. And if I can get them to do it, they're hooked, because they see incredible results in just seven days. Joint pain disappears, their brain fog goes away, their energy levels get better. And once I can get them to see how powerful that is, then they're usually hooked, and then it, it my my next step is do this as long as you can. When you get tired of this, if we want to add some vegetables back in, or some a little bit of fruit, depending on where you are with with blood sugar, we can do that. But let's try. Let's try doing this for as long as you can. And if we make it to 30 days, then we'll take a step back, we'll review some things, and there's probably going to be a couple supplements I'm going to recommend almost everybody needs to supplement. Vitamin D, just don't get enough of it, and minerals seem to be a problem. So electrolytes, other than that, I try to use very targeted supplementation, and then stop it as soon as I can. What about Celtic salt? Absolutely, any of the I take that every Yeah, any of those, you know, we have the pink Himalayan salt. We've got, I'm actually I, I almost have a salt collection. I have black salt, I have red salt, I have volcanic salt, I have Celtic salt, I have French salt, I I've got, you know, we actually have a store in Portland that sells nothing but salt. That's awesome. What are the differences between all of these different salts? I thought Celtic was the best, so that's why I bought that one. So what we're looking for is a naturally occurring salt. Not the iodized, you know, Cal or whatever the technical name for salt is, like tape regular table salt. Table salt, throw that stuff away. Don't go anywhere near it, any of the naturally occurring salts, pink Himalayan, Celtic salt. The difference is there. They've got a lot of trace minerals that we don't get in other places, and they don't have the junk and the, you know, there's some chemicals they put into salt anti caking agents. And you want nothing but salt, but all of those kind of natural Redmond salt is a really good brand that's been around for a long time. The one thing I love about salt is you buy a thing of pink Himalayan sea salt that's been in the earth for a couple million years and it has an expiration date on it. Boy, I'm glad I got this before it expired after two and a half million that was one of the dangers, like, or, because my mom has been started on on this diet journey, and just, you know, she's, she's trying to find those little lifestyle tweaks, and I'm a little bit further along in the journey, so I'm trying not to, you know, sort of nitpick a lot of the changes that she's making. So I guess, how do you, how do you balance that approach, where it's like, oh, no, you're wasting your time, because she bought Himalayan salt, and I kind of told her where you got to be careful about where you get it from, because of the way that it's mined, and there's a bunch of chemicals in it and things like that. And how do you, I guess, suggest nicely or point them in the right direction? No, I'll tell you the question I get all the time that I can't answer, and it's almost this one. People will do this. Their results are incredible. They really are. It's hard to describe this change until you've gone through it, and good human beings, the minute they experience this, they want to share it with everybody. And, you know, carnivores, we can get pretty annoying and obnoxious. And, you know, we're always talking about food and, you know, so I tell people, Look, I don't know how to influence somebody else to start this or to stick with it. I can do it on the air, because I just talk and people will come to me. The hardest part is when you try to do it with somebody. You love somebody, the closer you are to somebody, the harder this is to do. And I even know most of the practitioners I know won't work with their relatives. They partner with other practitioners and they swap relatives so they don't have to work with their own because it just doesn't work well. And people will call me Kevin. I'm so glad I did this. You told me this. I they give me all their results. They're so excited, and they're go. But I'm so frustrated. My wife just won't listen to me, no matter what I say to her. So that that's that's a struggle, I tell people, look the the best thing I know is to do it yourself and be a good example. Don't be obnoxious about it. Don't try to push it on everybody else. And hopefully somebody asks you, and when they ask, don't try to overwhelm them, you know, and I'm bad at that, because I could go on and on and on for eight and 10 hours and tell you everything I know about all this, and I just have to take a step back and say, look, let's, let's make this one change for seven days and see what happens. And then you can, then you build some trust. I know it's going to work. If they do it, I know it's going to work. Then you build some trust. They see the results now they're willing to try the next thing I recommend. And I think what the big advantage for me, why I've been so successful at this is simply the fact that I'm on the air every day, and people can call and ask me these things every day, and then they can call back and say, I tried this and it worked great. And then other people hear that, and then they'll say, but I tried this and it didn't work. And I'll say, Okay, well, then let's try this. And there are people I've been working with for over a year, you know, a little bit at a time, and that's the best advice I have. Try not to overwhelm people, try to be a good example, and try to meet them where they are. Brokering success demands a battle ready strategy. Thai TMS equips freight brokers with the ultimate battle station for conquering a tough market with Tai, brokers gain access to a comprehensive platform where rate intelligence and quote history converge on a single screen. It's not just a page, it's a strategic command center designed to help brokers win. Tai equips your team with all of the data they need to negotiate with confidence and allows them to communicate directly with carriers and customers from a simple control base, revolutionize the way your brokers perform by giving them a competitive advantage with Thai TMS. For more info, go to Tai dash software.com backslash battle stations. And we also have a link for you in the show notes to sign up for a demo. Yeah? Because. I think just, you know, personally speaking, my mom is much more, you know, I'm further along on the process. She's definitely come a long way. And then it's, you know, trying to convince, you know, dad and brother that, you know that he my dad famously has had a Reese cup and a Dr Pepper as his breakfast for 20 years, and getting him off of that, we have successfully, finally got him, him off of that. So now he makes one egg in the morning and he notices a difference. And so that little bit of a change is already noticing a difference. But he also works outside. He owns his own lawn care business. He's, you know, run up for 40 years, and so the sun, and he's, you know, 61 years old, the sun is just brutal in Florida. And so I worry about him, and I'm like, You need to put some Celtic salt in your water. And, yeah, vegetables. And he doesn't want to hear any of it, no. And that's awesome. And I love the way you're doing it. And I you're doing it. You're making progress. You got him to change a lifelong habit. That's a big deal. I mean, that's a that's a big win, really, is you brought up something that shocked me about this. So 10 years ago, I made the changes joint pain goes. I have no markers of Ra anymore. And I had RA in my 20s. I have markers arthritis, right? Rheumatoid arthritis? Yeah, had markers my whole life, until I changed the way eight and then my joint pain went away. And after a while, I thought, you know, I wonder if I should check for the markers. And I did, they're gone, no evidence that I ever had rheumatoid arthritis. So it's pretty incredible what we can accomplish with it. But, you know, I go slow, take it a little bit at a time, but there was something else I came across and I was reading online one time, and somebody was talking about how they gave up all this stuff and that they no longer burnt when they went out in the sun. And I said, What? Come on, that's just stupid. Yeah, let's not get ridiculous about this stuff. And then I went and did the research, and I had not, I had not been eating the thing that they claimed caused this problem for about six years, when I'd learned this, and I thought I have burnt my whole life. I mean, I am so pale, and 15 minutes in the sun and I am beat red, and then two days later it's gone, and I'll burn again. And I've been that way my whole life. And I love being outdoors. I love water sports. I used to put sunscreen all over, which is horrendous. That stuff is toxic. Then I at least switched to wearing, you know, long summer kind of clothes, fishing shirts and that kind of stuff. And I would avoid the sun. And I thought, could they be right? So I went out in the sun that day, and I, you know, I can feel it when I start tingling. And I was out in the sun for like, 30 minutes, which was a long time for me, and I thought I started to panic. I'm like, I'm going to be burned. I know it. And so I went in later that night. I'm like, I'm not feeling anything at all. Went out the next day and tried an hour that is unheard of for me. After an hour, nothing. And I just kept pushing it all this summer, I have a I've got a six acre homestead in Washington that I garden out there, and I'm doing a lot of land clearing all summer. No shirt, no hat, no sunscreen. 