Freight Law Without the Legalese: Matthew Leffler on Contracts, Claims, and Courtroom Lessons

What happens when a trucking kid grows up to become the industry’s “Armchair Attorney”? Matthew Leffler is a third-generation trucking professional turned lawyer who has made it his mission to explain freight’s most complicated legal battles in plain English. 

From nuclear verdicts to AB5 fallout, broker transparency fights to chassis choice rulings—he translates court cases into actionable strategies carriers and brokers can actually use. If you’ve ever felt lost in the legal jargon but know your business depends on getting it right, this conversation is for you.

Key takeaways:

• Broker transparency debates will reshape contracts, workflows, and margins.
• Carriers can mitigate nuclear verdict risks by controlling safety and documentation.
• AB5 compliance requires pragmatic playbooks for carriers and owner-operators.
• Chassis choice rulings are a rare legal win, lowering costs for motor carriers.
• Non-compete clauses often stifle careers more than they protect brokerages.

LINKS:

• Matthew's LinkedIn
• Lord of the Rings Logistics with Matthew Leffler Armchair Attorney

WATCH THE FULL EPISODE HERE

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Chapters

• 5:22 Barriers to Entry and Safety Concerns
• 16:07 Autonomous Trucks and the Future of Driving
• 26:27 AB5 and Worker Classification Battles
• 35:17 Chassis Choice and Intermodal Control
• 45:57 Non-Competes, Liability, and the Werner Case
• 58:52 Presidential Powers and Trade Law

Transcript

Matthew Leffler: 0:42

So for the folks who are watching and listening, ultimately, it's like a month to get a CDL, to get a CDL and operate an 80,000 pound machine, is about a month in most states, and in that context, you're not necessarily trained how to drive in the snow or in the nighttime or in the mountains, and it's because the barriers to enter this industry are very, very minor. It's just not very substantial. The minimum insurance to operate a truck Interstate is like 750,000

Unknown: 1:12

bucks. That's been the case for almost 40 years. And so the English language proficiency, at least for me, tells a story of we are trying to understand how to better enforce existing regulations, and we want the regulations to be enforced.

Blythe Milligan: 1:30

Welcome into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. I'm your host, Blythe Milligan, and we are proudly presented by SPI logistics, and we've got an incredible episode for you all today. We've got Matthew Leffler, host of armchair attorney, back on the podcast, and he's going to be talking about all of the legal drama that you've probably seen kind of floating around on the web, but maybe you're kind of like me, where you just read the headline, you're like, oh, that sounds serious, and you just keep scrolling. Well, today is the day that Matthew is going to break it all down for us. Plus we're going to get into a little bit of, you know, content marketing side of things, because you see his face everywhere. And then we're also going to get into maybe, you know, we'll dabble a little into, you know, some favorite TV shows or favorite movies that that Matthew has seen over the last year or so. So Matthew, welcome back to the show, Blythe. It is always a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to once again return into the gauntlet.