678, hours a day out in the sun. I never burned. Wow. What are you doing? Seed oils? Oh, that's what causes it. But here's the problem, when you quit them, it takes almost 400 days for all of it to clear your system. Oh, wow. So we didn't realize there was a change, because the change happened years after we stopped consuming them. But once this was pointed out to me, and I tested it, and I started telling it, it works every time. People I know who burn all the time, redheads total, freckles, get seed oils out of your diet. Give it a couple years to clear, and that all goes away. Isn't that crazy? What is, what is technically a seed oil? Okay, so anything that they've tried to call a vegetable oil, and they use the word vegetable because we thought vegetables are healthy, so vegetable oils must be healthy. You can't squeeze a carrot and get oil out of it. You can't squeeze a canola, not that there is a canola. Canola comes from the rapeseed plant, but you don't squeeze the vegetable to get oil. The oil comes out of the seeds and go look up the process, just for the fun of it. Once. Time, how what it takes. There's chemicals, there's crazy amounts of heat. The fats are so damaged by the time we start consuming them. And here's the thing, this is why this is such a big deal. Every cell in your body, the cell wall, is made of fat, and when you build every cell with bad, damaged fats, you're going to be sick. It's actually seed oils. This. This isn't quite proven yet, but I think it's going to be the the root cause of diabetes is not sugar. Sugar becomes the problem, but the root cause is seed oils, because diabetes is really insulin resistance. Your body won't your cells won't accept any more sugar, because insulin is the lock that opens the cell and lets sugar in. But your cells stop responding to the insulin, and then the sugar stays in your blood, and that's when you're diabetic, well, that the cell won't accept the insulin because the signaling part of the cell wall is damaged, and it was damaged by bad fats. It's all the seed oils in our diet. Is what about? Like avocado oil. Avocado is not a seed oil because one avocado is not a vegetable, it's a fruit, and we don't get the oil from the seed. We get it from the flesh, okay? And it and it should be expel your pressed, not, not heavily processed. That's why olive oil is okay. Olive is a fruit, and we squeeze the olive itself, not the seed or the pit. Oh, interesting. I guess I just assumed that avocado oil, because of the seed that's inside of it, was also a seed oil. It we get the oil from the avocado flesh is loaded with that. So avocado oil is okay. It's one. There are only three oils that come from plants that I recommend. That's avocado, olive and I would be care really, really careful with olive oil. Most of the olive oil in this country is fake. It's seed oils. And even really good olive oil gets damaged by light. It's not a really stable oil. Coconut oil is the other plant oil, and coconut oil is amazing. It's loaded with saturated fat. It's got all kinds of good stuff in it. It's an antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral. So those are the three. And I would just be very careful of olive oil. I use some olive oil cold. I don't cook with it, and I buy it directly from a family farm in Greece. Oh, wow. And the cans are dated. When it was harvested. They only put it in cans, not bottles, because that protects it from the light. But for the most part, I use all the animal fats, butter, lard, yellow duck fat. Duck fats, one of my favorites, man, duck fat is so good, yeah, so you should be cooking in all animal fats. Okay, so we have spent the first, I'm looking at the clock, 36 minutes talking about diet. And I think that that's a really, honestly, a good place to kick off. What, you know, some of the other, you know, I guess drama that's going on within the trucking industry. Because if you have, you know, good diet, if you're taking care of your body internally, if you're starting to, you know, figure out your fitness plan and working that all in as a driver, then it's going to help you to better be able to deal with a lot of the stresses that you probably in control with a point, yep. So speaking of the stuff that maybe we can't control, there are a few topics that I have seen on x, and have seen, you know, in in LinkedIn, and a lot of different discussions. And I wanted to kind of get your feel of it, you know, a couple of the big ones. And so the, the first big one is broker transparency, yeah, one of my favorite for, I guess, a high level Eagle view, if Eagle Eye View, sure, what is, what is the drama around broker transparency? You know, let's just be real and upfront. Because I've been doing this for 40 some years, I was afraid broker for a short time. We can go all through that, but I think the drama is really just frustration on so many carriers that got into the business. And I'm talking about one truck guys, and that's my sweet spot. That's my market. That's where I've always worked. They get into business with no plan, very under capitalized. They have no accounting system when they get started and and all they hope to do is, you know, run enough to pay the bills, if they can pay the bills that they're probably not complaining when they start to fall behind on the truck payment. Or they, you know, they need a tire, and they have to go buy a recap or a used tire because they can't afford it. Then they get frustrated. And then. Start looking to blame somebody. And you know this, the first place you got to look is the mirror. What am I doing wrong that I could make better? And there's always something before we go blame somebody else. The easiest place to lay the blame is the broker. Because, you know, that's where the freight comes from. They're stealing all my money, you know, the whole thing. But I think the frustration comes from is we have a lot of people that get into this business and don't have any business sense, and then they don't seek out any education. I think the solution to all this is education, not the government. The government's not going to fix any of this stuff education will let me give you a number that just shocks people, and this is it's a little bit of an outlier, but it tells us what's possible. I have a single truck owner operator that I work with. He came to my big conference, CMC, back in 2010 I think his wife now works for us. She's one of our employees. He kind of works for us, but he he runs one truck by himself, one driver, one truck, and his net profit in 2023 was $274,000 Wow. Yeah, he does. He dropped out of high school in the ninth grade. He's smart. He's really smart. He just didn't like school. He just doesn't like traditional learning. But he got hooked on learning about his business and accounting, and I take a little bit of credit, just because I showed him the ways to do this. But then he took off with it, and he, that's the kind of money he makes now, I mean that that's just incredible. The average single truck owner operator out there probably isn't making 80,000 a year, and he did 274,000 and so, I guess, for folks who may not be able to, you know, connect the dots, broker transparency was some kind of law that was passed. Yeah, let's go back to that. So we're going back to the motor carrier act of 1980 that's what we call deregulation in the trucking industry. The one thing people have to understand when we say deregulation, the only thing that was deregulated was the financial aspect of the industry. So people say, What? What? I don't even know why they call it deregulation. We have all these regulations. Well, of course, you do. Everybody does. We deregulated the financial part the government. Prior to 1980 the government controlled the rates in trucking, it was government controlled. And the way they did it was they didn't set the price. You understand supply and demand, right? This is that. This is the one I try to get these guys to understand. What the government did was, when you filed for authority, they just turned you down. They just wouldn't give new trucking companies authority. So they controlled the supply, which controlled the price, because if there aren't enough trucks on the road, the price just keeps going up and up and up. If you wanted authority, you actually had to go out and find shippers who would write letters saying they needed more capacity in that lane. And then you might still go to the government, and they might say no. And your authority was not blanket authority. It was lane by lane. You might have authority to move freight from Cleveland to Dallas, but not Dallas to Cleveland. And then what you had to do is you had to trip lease. You had to go find a trucking company that had the authority in that lane, and you would sign a lease for one trip. And we used to have magnetic door signs for our trucking companies. We would stick them on the door while they were working that one trip for us, it was a horribly inefficient system, and it cost us all a ton of money. What would happen towards the end? There would be trucking companies that were almost bankrupt, and they would sell for millions of dollars because somebody wanted their authority. That's how bad it got. 1980 they said, Look, we don't need to protect this industry anymore. The original idea was, we have to. We can't have too much competition. This is too big of an industry, and it could just fail. So we're going to protect some carriers and let them become stable. And then in 1980 we decided, You know what, we don't need to protect them anymore, that this can work as a free market, and that's what changed at that time. There were no freight brokers, that industry didn't exist. Thus people would go, Oh no, that's not true. Ch Robinson was a broker in the 20s. They were a produce broker, not a freight broker. H Robinson started as a produce company. They brokered loads of produce, and then brokered the move of them too, but they owned the produce. They were a produce broker. Well, once, once, all these new carriers flooded into the market after deregulation, which is a good thing, we got a bunch of new, small carriers in where are they going to get their freight? The old legacy carriers had sales teams. They would go out and find the freight for the carrier. Well, in the beginning, the broker worked for the carrier. When the brokerage industry first started, the broker did not go out to a shipper. They went to carriers and said, I'll go find you freight, and we paid them a percentage. So the transparency was because we were the one the carrier paying them direct. We had the right to see. But once that whole market shifted, which took time. Now, the brokers go to the shipper that is their freight. They signed a contract. They are the ones that have a contract with the shipper. Then they go find a carrier to move it. The problem is they, they left that clause in there about the every, every party to the transaction has a right to see the documents that just it was just a leftover that was in there because of the way the broker industry worked. Then it makes no sense now, but try to convince somebody of that they just think they should have the right to see this because of that one clause. Do you know any other business that has to disclose its margins to anybody? Yeah. I mean, or Yeah, I agree. I try to think of one. Nobody in business has to disclose their margins to somebody else, especially the person they're negotiating with. But that's what these people are asking for, but because they don't even have the basic understanding of free market and how business works, they're stuck on this one paragraph in 370 1.3 that they're allowed documents. First off, it's only after the transaction is over, you don't get to see it before. Then what happened was brokers when, when people started pointing out this and saying they wanted to see the documents, brokers said, well, we don't like that. So the broker contract, it almost always now includes a waiver, and the waiver is waiving your right to that clause. And then some of the groups, a wide and a bunch of others came out and said, You can't wave away your rights like that, except you can. Supreme Court said. So. The Supreme Court said when, when the law or the regulation is written, if it doesn't explicitly say that you can't waive this, then you absolutely can waive it, if both parties sign the contract with the waiver, the waiver is legitimate. So what would have to happen now is Congress is going to have to take this up again and change the regulation and make it non waiver able. I don't see that happening. And so that's where I guess a lot of the arguments are around is, you know, should this be a thing, or should this not be a thing? What are the ripple effects on the rest of the industry? I think there were, you know, I have some, a couple questions on Twitter about this in particular, or x, but there was one from Stephen Roo. He works over at freight 360 great group over there. And he said, If carriers get transparency as they wish, what is the benefit to them? If there is any benefit, what's the effect on the overall market? Will transparency actually combat fraud? There's a few questions in there. So just curious on what your comment would be, sure. And I actually know Stephen and him and I have discussed this and talked about it. And so here's a couple things. First off, let's, let's tackle the fraud issue. I solved freight fraud a long time ago. I don't I, you know, had anybody listen to me, we wouldn't even be facing this right now. So what I try to teach my small carriers and owner operators is the load board is a tool. It's not where you get your freight, and they're like, What? What? That's what it's for. No, it's not. Here's how I think you should use a load board. That's where your your potential customers are, and they'll be like, what, what, what. There's hardly any shippers on there. No, your potential customer is a broker. What that freaks them out, but that's absolutely true. You're providing a service to the broker and they're paying you. How is that not your customer? They don't like that. But I said, use the load board to find the brokers that have freight in your area, and the kind of freight you want that's your. Contact, reach out to them and start building relationships. I even say, if you want to put yourself in the top 1% schedule an appointment, go see them in person. Nobody ever does that. You know how relationships work. You could talk to somebody on the phone for 20 years. The first time you meet them in person, the whole relationship changes. Yep. So go meet them. Your truck has wheels. You can go anywhere you want. You know, go meet them. They'll be really impressed. And they are your customer. So, and then I say, Find three to five good brokers like that that you build a relationship with. They understand you, first off, you're going to get the best rate that never makes it to the load board. The best stuff never gets posted. It gets moved with relationships. So that's the first thing you're going to do, is you're going to cut all your time and headaches down and all this onboarding, and you're going to get better freight. But here's the other thing, if I'm only working with three to five brokers, what does that do for freight fraud? It almost eliminates most of it. We know who we are. You know the freight got on the wrong truck, where I pull your stuff every week. The the one freight fraud we don't address with this is them stealing carrier numbers and that kind of stuff. But if they steal my number and they go to a broker I work with that's not going to work for him either. So had we just worked together brokers and carriers as a as an industry work together, this freight fraud may have never even occurred, but we left that wide open because I have single truck guys that that work with 50 to 60 carry or brokers in a year. Wow. And I identified that CRM to keep up with all of that. Oh, and they don't have one, so they don't keep up with any of this. They can't tell you the last 10 brokers they worked for. They don't even remember them. I figured this out because one of my early businesses was doing tax returns, and I would get all these 1090 nines for and I'm like, What are you doing? And here's what they do. They go to the load board, they search for the load they want. They the next click. And I know this because I work with the load boards, and they store all this data. The next click is sort by rate, and they just start calling the highest rate on the board. Well, if I do that today, and then two or three days from now, when I need another load and I do it again, what are the odds I'm going to get the same broker again, just about zero. So this is what they do. We actually have a term for it. We call it one and done. We call it when you go to the load board, you're chasing the rate. And then when you call it, it's one and done, and you move on, and you wonder, why the brokers don't care about you. Why would they you're never coming back. So the freight fraud, I think, would would go away. But here's something else here. You know, I use this phrase a lot on this topic, be careful what you wish for if we got transparency? Have you ever, did you ever watch the show shipping wars? No, okay, don't I'm trying to think of which channel that I have seen those commercials, and I've said to myself, I need to watch it, but I have done, don't, not, not as entertainment. I watched it because, you know, you can learn a few things. So basically, the way shipping wars works is these, these guys on the show, whether they were a hot shot or a tractor trailer or whatever it was, they would follow these little owner operators around and kind of document what was