Unknown: 2:26

Into the gauntlet. That sounds, I don't know if you know, we can't get into TV talk right now. I almost got started, and then I'm gonna, I'm gonna reel it back in, because we gotta. But yeah, the gauntlet was reminding me of an MTV show called the challenge. So I won't get into that. And I don't know if you watch that show, but I do not literally talk all day about it. Okay, we won't. We could say you're going to just describe it to me. No, let's talk about the law. There's so many things happening. It's wild, it's crazy. Well, you as As of recording this. So we were recording this at the end of August, and so there's a lot of it feels like a lot of things going on. And I think I just watched a video of yours where you were talking about the history of yellow trucking and how that case is still ongoing. I have an entire list of I have 85 and worker classification. I have chassis choice and fmcrule the regulatory landscape, non competes, safety, maintenance, M and A. Where do you want to begin? I would like to begin by saying it's always a pleasure to see you. So first of all, thank you for having me. It's great to be here. I think the biggest thing we see in the news right now is English language proficiency. That is what a lot of people are talking about for a lot of reasons, maybe not always. We can get into that, just to kind of give some some clarity on this. The English language proficiency has been the law in the books since the 1930s so this isn't new. This has been the law for a long time. It's been the enforcement has changed, and that's kind of the new kind of ruling from Donald Trump on executive order saying it's an out of service issue. So we are seeing four or 5000 out of service issues with English language proficiency, not a ton at the moment. And there's probably not going to be a big change in our overall capacity, but it has animated quite a few people to for better or worse, I guess you could say it's a, it's one of those things where it's, I didn't realize that this was as big of a problem as it is, and it from the outside looking in and just following, you know, along with with some of the President as Secretary Duffy, you know, seeing what he has to say about some of these issues. And it, it just feels like we're missing the force for the trees with some of this. I, you know, is that an accurate assessment, because it doesn't feel like it's going to really impact anything except for, you know, the outlier cases where, you know, there's obviously, like tragedy involved, and I don't want to downplay that at all, but it feels like we could be focusing our efforts in different areas of trucking that will have a much more safety impact than this, which is kind of feels like a little, you know, just for clicks, for Internet attention. I think the way I look at this, I think it's a fair take. I mean, realistically, if you're not going to dramatically increase resources for enforcement, you can't expect to have a different outcome in terms of safety of our vehicles and our drivers. So for the folks who are watching and listening, ultimately, it's like a month to get a CDL, to get a CDL and operate an 80,000 pound machine. It. About a month in most states. And in that context, you're not necessarily trained how to drive in the snow or in the nighttime or in the mountains. And it's because the barriers to enter this industry are very, very minor. It's just not very substantial. The minimum insurance to operate a truck Interstate is like 750,000 bucks. That's been the case for almost 40 years, and so the English language proficiency, at least for me, tells the story of we are trying to understand how to better enforce existing regulations, and we want the regulations to be enforced. I would love to see focus on like vehicle maintenance. That's my jam. But realistically, I think this is just a a thing that's more political than it is overall an issue. But I do think that our truck driving schools need to be much, much more closely audited about their outcomes, and I think we need to have more resources for state and local and federal law enforcement to monitor vehicle maintenance and driver qualification, and is this in a situation where more, you know, shippers are going to make these kinds of demands, that's where I maybe see more movement happening, versus like government enforcement, because that's where the the problem is, is like this government enforcement of, how are you going to find out? It just feels like something you can't scale, versus something you possibly could scale, I would say that any shipper that's interested in finding a way to do some level of enforcement of FMCSA regulations should speak with their lawyers, because I think that's probably not a good solution. Maybe they heard of people using drivers that use apps for translation interpretation, saying, I can't communicate with you, but here's this app. Can you talk to the app? And maybe shippers refuse to load them that that seems maybe reasonable, ish, but most shippers are very, very busy, and they are not qualified to administer what would likely be a test. And if you're going to test somebody for whether they can speak English or not, you're you're opening yourself up for some level of liability you probably don't want to have. Now, I do think it's I understand why they would say we want to do this, but I would also say if you're a shipper and you're doing something in the driver qualification space, you may open yourself up to liability if that driver has a catastrophic accident. I mean, there's so many pieces that can go wrong if you insert yourself into that transaction, it's the broker's job to select the motor carrier. It's the motor carriers job to make sure they're following FMCSA regulations. Shippers probably ought not to do it, but I again, I understand if they if they feel compelled to do it, just talk with your lawyers if you think that's the outcome you want to do now is is this a temporary issue in in trucking, or from like, an enforcement standpoint, is this it feels like one of those things where it's, you know, done for political points, and then after, you know, a few months or so, everybody's going to get a little tired, or is it a situation where now there's A group that's going to be hyper focused on any kind of accident that happens over the road, and they're going to try to find out, sort of, you know, the the background of the drivers immediately, and almost, you know, do, like internet research on these drivers. I mean, I make that declaration. I think anyone who sees an accident is going to do research immediately. I mean, we talked about before we went live, like the folks in folks at Gen logs, like they have cameras on every single truck running. You'll be able to see the day that do T number is involved in that crash where that truck was the last couple weeks. So this, this idea of, like, sleuthing out when something goes wrong. There's, there's so much, so many more tools today than there ever was before to dig into those things. But to your broader point, is this a blip, or is this going to be a long term kind of outcome? My belief is enforcement is generally going to be a political thing, at least on the ELP side of things. I do think it's an out of service criteria. I think if you cannot speak English, it ought to be you can't drive on the road. But I would also mention, and we talked in other podcasts with you, is that, like the out of service rate for commercial vehicles is 22% that means one in five vehicles. If you and I went outside right now and looked at them, they would not be safe at any speed. So we have a very poorly maintained, very underinsured grouping of motor carriers out there that are not taking care of their equipment, and that's the stuff that really worries me. But again, I worry about everything. That's why I'm a lawyer. That's my job is to be terrified of all the things. So why? Why is this the first story that you bring up as far as like law? Why is this one like the most, or I'm not even interpreting maybe that it is the most important. But what's nice? It's not so. I think the way to look at is it has the most clout right now, for a lot of reasons. It has a lot of traction in terms of what people talk about. But for me, it is not a big issue. The bigger issue, I would say. And actually, we talked. About this case before a more recent development was the Werner case in Texas, where a truck driver who was involved in an accident but did not do anything wrong was found to be liable to $100 million that got reversed just a couple weeks ago. So that there's other things happening that are far more important in our industry, but the ELP thing has kind of taken a lot of the air in terms of what media is covering currently. And it feels like it's for, you know, not the best reasons that it's like, that's