going on. But they were all getting their freight from a website called you ship Yes, you ship it. You could go there if you needed to move a car or a big piece of furniture, or you could actually connect directly with carriers that could move this for you, even as a as an individual. But it's a bidding site, so the rates are all transparent. Somebody bids on that load, and I see what they bid, and I can bid. What does that do? When you can see the rate a bidding war drives the prices to the lowest possible point, and then somebody takes it. Everybody in trucking makes fun of the show. Oh, look at those idiots taking that. Who would pull that kind of stuff? This is what you're asking for you have total rate transparency, and I can see what that carrier moved it for. I'm just going to go in and cut it by two cents, and then the next person is going to cut it by two cents. And so once I can see the rate and look, the more efficient you are in running your business, and the lower your cost is the more you can undercut these guys. So the worst operators should be the ones hoping we never have rate transparency. That's an interesting way of looking at I never even thought of seeing it from from that perspective, but it makes total sense. I wonder, why do you think so many you know single truck operators? You. Know, owner operators. Why do you think they follow the same path of just relying on the load board, just an ignorance of of how to run a business really well, it's just what they know, because it's what everybody else does. Oh yeah, I got my authority. Now I need an account at the load board so I can get freight. And then that's all they do. The other thing they do is there, you've probably interviewed people from either truck stop or dad or both. Right soon, there we are in we are in talks, but I have actually interviewed the CEO or the former CEO of you ship. So it's she's not the CEO anymore. She's going off to other paths. But it's an interesting conversation, nonetheless. Yeah, so you know, the like I said, the load board is there to for. I think it's a great place to find good brokers to work with. And if you've got those three to five once in a while, you might hit a dry spot and somebody might not have any freight, and you've already got an account, go to the load board and grab a load I'm fine with that, but it shouldn't be the bulk of your freight and and you know, the load boards have also created incredible tools around rates. I can dig down into every lane in the country, and they have carrier negotiation tools. And if I go in there, it'll say, Look, here is your negotiation power in this lane, and they're basing it on supply and demand. And it's real time data. If you're in Chicago today, Chicago is loaded with flatbeds, and there's hardly any loads posted. Well, guess what that's going to do. The rates coming out of Chicago today, they're going to be awful. Maybe you just want to bounce over to Cleveland or something, you know. But all of the data is in the load board to go figure all that stuff out. So these guys pay for that. Don't even know it exists. Never use it, and they're using the load board completely wrong. It's why I have such a strong partnership with truck stop, because the whole point is to try to educate these guys on how to use those tools. Interesting, yeah, I guess you know, for for, maybe for a lot of folks, they just get into a habit of doing it one way, and it's difficult for them to very similar to their diet. You know, they're they get used to the thing and change is very hard, and they don't want to address it, and they don't want to to your first point that you made look in the mirror and, you know, kind of address those issues with themselves first. They don't, you know, it's very difficult, I think, to admit when you're wrong or maybe that you've wasted a lot of time and money. You know what? That's a really good point. I learned early on in business that not only was I going to admit when I was wrong every time I was wrong, because it's the only way you're ever going to learn and become right, but then the other thing I learned was I learned way more from my mistakes than I learned from my successes. Successes sometimes are just pure luck, right? And you look at you go, wow, that was great. Look at that, but you had nothing to do with it, and you don't learn anything from that. Mistakes will always teach you something when, when you do something wrong, there's usually a consequence, and you can usually look at that and say, Okay, why did that happen? And what can I do better? So I actually have a model that says, if I have a new project or a new idea or something I'm working on, I want to make as many mistakes as I can, as fast as I can make them. Yep, and then I'm going to get up to speed and I'm going to and a lot of people, their ego just will not allow them to do that. Here's another clue. My most successful clients by far in the 30 years I've helped people get into this business and run small businesses. My most successful clients are always somebody that came outside the industry. They're not longtime drivers. The long time, drivers get all the worst habits, their ego is too big. You can't tell me how to run a truck because I've been driving a truck for 42 years. My daddy drove a truck, and he taught me when I was seven. And look, I'm not trying to teach you how to drive a truck. I'm teaching you how to run a business. But, but they can't separate the two to them, they know everything there is about driving trucks because they've been doing it a long time, and I agree with them. They're really good at it. Driving a truck has nothing to do with this business. My most the easiest clients to work with, I can make them a success every time, 40 to 50 years old, with a business background, I can make them successful every time because they just listen. They'll just do what I you know, I lay out the plan. They follow it. They succeed. And the next thing you know, they've got 10 trucks and they have almost no experience in the industry. So would you, would you say that Trucking is still because I hear, you know, I follow a lot of drivers on social media, and, you know, a lot of them have kind of made the comment that trucking isn't what it used to be, and that, you know, there's a lot of. Stuff that's going wrong in the industry, and why would anybody even want to come into this industry? Do you think that it's still a good job to have provided you are willing to have the business acumen behind it? I do. I we can talk about that a little bit, but let's start with this. Tell me anything that's the same as it used to be? Oh, true. Yeah. Nothing is or everything about our world, our life, everything has changed. Because these people are talking about three or four decades, that's how long I've been in it. And the biggest group of drivers right now are baby boomers that are about to retire. So these guys that have been around for three and four decades. Of course, it's changed. Everything does it is? Is it as good as what it used to be. Now I don't like the industry as much as I used to. There isn't the kind of camaraderie, and you hear that a lot, although that was never a big thing for me. The one place that I spent the least amount of time when I did drive was at truck stops. The only thing I did at a truck stop was get fuel. That was it. Nothing else. I didn't park there. I didn't buy stuff there. I didn't take shower there. I don't like them. There's nothing about them that made me want to be in a truck stop. I went in and got fuel. I'd park at a rest area. I'd park at a in the back of a mall. I'd park anywhere I could find, and I'd eat from grocery stores so I can control the price and the quality you know better. And one of the things I try to tell people if, if I could tell them one thing, try to understand what it means to be a contrarian, and it will work really well for you in so many areas of life. I teach people investing, if you want to be a decent investor, do the opposite of what you see everybody else around you. Doing it will work better than anything else I could teach you. I had a I had a saying, when I used to do a lot of the financial planning, I would say, as soon as your grocery store clerk is giving you stock tips, it's time to get out of the market. That's a really good sign. It's just time to get out. Stocks are so popular. The market must be doing so good. If your grocery store clerk is talking about stocks, it's time to get out. So I have a contrarian belief in trucking. I this right now, right now, today, right where we are is the absolute best time to get into trucking. I helped somebody get in last January. You should probably have him on your show. This guy was really interesting. He'd never been an owner operator before. Maybe had been a little bit but he wanted to become a carrier. Went got his own authority. He went through some of my programs. He would call my show. He asked me a lot of questions. I help him do this. You may even see him on x because he's really active. He posts since he got his own authority and became a carrier. He started on day one. He posts every single load HE books. He puts a post up and says load number 37 since I got my authority, I'm going from here to here, and then he'll comment like, you know, this wasn't supposed. My appointment was until Tuesday. I got there Monday in the afternoon, and I called him, and they got me in. So now I'm on to another load, and he, you know, the other thing he does at the bottom of every one of these posts, and he posts every load, and he's got a standard format that he does it in, and at the bottom it says it's a, it's a kind of a shout out to brokers. If you're looking for a good, small carrier that cares about your customers kind of thing, call me. Wow. Who is it? Ilya on exits. I believe his handle is millennial truck. I swear I was going to guess his name because I've seen some of his posts, and I thought, Oh, wow, he's doing, you know, really good social media. So shout out to him. Yeah, I wrote down that that name. So, yeah, awesome. That's awesome. Reach out to him. Get him on your show. Brent huttos had him on his podcast, and it's another guest I need to get on the show as well. Yeah, I don't know if you know this or not, Brent's my co host on Mondays. Now, I did not know that that's awesome. We do our Monday show together. It's all about rates and lanes and what's going on in the industry. And so Brent's actually the co host. Now that is awesome. Okay, yeah, you know, I think I have one two, yeah, at least two guests out of here you go. There you go. Yeah. So. So that idea of I'm not going to fight with the brokers, I'm not going to complain about the brokers. I'm going to market to the brokers because they're my customer. He the broker carrier Summit. He went to that. You know what he did at the first broker carrier Summit, he put out an offer to all the brokers there, I'll pull your first load free. Talk about being able to market yourself that is really, really smart. Yeah, yeah. So that's kind of the contrarian point of view, and it works in so many ways. Don't start. Look at all the people who are being washed out of the market right now. They all started during COVID at the top. You start in the top of a market, and the odds that you can survive the bottom of the market are pretty slim. Start at the bottom of the market with a plan that works, and then the top of the market is just pure gravy. So I helped, I helped Ilya start at the bottom of the market January of this year, and he's killing it. That's awesome. Yeah, that is really cool to hear. Because I, you know, I see a lot of doom and gloom, you know, on social, especially from drivers, about how the market is just, you know, it's crap. And, you know, they they're not sure if they're gonna be able to survive. And I feel for them, but I to your advice, I mean, or to that point, it really, it shines. I think you're helping, you know, give drivers a flashlight in the dark to understand, you know, what pathway to take in a multitude of ways. There was another, you know, a little bit of drama. I think I've kind of been I've experienced this as well, especially with the truck parking club guys. I've had them on the show. Love them, but anytime I post a clip from one of that those conversations, I get a lot of replies about how they're a scam and they're stealing money from truckers, or they are, you know, making them pay extra for something that they got for free. What is, what is your take on on that a Blythe while they're telling you that they're probably drinking bottled water stressed and they're getting poisoned from the plastic in the bottle and the water, and they paid more for it than gas. When it's it's at every faucet, it's free. Why would you pay for it? Why would you pay more for water than you pay for gas? But now you're going to complain about parking. But why do you think parking should be free just because it has been and it's not free, by the way, they also complain about how much they have to pay for anything in the store at the truck stop. Why do you think you have to pay that kind of price? Because they provide a giant parking lot out there that is outrageously expensive to own and maintain, and they don't charge you for it, so you're going to have to pay for it somewhere. My I have been saying this for about 10 years, since the whole parking thing started coming up as a complaint, and I said then, and I continue to say it now, and we are in. When I get off this call, I'm probably going to be talking to Reed over at truck parking club, because they want to partner with us. I think they're going to be a part of our CMC. And I've been saying forever, if you want better parking, be willing to pay for it. It's simple as that, if truck parking club succeeds, what are they going to end up with? Competitors, right? Somebody's going to look at this model and go, Hey, look, this works. You can actually make money with parking. And then a competitor is going to look at truck parking club and go, Hey, look, if we put in these amenities, we can the more that happens, the better parking will get. If you want parking to be free forever, just get used to truck parking lots with big holes in them and crashes all over the place and no amenities and and all the issues we've always dealt with. Want better parking, just be willing to pay for it. I mean, it's always reminded me a little bit of, like a, you know, like a gym, where if you want those better amenities, you're probably, you're definitely going to have to pay a fee right to access those amenities, and then the upkeep and the upgrade of it's not free, and you have to, I mean, that's the cost of running a business. And so maybe it kind of, you know, gets back to your point of, you know, if you understand sort of business basics, then you would understand why a facility would like to charge money for the upkeep of those parking spaces. And I think, you know, to to play the, you know, the other side a little bit that, you know, their argument is, well, I used to get these spots for free. This money is coming out of my pocket. Why isn't it coming out of the shipper or the broker's pocket. This is another fee for truckers. You know, the complaints are kind of endless, yeah, and I get that but, but wait a minute, why doesn't it come out of the shippers or the broker's pocket? It does. That's where your revenue came from. You took their money and you spent it on parking. It did come out of their pocket. How else? Where else would it come from? You kind of have a choice there too. You don't have to haul for that shipper either. And you know, maybe that's an amenity that they could offer you as well with different partnerships, where you can just structure your rate to cover that true do we ask? Do we ever say I want the shipper or the broker to pay my tolls? Well, why do I have to pay a toll? There's all kinds of free roads all over the place. Why do I have to pay a toll on this road? Well, you do because the state said they're going to build a toll road. You can either try to go around it, or you can pay to drive on it. But we don't, then look. At the broker and go, Well, you have to pay this. No, as a business person, you look at the load, you should realize, hey, those are there's some toll roads. I need to calculate that into my cost. Parking is really rough on the East Coast, so I'm probably going to have to pay for parking. And then you price accordingly. And if there's nobody to pay the price, then you look for a different lane. It makes sense. But I'm also a business owner, so I think it makes sense to me to understand where those costs are coming from, and to structure your rate appropriately. I just maybe it's a little bit of just it. I got the feeling because anytime I get those comments on on the truck parking club posts, I see it as this isn't just one thing. It feels like maybe they're they're experiencing a lot of pile on from a lot of price increases from a variety of industries, and this is the the thing that they're going to blame the most they are. But let's think about this. Every one of their competitors has the same pricing problems. Every one of them. It's not like they're being singled out somehow. In fact, they have they have far more control. Nobody has more control over their day, their cost, everything, than one guy, one truck. I understand why employee drivers would be upset if all of this parking starts to be paid and their fleet isn't going to pay it. As an employee, you should not have to pay that cost, that that should be your employer. That would so I get it. It's why I don't. The only time I deal with employee drivers is on the health side, because the rest of everything I do is business, and sometimes what's good for an employee driver is in direct conflict with what's good for my customers, which are owner operators, that when a white a pushed for mandatory detention time the shippers, they wanted the shipper to be required to pay mandatory detention time. Well, I get it for employees, if you're sitting there at the dock and you have no control over this, and your employer is not paying you for that time I get it. While you're upset, it's it's