what I'm here for. I am here for the engagement because I just want to put it out there that there are a lot of immigrant drivers that are doing a very good job, and they want to, you know, they want to be as safe and get home to their families as everyone else. Like, obviously, there's going to be bad actors out there that are going to, you know, sort of taint the, I guess, the online perception. But it just, it feels, it feels very like politically motivated and I just, I wasn't sure, from an outsider's perspective of how prevalent are some of these issues, and is it really a problem, or is, you know, relative to the overall amount of of truck trucker accidents, you know, how much does this play a role? I think for me, I don't, I don't think it plays a major role. I think for me, I look at this and say it highlights a broader trend. And the broader trend is that we have very, let me talk this limited bears to enter this business, to be able to get a CDL in under a month, and then operate a vehicle, and maybe you're leased on, maybe you find a way to go. Worth it per company, the average truck driver today makes about $50,000 a year, if you go back in time to 1980 the average trucker made, adjusted for inflation,$130,000 a year. Wow. It's a different world than it was 45 years ago. And we look at and say, Well, what? What happens when things get cheaper? It means the drivers are less qualified. It means that the equipment is less maintained, because in the old days, a unionized motor carrier had a driver says that truck is unsafe. If you put that driver in that truck, you have a grievance. You may lose your job today. If you say that truck is unsafe, it's get in the truck or you're fired. So it's a different calculus. So the English language proficiency, at least for me, highlights. Hey, maybe we should just enforce what the rules are. Don't go looking for new rules, and it would likely be a better outcome. It but it requires money, and if we as Americans want to spend more on stuff, then, um, we're going to have to that. That's what safety is going to cost. It's going to cost us spending more money on stuff. Now the the truckers who are listening to this are going to this are going to get mad at me for bringing this up. But does, you know, autonomous trucks kind of help here? Does it help some of these, you know, onboarding issues and, you know, level of training issues and ELP, does that help here? I think the autonomous piece is going to be the biggest change in our industry since deregulation, I look at our industry like the from a lens of three major events. The first one was containerization. The idea that you could take the entire world to agree on a singular method for moving things across the globe is insane. But when you look at the cost savings and the safety of those containers versus what they did before, you would never go back. You would never go back. Deregulation. Did this new thing where now anyone can be a truck driver. You could have brokers. They didn't exist in the way they do today. Back in 1980 autonomous trucks are here. They're here now. They're running in trust states. So Houston to Dallas. You know, Kodiak is running them. Aurora is running them. But longer term, they will absolutely be part of our supply chain. And we are in this phase where it's the normalization phase. You fly into Phoenix, you see Waymo everywhere. You don't see those in Chicago yet. You don't see them in New York yet. But once they become everywhere, what happens? And I think autonomous trucks do the thing that we've always looked at doing, which is, how do I reduce the cost of moving freight? And in our industry, it's labor and fuel and assets and maintenance and tires and insurance, and this tackles labor, so I think it's inevitable, but I also think that they're going to be better maintained than most commercial trucks on the road today. What about the LIDAR cameras that are, you know, have to, you know, be on every autonomous truck does that? I mean, it's, I just see these big cameras on the side of, like, autonomous trucks. And I'm like, that doesn't look cheap. And imagine if you, you know, the truck hits something, or something else hits that camera. That's got to be a $50,000 repair right there. Does that maybe add on to the cost of shipping goods if we go fully autonomous and then, you know, all of these technological improvements to the trucks, does it really offset? Maybe, I would say, I it's legitimate question. I think they wouldn't do it if it wasn't going to save money. They wouldn't do it if it was going to save it wasn't going. To save money. And so you look at the autonomous kits, maybe it's $50,000 or whatever the number is to upfit and install these things. The cameras will go will be damaged from time to time. They will have pairs that are necessary from time to time. But you are going to save 30 to 40% annually on the cost of labor. If you do these things, there'll be an increase in maintenance, maybe more mechanics looking at trucks, making sure they're working properly, making sure the sensors are working properly. But this is the next phase of the independent contractor. It was, first it was a w2 unionized driver, then it was a non union w2 driver, then it was an independent contractor. And the natural progression is, how do I reduce the cost of labor further? And that is autonomous trucks. It will not be every case. It'll be only in certain uses, from like, you know, shuttling from one place to another place, but the truck will never get tired. It will never have to worry about hours of service. It will slip seat every single day, and essentially, it's going to work 2223 hours a day except for fueling, and it'll never need a meal period or never file a workers compensation claim. There is so much savings that will absolutely be unlocked. And I look at this stuff and say, It's inevitable. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when, and it's not a question of, like, how soon, because it's happening already. Yeah. I mean, I I've had the opinion for gosh, like a decade now that one day, we're going to look back on just manually driving cars as what were we thinking? Because there's it's so incredibly dangerous. There's so many accidents. People are killed all of the time, not just from semi trucks, but from just regular cars. And so I do see a future where manual driving is going to be very much like iRobot, where you you're going to be the you're going to be in the very low percentile, if you have, you know, a gas powered car, even I have a gas powered so I think, like, what you bring up is a really important point. Is this, this period of normalization. So any innovation has like three steps. The first step is that will never happen. That's impossible, and we have seen that with autonomous trucks for a decade. It'll never happen. Or if it does happen, it'll be way past my time in the industry. I don't worry about it. Then it starts to happen. It starts becoming more conventional, more normalized, and then the third stage is, it's always been this way, like, why are you complaining about it now? It's always been this way. We're never going to go back in this phase of normalization. This is the most important phase, because you and I can't go back and say, don't use containers. We can't go back and say, Don't deregulate. We don't want to see the unions get destroyed. This is happening now, and the rules about how autonomous trucks will function in our supply chain are able to be shaped by us. We are the most powerful generation has ever existed. We can talk into a camera or type into a computer, and 1000s of people can hear and read and understand what our position is, and we should all want to comment and participate as the stuff becomes more prevalent. So what does that, I mean, this is, might be like a theoretical, you know, kind of overarching question. But what happens to a lot of like, the, you know, the average driver to the average maintenance worker? Well, maybe maintenance workers will, will never truly go away. But what happens to, like, I'm autonomous, yet, what happens to maybe some of those, you know, positions and CDL schools and you know, is that just something that's going to, you know, maybe die a slow death? That's a really good question. So first, I would say, in every in all 50 states, for high school educated men, driving a truck is the most common job for about 30 to 40 states. Driving a truck just generally is the most common job for everybody. So it's millions of people that do this. There are things that the robots are not going to be good at doing. They're not going to be good at LTL, like, they're not going to be able to do lift gates and roll up doors. Like, that's far away. The freight that likely gets impacted is going to be the full truckload, you know, 500 miles here, 400 miles there, back and forth, kind of stuff, like the shuttle runs. That is where it might be the most prevalent. I think that the question of, like, what happens to those drivers? I think there's still going to be a place for them in this, of course, there'll always be a place for them. There'll be new jobs. So an example is like a remote operator, so someone who can take control of a truck without physically being in the truck. What qualification should they have? How many trucks can they monitor? How many trucks can they physically take over? These are questions that will be answered as rules become established in our industry. So those ones will stick around for maintenance, I think you are going to see a lot more opportunity. There will be if, just because we don't have human beings as drivers, in some cases, the pre and post trip inspection is still the law. You still have to have someone look at that asset before you use it and after you use it. So there will be. An opportunity for mechanics to do more things. But I think the way that they the way the autonomous trucks companies tend to talk about this, is they'll take away the jobs that drivers tend to dislike and the ones that drivers do like, they get to keep those I don't know where it plays out, whether it's 5% or 10% of all freight moves with autonomous truck, but there's no doubt 8% will and when that door opens, it will never close, yeah, because, I mean, I just took a trip to Austin, you know, a couple months ago, and the waymos were everywhere. And if you would have asked me if I could put my money on, you know, the bets of autonomous, I would have bet that autonomous, long haul routes would have absolutely taken over way before a company like a Waymo, where they you know, there's so many more variables when I whenever you're in like an urban, densely populated setting, and so I never thought that that would take over as quickly as it did. I was still a little annoyed when I was in Austin. I actively, multiple times per day. Tried to call one and tried to get one, but I think it's only available for Austin residents, which is I was a little annoyed about so I haven't actually got to ride in one yet. I think the piece you brought up is really interesting, because what we what that kind of demonstrates, is the technology is here. The technology is not like a what if it is, it is existing now. What is not here is a federal regulatory framework for how to treat those things, so people can run an autonomous truck or a as a safety driver can be inside autonomous truck doing stuff intrastate. But the technological barrier to haul it to another destination is not it's not a technological barrier. It is a legal barrier. And what I caution people about when it comes to autonomous vehicles is I look at the ELD mandate, and that's probably the closest approximation to like a technological transformation for our industry. We operate in our industry with a self certification, which means I fill out of form, I submit the form, and the federal government says you are certified as an ELD provider. There's about 1000 ELD providers right now. There's about 250 that have been revoked. So if you were to look at the when the date of the creation of the ELD mandate, it's like, every month, two or three devices are pulled off the market. Wow. So why? Well, sometimes it's because the manufacturer says we have a new model and this one's not gonna be supported anymore. Sometimes the company simply lied about what they're capable of doing, and you only find out that it's not actually doing it when a driver gets in trouble or something bad happens and they go, Oh, the device malfunctioned in Canada, they do. They do not allow self certification. The government looks at what you're trying to sell, and they say, We will let you sell this because we've tested it. So I am very skeptical of what the manufacturers say that they can do, and ultimately, we need some level of regulation around that piece of it that has certainly not been discussed or really kind of promulgated anywhere at this point, but it's something we need to be aware of, because I don't trust the manufacturers to do anything. They'll make good products, for sure. But we need something from the government side that says that's that's okay and that's not okay. So it sounds like, if I'm kind of reading between the lines, is that there is, you know, we are witnessing an evolution of a job that has existed in its present form for, you know, a few decades now, and that that job is largely evolving into, you know, more technology. I do, you have to preface this with, I, I'm a tech optimist, but I also, you know, I the roles that I have, I can also see where certain technology is going to impact the work I do and my potential to earn income in the future. And so if, if that's happening in my area of work, I know it's happening in other areas of work. And so from, from that lens, does this kind of is it almost like adjusting or not adjusting, but leading us into a new era of what a what a truck driver looks like, and, you know, and from that, or how they even work. Because then there's another issue of 85 and that one is what out of California. And so that is independent contractors, right were for worker classification. And I guess a law that had good intentions has unintended consequences. Can you kind of break that down for us? Because I think it's, it ties into, you know, all of this I said, you know, sort of evolution of the truck driver job. We will look back 10 years from now, and we'll realize that this is a a very interesting time, and it's a blessing and a curse to live in interesting times. You're right. This is a new era, a new era of autonomy. The work of AB five followed through this idea of, how can I make somebody behave like an employee, but make them a contractor? And the example I give to so many people. Is the Amazon driver coming to your house in the Amazon truck with the Amazon uniform delivering the Amazon package. That driver does not work for Amazon. When the FedEx Ground driver with the FedEx Ground truck and the FedEx Ground apparel walks up to your house and delivers the package that has FedEx Ground on it, they don't work for FedEx Ground the idea is you can find a different type of business relationship where each party kind of says we're independent businesses. We don't have to pay for your PTO or your workers comp or your unemployment. So AB five was a codification of a California Supreme Court case. And codification just means, hey, there was a Supreme Court case. We like what the Supreme Court said. We're going to make a law in Congress, our legislative branch in California will pass it, and then the governor will sign it, and now it's an actual law. So the AB five test, as it was, is this three pronged approach, deciding whether you're an employee or whether you're a contractor. And when you look at this, I think we've talked about my example of this. I think it's like, what's a planet? What is a planet? What are the what are the things that make a planet, a planet? And for the planet discussion, it's, it's a sphere. It's hydrostatic equilibrium makes into a ball. It has, it clears its orbital path. Nothing else orbits the thing, and it orbits a star, in our case, the sun. And if it doesn't orbit the sun, it's an exoplanet. Well, Pluto is a sphere. It's a hydrostatic equilibrium. It orbits our Sun. It has that checks that box, but it doesn't clear its orbital path. There's another thing that it orbits, which is it's moon Charon, so it's not a planet. That's the same with AB five. AB five comes and says, You are not a contractor. The only way you're a contractor is if you pass these three things. It's control, it's outside your business, and it's other customers you might have. There's a whole list of these things. But AB five did not change how Amazon or FedEx does business, because they've been doing well, FedEx has been doing this for 40 years. Amazon relatively new, but they didn't fight AB five. They built contracts to make sure that you are a contractor for companies that were sloppy. Yeah, you got ding, you got in trouble. You could get in big trouble. But it wasn't the government coming after you. It was your former contractor suing you and saying, I'm an employee, you got to pay me back wages, and then winning so AB five again for me, nothing catastrophic. It was just the same thing as it's been for decades, but with a new flavor of it being a statute that the California Legislature passed, I think I think I also heard that there were some unintended consequences that came from that, especially when it comes to drayage drivers. Drainage is such an interesting yeah, so to talk about drayage like the way drayage companies typically work, and this is not always the case, but it's probably mostly the case. I say, Blythe, you are an independent contractor, and