not the right answer to go to the shippers and expect they're going to pay this, and who would ever enforce it? We need to get and you have a little bit of control. As a driver, go find a carrier that does pay it, and that's how competition works. But as an owner operator. The last thing I want is some group that's supposed to be representing me putting regulations and costs on my customers. That just doesn't look good. That's my issue. I'll go to my customer and negotiate this stuff, and if I can't, then I'll go find a different customer. But I don't want groups that are just going to put a bunch of regulations on my customers, which is why I fight so hard against broker transparency. The system works that nothing about this makes sense, and all you're doing is asking the government to put more regulations on our customers. What do you think is a story in trucking that deserves more attention. You know, we've talked, you know, obviously, about broker transparency and truck parking. But is there something else that you know that the logistics audience should be aware of and paying attention to? Yeah, and I don't, you know, this is what I do every day. I have almost no competition, and I think this is the answer, and I don't I'm not saying it's anybody else's responsibility in the industry, but I'm just trying to point out this will solve a lot of the problems we all fight with, and the one thing I think we're horrible at in this industry is education. Think about all the things we just talked about today, and you not knowing the inside of this, you've never owned a truck, but when I say it, you go, Well, that makes sense, and you can see how that would work. And it's not rocket science. This stuff's pretty simple. It's business 101, for the most part, here's a statistic, over 90% of single truck owner operators have no accounting system whatsoever, none, none. They wait. They throw their receipts in a bag or a box. They wait till the end of the year. They dump it on their tax preparer and say, I need a tax return done. That's the extent of their accounting, and it's over 90% you run a business. How could you run a business without knowing where your money's going or where it's coming from? But they do, or they try to, and then they wonder why they're struggling with all of these things. Then they get angry, and then they just start blaming everybody else, and this is the state of the industry. So it's why everything we do at let's truck is really built around education. I love that. And speaking of content, what does your what does your schedule look like? Are you making any, you know, adjustments or plans for 2025 because you broadcast every day? I believe, right? I am. I do 15 to 20 hours a week on the air. That's just on my radio show. I do two hours every week of group coaching. So all the things I talk about on the radio show, or the questions you can ask me, we're pretty limited in time and scope. You know, I can't get a lot of background data for someone. They call me on the air, they have a question. I don't know who they are. I don't know background. I've got a limited amount of time so I can answer a lot of stuff like that. But if you want to go deeper, then I have this group coaching, and I will go as deep as somebody wants. I have been working for over a year with a family run trucking company. It's been around for about 40 years, and is about bankrupt, and it's really sad. And there's I've been working with them for over a year. We solved almost all of their problems, but the family started in fighting, and they reversed a lot of the stuff we they did now we're heading back into the problems again and and I think if something doesn't change in the next 60 days, they're going to be out of business. But I've been working with them for over a year. We worked on a hiring program, we worked on a fuel mileage program, we worked on a bonus program. We went from they couldn't get a single call when they when they tried to find a driver to having a list of seven drivers waiting, that's what we were able to accomplish. And then they started fighting in the family. I helped one guy who was growing enough that he wanted a kind of a repair shop terminal. I mean, I helped him with the real estate part of it. You know, here's how we go find the right property. Here's what we've got to do to, you know, make sure it's going to work. So on the coach, that is my favorite part of the week. I mean, I get to use all my skills, and I get to really dig deep and troubleshoot, not just the same surface stuff over and over, like my show might be. And then every other week, I do a two hour CMC, because my CMC program now is a year long program. So in and we are also now an official part of mats. I think we are the only, I know that's their that's their model now they're trying to bring more events in around mats. And I think we're the first, we're the third, first third party to be an official so our CMC is two days prior to the truck show opening, that's live and in person, and then that program goes on for another year, where I do a two hour webinar every other week for a year. So that that's really my schedule. I get up, I spend three hours on the radio. I get off the radio. I do podcast stuff like because if somebody invites me on the show, I go, I mean, I'll go on anybody's show. I love talking. And then I had the call with the Volvo engineer a little while ago, and tomorrow, I'll have my coaching call in the afternoon, and Tuesday, I'll have my CMC. And so I just, I basically spend my time talking. I was gonna say, what do you what do you what do you do when you're not talking? No, I'm always talking. If I'm not talking, I'm reading. Where do you? And that's a good segue into my next question, where do you get your content inspiration? Where? Who do you learn from? Everybody I can, other industries, other countries. I studied Europe for a long time on fuel mileage. Europe, heavy truck fuel mileage, they've been a decade ahead of us forever. So I get, I get more of my ideas from European magazines and websites and and people that I know in the industry. I've just been a lifelong student. You know, I've been following Anthony Robbins. Been following Anthony Robbins since I was 20. And he was probably about 20 at the time too. But pretty impressive I did the Have you ever seen his fire walk? No, I don't think so. Is that just where you walk across the fire coals? Yeah, yeah. He's famous for it. He does it at his seminars with hundreds, sometimes 1000s of people. Wow. So I did it first in West Palm, somewhere in South Florida, and that was a 10 foot fire walk. You know, you had a 10 foot lane, and you had to walk across these hot coals. And, I mean, they're glowing, and they've got fires built up there where they're taking new hot coals and putting them on there. And I'm looking at this, going, how can this work? I mean, and I still don't understand it. So you walk across, didn't feel the thing, nothing. And I'm like, I don't get it. I don't understand this. And it was so funny. About a month later, I'm standing outside on my deck grilling, and I was in bare feet, and a coal, a piece of coal must have popped out from the grill, and I stepped on it, and I was crying like a little girl. I'm like, Well, this is bizarre. I just walked across. 10 feet of this didn't feel a thing. Then, then in on the Big Island of Hawaii, right on the beach, we did a 45 foot firewalk. Is it all mental? Like you just had the brain power to do it? He sets it up as though it's mental, because all day long, he takes you through these, practices that you do. And then the the mantra that we use is cool moss. So you start visualizing that, that you're not walking across fire, you're walking across cool moss. And you repeat it over and over, I'm walking across cool moss and and then you get up there, and then the next thing you know, you're walking across it, going, I'm walking across school logs, and you get to the other side, and I'm like, didn't feel a thing. So I guess it didn't work by the grill, because you weren't saying that. I don't know. That's what I mean. I don't understand why this works, but it did. So I've been following him for years. Authors that you know, I've been reading their books for years and years, and I'm just, I'm a really big believer in education, and I just, I really like to educate myself. I normally don't take a lot of formal classes or programs. I just find somebody that's really good at something, and I start reading, and sometimes even reach out and talk to them. I mean, that's what social media has. You know, obviously there's a lot of people who talk about, you know, the downsides of it. But I think the beauty of social media is that you can directly connect, or try to directly connect, with the people that you admire, the content that you know, that you that they create, that you consume. I am curious. So are you still doomsday prepping? I am, as a matter of fact. In fact, think about the world we're in right now. Think about the news every day, drones. I was also asked on Twitter to ask you about the drones. Well, here's