you're going to do Dre work for me. I will pay you $100 for every box you bring into my yard. And you'd say, Great, Matt, I'm gonna go get a box. You get into traffic. You get a box, you bring it back. I give you 100 bucks. Some days there's no traffic. You give me five boxes. I give you 500 bucks some days there's really, really bad traffic, and you only get one box for me, and I'm paying you 100 bucks, but I'm your only customer. You work exclusively for me, and I'm only paying you 100 bucks per move. What ends up happening for the DRE providers is that you have to make a decision if you're doing it that way, as two independent contractors, and I'm the only customer that's probably an employee, that's probably somebody you gotta be paying minimum wage to and California's got pretty high minimum wages, and there's a lot of penalties. So the DRE community, the ones who were not paying attention, could get in big, big trouble. If you're a w2 driver, it doesn't matter. You're just doing your normal thing, getting paid hourly. But Dre is particularly interesting for misclassification, because it is such a sad situation where you work for 12 hours and I pay you 100 bucks, that's that's not fair, and that's what California said. We're not going to have that. We're going to make you an employee. And if you decide to sue your employer, you get back wages and overtime and benefits and all these other things. And it's the DRE people that were that got found liable for misclassification. Lot of them go bankrupt because it's very difficult to survive that litigation. Yeah. And I think with that law in particular, they were trying to target like the Ubers and the lifts of the world, where they have all these demands with their drivers, but the drivers got no benefits whatsoever. Yeah. So the gig companies, the ATA could learn from the gig companies. The gig companies spent over $200 million lobbying for a thing called Proposition 22 and what proposition 22 essentially allowed is to exempt the gig companies from AB five. It was a specific go to. Us go to the people of California, give us a referendum, because what Uber and Lyft and DoorDash and Grubhub, all those companies went to California's leaders and said, If you classify our contractors as employees, we are shutting down operations in your state. We're not going to do business here. And they were probably correct. They probably wouldn't have done business there if they would have stuck around, but they spent a whole bunch of money, and money can certainly get you policy if you are investing it properly. Don't you feel good now, Blythe, but you feel good about that. There's so there's so much. Everything is against us. Everything's trying to kill us. I'll be very clear. I I'm on the side micro plastics like, Oh, those are feed oils, Ubers and waymos and autonomous technology. It's, I believe we're in the trends and forces of history. We cannot change them. All we can do is observe them and try to predict where they'll be, so that we can hopefully benefit from the changes. But I think the plastic will make us live longer. I mean, if we're mostly artificial, doesn't that mean we have a longer shelf life? I guess it depends on how you define consciousness, and if you can just make a new body, an autonomous body, I would do that. There's enough of us on the internet that we could make a version of ourselves. Oh, that that kind of technology already exists. I had to tell my family like we're gonna have a safe word so that no one is like calling you and wanting to, you know, break me out of a prison from a Nigerian prince that, you know, requires a $10 million donation. It's good to plan for the best, but prepare for the worst. Absolutely. That's why I own a bug out bag, sorry, underneath my bed. This is why we're such good friends. We're always we're always prepared to for the next zombie ball. You have to stay prepared. A friend of the show, Kevin Rutherford gave me a lot of good tips on on, you know, canning different items and, you know, being able to to have certain supplies in my house. So I got a whole list of things that I got here. And I love that. Kevin's a good dude. I like he's good, yes, love his content. Love having him on, and he's one of the more popular guests that has ever come on. And you and you as well. So I'm known by 10s of people. 10s of people know me, aren't we? All right, we do work in a niche industry. There's riches in those niches. That's right. Gotta be careful who you make friends with in the business. That's Debbie. Yes, yes. You have to be careful with who has very loud and vocal social media presence too. So in a variety of ways. That's why I'm only on Reddit. I mean, other places too, but Reddit is the best one. I like that one that is kind of a hellscape at times. But, you know, it does have its moments. Okay, let's get into a couple of these other issues. So chassis choice and FMC ruling. What's going on here? That's, I would say it's, it's, it's a, it's been a little bit from that kind of coming through. But the general idea was that there are three companies that own 80% of the chassis in the United States. That's Flexi van track and DC ally. And these are all, like, there's, like, I said, 80% of all chassis are owned by these three companies. So if you're going into a location to do drayage work or pick up a box, you usually have to use one of their chassis. And sometimes the average age of these chassis, I think 40% of them were built before 1997 and so if you're like, I kind of want to just bring my own chassis, or I want to use someone else's chassis. That's not this one. You were prevented from doing that. You could not do that the chassis providers had deals with the big rail yards, and that's just how it worked. The ATA and their intermodal division helped lobby and fight against the this idea of like not having chassis choice. So what chassis choice really means is it it allows the motor carrier or the DRE provider, whoever, to bring their own equipment and not have to pay for the presumably junky equipment from one of the big chassis providers. We are in a very different time. There's a lot of equipment available, and so companies that invested a bunch of new chassis, they're still some of them are still sitting waiting for someone to come and borrow them or rent them, but I think that's what chassis choice is about. It's about letting the operator decide what chassis they want to bring for when they're picking up those boxes at those ports and rail yards. And so what kind of barriers exist right now? Is it just simply lobbying or contracts in place by these big three. I think the last I heard, this is not one I'm super familiar with, so I have to come back to you, but I think it was like four, four big metro areas were able to get Cassie choice. Other places are still trying to get those things, and it was done through litigation, is my understanding. So I think there's, there's the path is ultimately going to be you will get to bring your own chassis. And that's why the big leasing companies have moved into providing chassis. So we talked about CLC, but milestone and Premier and fleet equipment like they're all starting to buy chassis because they know that there's going to be value there. The other piece of it is like JB Hunt and Schneider, they buy their own chassis, so they don't even bother with the pools. They just get their own they have their own separate deals. So there's, there's different ways to approach it, but ultimately, you want safe equipment on the road, and if an operator wants to use their own equipment, they should get to use their own equipment. Absolutely, I feel like that's such a no brainer. So I this is one of those. This is why I love having you on because I'm like, this is a no brainer. Like, why is this even a thing when you couldn't buy your own equipment and bring it? But this industry makes sense. If you really kind of, like, shake your head for a long time and get a little bit dizzy, then it's like, I guess that makes sense. That sounds right. How many of these, like, I don't want to say, like, not lobbying efforts, but how many of these, I guess, sort of just market controls exist throughout the industry, and I imagine that they're probably very largely entrenched, and they have been for a long time, and this industry is very guilty of it's always been done this way. Like, if it's always been done this way, why would you do something different? I think, like, if we look at, like, the future things we saw on the on the on the rail side, specifically Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific talking about a merger, this is a 10s of billions of dollar merger, which would take two of the biggest rails in the country and combine them into one. We send forces, presumably BNSF, to partner. They've partnered with CSX. That will likely be something different. If the up Norfolk Southern deal gets done, you're going to watch the rails consolidate further, because the rails competitors are not the other rails. The rails competitors are the over the road motor carriers. And so they're trying to take more space there. So all of these regulations in place to make like the old business models sustainable, those are going to get chopped apart. They're going to get chopped apart and taken down, and new things will pop up. We're just in a very deregulated administration, so we're likely not going to see a bunch of like new regulations. We'll just see old ones kind of go away. We'll see if broker transparency goes away, that'll be an interesting one. Well, let's hit on let's hit on that one too. Well, you know, we stirred the pot enough already, so let's just keep it going. Here's what I would say about broker transparency, the FMCSA has about a billion dollar a year budget with about 1000 employees, and they are tasked with monitoring and regulating 550,000 motor carriers, 25,000 brokers, 4000 interstate bus companies, and millions of commercial drivers. And you, if you're in favor of broker transparency, you want to have the FMCSA step in between the contracts between brokers and motor cures and enforce them are out of service. Rate for trucks and trailers is 22% they don't have any ability to do this. So for me, it is outside of their mandate. We shouldn't have it not to say that a motor carrier can just say, I'm not going to work with a broker unless they allow me to know how much they paid for that they got paid for that load. So what we have right now is there are two comment periods. So the FMCSA opened up a comment period to make new rules on the broker transparency. The main thrust of the new rule was one, you had to produce the records within 48 hours, and those records had to be electronic. So the old days, Blythe is like, you want to get you're like, Hey, Matt, you're the broker. I would like to see how much you were paid. I'd say Blythe, of course, if you want to come look at the records. They're going to be available in St Charles, Illinois, a couple 1000 miles from where you live, and they'll be available from 1pm to 4pm tomorrow, and you'd say, I can't get there. I'm like, must really suck for you. That's what the brokers were doing. But the reality is, brokers were making the motor carrier sign waivers, and the waiver would say, I completely waive my right to see the records of the broker transaction. Those are not likely to be impacted by a new rule on broker transparency. So the rule would not make any major differences, but it's still in the main topic of people talking about there is litigation in DC with a company called Pink cheetah, suing TQL and me and my dear friend Ken Adamo from d a t dial a truck. We have been waiting for the motion to dismiss to come down, and we have not seen a ruling yet. It could be any day now, in that case. So that's like the latest in broker transparency. It's just one of those things where it's, you know, as a business owner, it's your responsibility to know how much it takes to run your business, and then how much you are willing to to charge, and then is somebody else going to pay you that amount? And then can you do that over a long period of time and have a sustainable revenue, sustainable income, sustainable you know. Costs. It should be no business of yours to worry about how much someone else is is getting paid that that's my personalized you know, as a business owner, yeah. I mean, I agree with you. The thing I would look at is, like, when I had my clients, my customers, when I was fixing equipment, and they would say, How much did you pay for that starter, or how much you pay for that that widget, I would happily show them. This is the cost that I bought it for, and I marked it up 10% I if they asked me, I would happily do that. If they asked me for every single part, every single time I like, I'm just not going to work with you. That's too much of a labor intensive process. And so for motor carriers, I think the challenge you're going to find is one. You have to know your own cost. You have to know what it takes to do what you do. But if you think that you're getting money off the table because you don't know how much the broker was paid, I don't think that this is the right way to do that. There's better tools available for truck drivers to know what they can charge for their services, and brokers will likely blacklist anybody who does repeated requests, even if there's a waiver in place or make this is just too much of a hassle to work with, right? And if you become too difficult, nobody is going to hire you. And so that's another, you know, part of being a business owner is being, you know, somebody pleasant to work with. Otherwise, as a contractor, they don't have to hire you. Absolutely. I mean, you don't go to Amazon and say, Well, how much did Amazon pay for this thing? You say, How much am I willing to pay and how fast I want it? That's like the thing that we ask. So I think the broker transparency, my hope is that it goes away. I don't think it's very valuable. Yeah, I'm far more interested in, like, understanding people's perspective on broker liability. When can brokers be liable when truck drivers have accidents. That's super important. Broker transparency. It's, it's not interesting, and it should not be a law that the FMCSA forces or continues to work with. And it's one of those. There's that famous graphic, I think it's, I can't remember, I'm blanking on his name, but he says, you know, the he sends over a copy of an invoice, and it says, screw on one line is like 10 cents, and then on the next line, it's knowing which where to put the screw. It's $10,000 and so, you know, industry expertise, your your your your career focus, like that is your expertise is what you should be charging a premium for. And you know, based on what the market wants to pay you and how you convey that value is solely up to you, and that is sort of the blessing and the curse of being a business owner. Absolutely. And you can look at publicly traded companies like ch Robinson posting their profits. They are not making 40% margin like that. Is not the world that they live in. So there might be brokers who make good money on certain loads and lose money in other loads, but it's about the aggregate. So again, I'm with you. I think you run your own race. The more you look at other people's plates and wonder, why is my plate not as full as theirs? Is the wrong mentality in this business? Yeah, 100% okay, let's go into a little bit of non competes, non solicits. That's an ongoing issue. I love talking about post employment, restrictive covenants. I call them perks. They're perks of the job, but they're the opposite of perks, because they're things that control you. For the folks who are new to my diatribes on non competes and non solicits, let me quickly explain them. They are, I said, post employment restrictive covenants. After you leave, you have a restriction of what you're allowed to do for a period of time based on a promise that you make. So the FTC tried to ban non competes. That was immediately sued by the US Chamber of Commerce, but the ATA and others made comments saying, if you do this rule, we're going to try and stop it. It was overturned. The ban was stopped, and the Trump administration, as you might imagine was like, We love non competes. We're not we don't care about this. So the non compete ban was knocked down. It is not coming back. It is very unlikely the FTC will ever try and do something like this. Again. There are other ways they could try and tackle it, like forcing disclosure of the non compete before you apply for the job that is probably legal, but they do not have the ability to go in there and ban non competes entirely. And it's 30 million American workers have non competes. It's one in five workers have a non compete. So it's, it's everywhere. It's it's not just transportation or media. It's everything from doctors and anesthesiologists and anyone else you can imagine, except Blythe, except for lawyers, we are ethically prohibited from signing non competes. Though, if you work in house and you do sign a non compete, you're probably bound by that non compete. The other one is the non solicit, and that is that just means you are not allowed to generally solicit a former customer, a former vendor or a former coworker for a period of time, usually a year, maybe two years. There are no new regulations on non solicits. And the important thing about a non solicit is it means you can't reach out. But. If you're a former customer or your former vendor or your former coworkers, like, Hey, I saw you went somewhere new, can I go there too? That's probably okay. But I will preface this by saying, don't take legal advice from a