the funny thing about the drones. I'm all over the news all day, mostly on social media. Anymore, I get better news from x than I get from anywhere anymore. I used to use a news aggregator to kind of do my show prep. Now I use X. I've got it set up so it pulls in all the stuff I want to see. But if you look around at where we are today. Now this drone thing, I don't know why, but as soon as it started, I did not read the articles. I was seeing the headlines, so I knew there was something going on and I would see these videos, but I wouldn't even really pay attention to the videos. And I don't know why I did this, but I started watching the reaction that people were having. Rather, I was paying attention to the people and their reactions, not the story. So I know nothing. I don't know any of the details I and I've purposely ignored it. And it was wild, because just a couple days ago, you could watch the President talk about it, the military talk about it, the government talk the governor talk about it. You could see these videos that they were analyzing. And then there was yet this whole group that was saying, there are no drones. They're just they're airplanes, they're just stars. You guys are idiots there. And I'm looking at this going, Are you kidding me? We can't even agree whether there's drones there at all. It was so bizarre to watch this. So anybody who says they know what's, I mean, the last two theories I've seen is we're searching out a dirty bomb, or some sort of they're trying to sniff for radioactive material, or it's Chinese spy drones. But yet, we still don't know. Yeah, I saw all the it's funny because, you know, sort of the UFOs, UAPs, like the, that's where it kind of, I guess it the drones are kind of a, you know, I guess a segment of that overall debate. And when the government is denying that UFOs exist, or UAPs exist, then, you know, my mindset is, I don't believe you, but now that the government is saying that they do exist, I'm looking at it like, I don't believe well, here's the thing, if they come out today and tell us what this is, nobody's going to believe them. I mean, I still got to go to work tomorrow. Yeah, exactly. Somebody I was having a conversation with on x and they were at the airport, and their flight was delayed because of drone activity at the airport. They were going to she left and went and got on a train. He's traveling from the west coast the east coast on a train. Today, she was even live streaming, you know, going through Glacier National Park on a train because she didn't want to get on the plane. So yes, I'm still prepping. And you know, we used to look at the preppers as the lunatics. It's kind of the opposite. Now, if you're not prepping, you're the crazy one, right? That's to your own demise. You're not, yeah. Landing, yeah, you know, the the idea is, there's lots and lots of things we could need to prepare for, and many of them look like they're bigger possibilities now than they've ever been. You know, we could have an EMP from somebody like Iran or North Korea or China. We could have. They could attack the electrical through the through the they could attack the grid through the internet. They've already done it. We know that every one of those countries has already gained access to our utility systems through the internet, and we know what we're capable of. We shut down the entire Iranian nuclear program through the internet. It that could all be done to us now. And you know where, where I talk about it more, and sometimes we'll get on the topic of just be totally prepared, like I'm about as prepared as I could possibly be. I bought a homestead. It's in the National Forest. I mean, there are reasons it's got a creek running through it. I mean, I I love that lifestyle, but I also feel like I'm pretty well prepared. I can go hide out for quite a while out there. But here's where I talk about it more. I talk about it more in drivers who are 1000s of miles away from their home all the time, and all it takes is there's so many ways our cell phone systems could go down. They're really vulnerable now. You can't even talk to your family at home. Imagine what that's going to be like. The banking system goes down and all you're carrying your credit cards. You can't get fuel, you can't get food, you're 1000 miles away from home. What are you going to do? So I really focus what I've learned in all these years of kind of, for me, it's a hobby. I have fun with it. I mean, I enjoy doing it because I like food and, you know, being self sufficient, gardening and hunting and all that stuff anyway. So this is just a good fit for me. I started teaching drivers to pressure canned meat, because it's a great way to have good, nutritious food on the truck. It's also a great way to put a couple of years worth of food aside, and it's not all that expensive. You go buy the meat on sale. You can it yourself. It lasts for years. So I took a lot of these skills that I've learned and started applying it to if you're going to be gone and potentially 1000s of miles away from home, you might want to think about some of these things. You should have. Mean, I wouldn't announce it, but I guess I'm announcing it. I don't travel anymore with usually about less than $5,000 in cash, just in case, just in case, if banking systems go down. You're screwed. Just think about even three days. You're you're out in a truck, you're sitting in a truck stop, you have no cash. The banking system goes down. And let's say it's only three days you're screwed. You're three days of sitting in your truck. And I hope you have a little bit of food in there, or you're going to be really hungry too. So I do talk to him about taking, you can't really carry a ton of water, but we what you can carry are good water filters, a life straw. A life straw, you could suck that nasty water right out of the truck stop mud puddle and drink it. I mean, I know, I know it is, but you know that, but I that's the kind of stuff I try to get them to be aware of. You know, do you have some sort of a plan at home if this happens? And that's, that's one of the most difficult communications and the solution just isn't simple. I mean, you got to kind of get a ham radio license and carry around a portable am radio and, I mean, there are ways to solve it, but I try to at least get them to understand you could be in a place and you might only be there for a couple days, but it could get really miserable or dangerous. I am. I'm not very political when it comes to lobbying and that kind of stuff. I'll talk about politics, but I'm not into lobbying. I don't see it doing a whole lot of good if I were ever going to lobby for a law in trucking, and I wish we would just get it nationwide anyway. I think anybody with a CDL should also be allowed to get a nationwide concealed carry permit. It's insane as a driver trying to figure out what all the rules are in all the different states. And the problem is, and people ask me this question all the time, do you know all the rules around the country when you travel? And I'll tell them no, and I don't want to know, here's why, because I'm going to break them anyway. If they tell me I can't carry in this jurisdiction, I'm still going to carry. So I don't need to know the rules, because I'm not going to follow and I'll just take my chances. The sad part is, if I ever get caught breaking the rules, then I lose the right to carry the weapon completely. So we just need a better law. I wish we would just have a nationwide concealed carry for everybody, drop all the state stuff, but if not for everybody, I think CDL holders should be able to have that option. Yeah, especially if you are, you know, to your to your point, not even really doomsday prepping, but it could be your own personal doomsday that someone is trying to rob you, or, you know, break into your truck or steal your stuff, and you need some way to protect yourself. And yeah, and yeah, so that when we talk about the prepping, I really focus more on helping drivers prep in their truck. And it's shocking how many of them said, you know, I never thought about that. Imagine what it'd be like. Cell phone system goes now you can't even call home. Yeah. So, okay, so water, you have to have some kind of water filtration, some kind of weapon, cash, and then that's probably, would you add any more to maybe, like a top a top five, yeah, what we call and what I have in all of my vehicles, and I care a Get Home Bag. What if we actually had an EMP and the vehicles are just toast. Now, what are you going to do? So I have probably one of the biggest tactical backpacks I can get that. I've got probably a month's worth of pemmican in there for food, and I have tents and thermal blankets and six ways to start a fire and three ways to purify water, and, you know, emergency stuff and rope and all those things that, you know, if I had to survive and start walking somewhere, I could do it, you know, the right clothing, depending on the time of year, that kind of thing. So I really do try to cover all all the possibilities that could happen. And you know how I look at this? I look at it like insurance. I hope I never have to use it, but when it happens, I will be prepared. And that's a because I have a bug out bag and just in my room, and I don't the next on the list is getting the Get Home bag in the car, just to make sure that I have, you know, some extra things on me. Here's, here's a great idea, one year for Christmas, everybody on my Christmas list got to get home back Oh, that's super smart. Yeah, next year's next year, because by the time people listen to this, that could be your Christmas present shopping is done during the month of January, because that's what we're gonna be hearing this episode. And you know what? Everybody I gave them to loved it. They're like, Oh my god, this is so cool. I would have never thought about this, but you just, you show them there's all this stuff, you throw it in the trunk and you forget about it. Well, I do have a funny story around that, because I not last year, I had a white elephant gift exchange with a bunch of my girlfriends, and I got one of those, you know, just sort of all in one, you know, Bug Out Bag kits, yeah. But, you know, of course, all the girls, you know, they've been drinking, and so they start pulling out all the stuff at the Get Home Bag before, you know, the thermal blanket is being used in a non emergency situation. You're right, yeah, no, it's a great way to do it, give it to everybody else as a gift. No, I love that idea, and I think that this has been such a fantastic discussion. I came in with, like, I think I'll have six bullet points of what I wanted to talk about. And so this is, these are some of my favorite conversations, because I don't have, like, a list of scripted questions and things like that. We can just talk about, I could just mention broker transparency, and you can just go, so that's the beauty of having, you know, other content creators on the show. So Kevin, last few thoughts here. Anything that you feel is important to mention that we haven't already talked about. Yeah, one other thing, you know, I talked about education. You know this better than anybody with what you do. Business runs on relationships. It just does whether it's a relationship with the broker, whether it's a relationship with a carrier you might be leased to, whether it's your shop, your tax preparer, your financial whoever it is, business runs on relationships, one of the biggest changes I've helped people make. And I have a good example, another regular caller. I know him in person. I just hung out with him a little bit done at nastick. He's a he's a car hauler. Started as a, as a hot shot, a couple cars on a hot shot trailer, and failed, and he'll admit it. He said he failed miserably, couldn't make any money, tried to get into the car. Hauling wasn't doing all that good. And then started listening to my show and just doing some of the things I was saying. And one of the things I convinced these guys is get involved, go to the industry events. And I don't just mean the truck shows like Louisville and Walcott. That's where you tend to see the owner operators. How many conferences do you go to, like f3 or where it's it's brokers, it's admin, it's tech. You don't see single truck owner operators at those places, f3 this last couple of years. Probably has done a better job. And that's Craig being on X, inviting all those guys, you see it, and not with a lot of them. They were great, exactly. And when they go to these events at the first they're like, this is incredible. I get to talk to Craig, or I get to talk to that guy. So Mark started doing that, and he started even going to specialized like little car hauler events that, and he'd be the only single truck guy in there, and he'd be i truck stop did a an event called connected, and it was mostly for brokers. And I said, Hey, why don't we run a parallel track with owner operators, and I'll teach it, and we'll get owner operators and brokers there together. And that was kind of the start of this movement. Now we have the broker carrier conference. I do a show called broker Connect. That was kind of the start of it. We only had like 20 owner operators there. There was probably 1000 people at the conference. Those guys were like the stars. Every broker there wanted to find those guys and talk to them. That's awesome. And I said, should go to your go join your state Trucking Association. Go to these events. Mark was showing me his profit and loss statement at the event. Most people would agree, we've been at the bottom of the market this year, right? I would hope so Mark. Mark's having his best year ever. Revenue wise, he's 20% above any other year he's ever had. That's awesome. But he but he made connections. He built relationships. He he, he has a relationship with his insurance broker. I mean, virtually everybody that he needs to help him run his business. He took the time to say, I'm gonna go meet them and sit down and talk to him. That's awesome. Education is so important. And I think as we sort of, we kicked off the show with talking about diets. And I think, you know, a stronger focus maybe should be on the educational diet as well, of what you're watching, what you're reading, what you're listening to, and is it? Is it feeding you and your business and your family and your personal life, and if it's not, get rid of it. Blythe, how? How crazy would it be for you if you could afford to either read or listen to audio books for 60 hours every week. I would love it. That's the that's the opportunity they have 60 hours. They complain that's not enough. They want to work more hours than that, but they're working 60 hours a week. They can listen that entire time. You could easily consume three to four books a week. Yeah, and that's what I did when I drove. There was always a book when I was driving, always, well, well, speaking of listening to shows and watching shows, where can folks, you know, follow you and follow all of the educational content that you're putting out? You know, join let's truck, do all of that good stuff. Really, everything's at let's truck.com, I mean, we have other sites, but everything, you can find everything from there our show schedules there, you can find the links to download our app, to listen to the show, so that's really where they should go. And then you can always look me up on x because I'm on there most of the day. That's awesome. Yeah, I have a post it. Of all of the good stuff that you said, all the different timestamps of the good stuff that you said, and it is filled so I Kevin, I appreciate you coming back on. Appreciate you sharing so much of your time. We're at, you know, almost an hour and 40 minutes here, and you've been talking all day. And I know, I know you got other things to do so deeply appreciate your time and sharing all of your insights. And thank you so much for coming on the show. Well, you're welcome. I always enjoy it, and I do have some really important stuff. I was serious. I'm gonna go take a nap. Well, I feel fired up now. Guy, no, we joked earlier, before we started hitting record that, you know, we both needed to go take a nap. But now I go, fired up, I'm gonna go, No, I'm gonna relax. Thanks for having me. I always enjoy it, and I'll come back anytime you want. Heck yes, awesome. I'm gonna take you up on that. So hopefully we'll see each other in person again here soon at a conference in 2025 but thank you again. This was great. You're welcome, and hopefully we make trucking a little bit greater again in 2025 that's the point. I hope you enjoyed this episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight, telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff and people get from point A to B. Subscribe to the show, sign up for our newsletter and follow our socials over at everything is logistics.com and in addition to the podcast, I also wanted to let you all know about another company I operate, and that's digital dispatch, where we help you build a better website. Now, a lot of the times we hand this task of building a new website or refreshing a current one. And off to a co worker's child, a neighbor down the street or a stranger around the world, where you probably spend more time explaining the freight industry than it takes to actually build the dang website. Well, that doesn't happen at Digital dispatch. We've been building online since 2009 but we're also early adopters of AI automation and other website tactics that help your company to be a central place, to pull in all of your social media posts, recruit new employees and give potential customers a glimpse into how you operate your business. Our new website builds start as low as$1,500 along with ongoing website management, maintenance and updates starting at $90 a month, plus some bonus freight, marketing and sales content similar to what you hear on the podcast, you can watch a quick explainer video over on digital dispatch.io, just check out the pricing page once you arrive, and you can see how we can build your digital ecosystem on a strong foundation. Until then, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll see you all real soon and go jags. You.