podcast. If you think you need a lawyer, you probably do, and it's not me, unless you're paying me, then I will be your lawyer. Don't. There's nothing I say meant to be an attorney client privilege and don't take legal advice from a podcast. I'm sure you've seen Jurassic Park where you know John Hammond is talking about the blood sucking lawyers. That's the only quote that I could think of. We're very special. I mean, thankfully, the autonomous things have not necessarily come for the the podcasting lawyers, but they're certainly coming from the lawyers, and I think they're probably coming from the podcasters too. Yeah. Have you tried notebook? Lm, we are, we are. We have an expiration date, much like the dinosaurs. I can't wait. I can't wait. It's amazing modern technology. All right, so I'm looking through the rest of my list of all of the law cases that have gone on. What? What about the one? I think it was so tragic that it was a somebody else, another car crossed the man and hit a truck driver, and then that company and that truck driver were being held liable for that accident. Yeah, we went about. We alluded to that earlier. That's the Werner case in Texas. So let me, let me set the stage for the folks who have not heard about this case, and give you a refresher of how horrifying the set of facts was. There's a driver for Werner. He had been driving for about a week. So brand new, brand new, CDL holder, his boss, the trainer, was asleep in the back, sleep in the birth of the truck, and he was driving in inclement weather. Was snowing as a snow advisory, but he's driving it under the posted speed limit, probably 10 miles or so under the posted speed limit. In the opposite lane, the opposite side of the highway, another vehicle is traveling too fast for conditions. They lose control, spin out cross 42 feet of grassy median and collide head on with the truck owned by Werner enterprises. And in this catastrophic accident, one child dies, another child is paralyzed, and another one has traumatic brain injury. And the question is, who's at fault? Who's responsible for this? And it goes to trial, and at the trial court level, the jury came back and said the driver for Werner was liable to the amount of 14% they take percentages and assign the liability. So 14% for the driver for Werner, 16% was assessed to the driver of the pickup truck. But I'm not a math guy. I'm not I'm not Jason Miller or Ken Adamo. I'm a simple country lawyer. We're missing something, and that missing 70% was Werner. Werner was found to be liable to the amount of $100 million why? And the argument that was made is that Werner was supposed to do training for this driver in bad weather and this driver, had he gotten that training, or had the dispatchers told him you should be going slower, not that he was driving too fast, because he never lost control. The argument was, essentially, if this truck was going any slower, this accident wouldn't have happened. And that's true, like it is true, if that truck was going slower, that vehicle crossing the center line would not have hit it. But that is not how causation works. And causation is this really special legal topic. That's really the simplest way to describe it is. But for this thing, would this other thing have happened? And so who caused the accident? Was it the driver for Werner who was essentially the wrong place at the wrong time, but going maybe a little fast, but still under the speed limit? Yeah. Or was it the driver in that pickup truck who was driving way too fast who lost control and did an incursion it crossed the meeting hit that driver? Is it their fault? Well, it went on appeal, and at the appellate court they said, Werner is at fault. Now that number of $100 million changed. Now it's $130 million with post judgment interest. It's a lot more money. It finally on December 3 or December 4 of 2024 it gets argued before the Texas Supreme Court, and I watched the entire argument. I take notes of who's asking what questions and when the questioning was done, my belief was that the Texas Supreme Court would reverse, I thought, based on their line of questioning, it sounded like they were not going to agree with the lower courts. And just, I think it was June of this year, 2025 they come out and they say, Werner is not at fault. It's a terrifying set of facts. It's sad, sad, sad. But just because Werner was there doesn't mean that they caused the accident. The accident was caused by that pickup truck. That's what happened now in. If I'm a jury, and you see this case, you see a dead kid and a bunch of injured kids, and you see a big business, it's easy to go like it's clearly their fault and they got all the money. But that's not how the law works. It's not how it works. So that case is probably the most important liability case in our industry right now. And Werner was vindicated. They were vindicated at the Supreme Court level for state of Texas, and so that that case is now done, that, you know, that's because if it were to have not been in werners favor, then that would have had a, from what I understand, a cascading effect versus, I mean, the question is like, if the Werner case had been upheld, what that would mean for you and me and anyone else on the road, is that you would have to anticipate another vehicle colliding with you in the opposite lane of traffic. It's impossible. I go down the highway, I'm driving 60 miles an hour, 70 miles an hour, and I see another car, you have a second or two seconds to react when that car starts losing control. It is an impossible standard for Werner or any driver to have. So if it had stood, many motor carriers would probably park their trucks in bad weather. There just wouldn't be a reason to risk it. Now, the small truckers, they wouldn't care, because if they get an accident, they're going to go bankrupt and move on, but Werner in there, they self insure for 10 million bucks, and then they have an umbrella policy for the stuff above that. So they were, they were very fortunate to win on appeal, but that that was the last place this thing was going to go, the Texas Supreme Court, was the last place that case could end up. And I think it's, you know, we talked earlier about, you know, autonomous vehicles and autonomous trucks. And you know that that's probably a reality of the world that we live in. Of these, some of these accidents can be avoided by using autonomous vehicles. And, you know, like it or not, that's, it's one of those things that I think is a net benefit to society, to not have just anyone and everyone being able to operate a vehicle that is hundreds, sometimes 1000s of pounds and, you know, and under the influence or in bad conditions and road rage, you know, as you know, different variables never leave home. That's my advice. Like, just don't go why? Why Why would you go outside? Everything can come to you, like, just don't go anywhere. Like, that's where things are safe, and don't be outside at night time. Why would you be outside at nighttime? That one was also, uh, part of, like, the the nuclear verdict. Yeah, I understand. And so the nuclear verdict is it would, if that would have gone against Warner's favor, that means that they're out of business. And so it wouldn't have been enough to kill Werner. Werner could absorb$100 million verdict. There's a handful of companies that can, like Wabash currently has $100 million verdict against them in Missouri. So that's a manufacturer. They can usually survive one or two of these things. If you get four or five in a given year, you probably don't survive. Even the big brokers, if they get held liable in some big case, they can probably take a punch or two because their umbrella policies are substantial, but small or mid sized motor cures, there's no hope. If you carry a $10 million policy and your verdict is 30 million bucks, you're toast. And nuclear verdict is kind of a it's not a legal term like we didn't the lawyers didn't invent that term. We didn't go like that. Verdict is like Hiroshima, like we it's nothing like that, but it really just means a verdict that's over$10 million is a nuclear verdict. And if it's over $100 million they call them thermonuclear verdicts. Again, I don't use those terms necessarily, but that's the kind of the parlance of what people say. How do you know sort of the Billboard lawyers play a role? I haven't gotten a billboard yet. I've thought about it. So the billboard lawyers, that's how they market. I mean, how many companies would you recommend Blythe to market with billboards? It's just it feels like they're the only, you know, going against truck drivers. It feels like that that's the only you know, I guess, sort of, well, maybe not the only one, but, like, injured in an accident, call, you know, so and so, you know, involved in a truck driving accident. Call, so and so. And it feels like that's the only, like, lawyer focused billboards that I see. So you're exactly right, because lawyers are terrible advertisers. They're terrible marketers. They don't know how to communicate what they do. Some of them are okay. Some of them are fine, but the billboard lawyers are the ones that are. They basically want people to know if there's a truck associate their name with it. That's that's the whole point. What is more, I would say, problematic in our business right now is this idea of litigation funding. So this is going to go out in a little rabbit hole. So please bear with me. But non lawyers cannot own what law firms do. You can't be an owner of a law firm if you're not an attorney. Some states have, they kind of winnowed away at that. They've changed. A little bit, but generally speaking, you can't have any corporate ownership of a law firm. There's a new technique, though, and the new technique is okay, you were involved in a catastrophic accident. You want to sue Matt Leffler, but you don't have the money to last for two or three or 10 years. Like the Werner case, that was over 10 years of litigation, no one made any money for 10 years. So there are these companies that come in and say, I will loan you money. I will take an interest, I'll take equitable ownership of a part of your potential recovery. It's like betting on whether or not the case is successful or not. And there are companies that specialize in litigation funding, and they they get you the ability to hire better lawyers, have better experts, get better evidence. And that has been problematic, because now there's a new kind of entity involved in these cases. So private lawyers, having private equity, giving them money to litigate against a big trucking company or big brokerage that is new, that's new ish, and that's something that you don't see on billboards, but in the circles of lawyers like we all know what's happening, and that sounds like something that maybe could bubble up in the next decade or so as something a lot more maybe, maybe it's under that because one of my questions I was going to ask you is, You know, what's the legal case that's going to be coming down the pipeline that we all should kind of maybe be focusing on right now, is that one of them, I would say, No, I would say litigation funding is interesting, but it really doesn't change the real dynamic. So, like, if I'm a plaintiff lawyer, and someone's going to give my client money, and they're going to take part of the interest, I don't give I don't care, like I have a client, like I'm a fiduciary to that client, whoever else you want to get involved, like, I couldn't care less. Like, that is, that's my client. It's like, when I'm a insurance attorney, the insurance company is paying me, but you the truck driver, you're my client. Like, I love the insurance company is fine that that's who pays the bills, but that's not my client. That is not my client. What I think the biggest case that is happening in our in the country right now, and it is something that I've talked about a little bit, but we we talked kind of adjacent to it earlier, before we started recording, is this case called vos selections versus Donald Trump. This case has to do with a statute called IEEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 this case is so important, so let me set the stage. And I I know we're getting close on time, but it's going to take me a minute. And you need to know this. They need to know this. The emergency powers of the president are incredible. And no one truly knows how much power the president, any president, has in an emergency. And we do want our presidents to have power in an emergency. If there's a hurricane, we want to go send relief. We don't want Congress to vote on sending relief. We want to go do it if we are attacked by a foreign entity. We don't need to go to Congress and say, Hey, can you give us the money to go send troops like we just do it. So there's a there's an important piece of what emergency powers are, but IEEPA is the newest version of the economic powers you have in an emergency so on. I think it's April 2 of 2025 President Trump comes into office, or he's been office for a bit, and says, I am declaring a national emergency that has to do with trade deficits and other things. And because of this emergency, I am going to give every trading partner in the entire world, a tariff immediately. Now that is not the power of the president in a non emergency like that. Is Congress's power to do this. And so using IEEPA to say there's an emergency then triggers all these other kind of things. So what ends up happening in the IEEPA case is it Trump says it's an emergency, and Congress can actually pass a bill, essentially, and say yes, there's an emergency, or no, there's no emergency. If they were to have said no emergency, he would have gone to the president and he would have likely vetoed it and said, No, no, I think it's an emergency. But if you get two thirds of the Congress to say it's not an emergency, then it overrides the declaration. But Blythe, who's going to get two thirds of Congress to do anything, it's impossible. So this case of vos selections is this little company in New York who's like, we're getting hammered by tariffs, and we do not believe that Donald Trump has the legal power to assess assess tariffs this way under this particular statute. And you. It moved fast at the District Court. The district court said that Donald Trump did not have this power, and the entire tariffs that were put in place on Liberation Day were stopped for a single day. They were all done. And then the federal appellate court jumped in and said, No, no, keep the tariffs in place. Appeal it to us, and we'll tell you what we're going to do. So it's the Court of International Trade. Is a US District Court. It goes to this federal appellate court, and the federal appellate court, a couple of weeks ago, heard oral arguments, the lawyers for Trump, the lawyers for vos, selections, other lawyers, they all kind of came and gave their stories. Even 33 senators filed an amicus brief, which is like a friend of the court brief, saying we don't think this is appropriate. We don't want this to be the case. We don't think IEEPA gives this kind of power to the President. We don't think it's meant to do this, and what we have are fundamental questions of American democracy. We have what I would call a three legged stool, judicial, legislative and executive, and each one checks and balances the other. They can't give the other branch power. They're not supposed to say, this is for you. You can have our power. And IEEPA is this case that is probably the most important case in our lifetime. And when I talk to my more conservative friends, I say, imagine that like your worst political nightmare. Let's say it's AOC. She gets into office, and she says there's a national emergency on greenhouse gasses, we need to tariff every internal combustion engine 5,000% could she do that under this thing? Absolutely. So my concern of this case is not pro or against Donald Trump. My case is the executive branch is too fricking powerful, and it's almost outside of our hands to stop it is so close to being completely unable to be impeded by anything. The last time our Congress declared war, which is their power, was in World War Two. So in World War Two, Japan attacks us. We declare war on Japan, and then, for whatever reason, Germany declares war on America, we then declare war on Germany. That is the last time we used our war powers in the Congress. Afterwards, it's all police actions. We have watched the executive grow in unique and profound ways. It is not a Democratic problem or a Republican problem. It is an everybody problem. So that is the case that I would urge everyone to follow and understand. What about from another just playing devil's advocate here? Should a random company in New York or a small circuit judge be able to impede on the President of the United States and his decision or their decisions? I think that the democracy doesn't work if you can't do that. Otherwise, I don't think it works. I mean, we are governed through the advice and consent of our representatives, like we give them, we elect them, we tell them to do this thing. And I look at the problem being the sickness within the legislative branch, the Congress, the House and the Senate. If you go to the House and the Senate more often than not, and you ask them about who they are, what they do, they say, I'm a Republican and I'm from Louisiana, I'm a Democrat and I'm from Illinois, they are party first, institution second, and they have no problem watching their institution get destroyed and dismantled. There's no way. There's no way that you should be able to declare an emergency with essentially no oversight and do anything that you want when you know for a fact that's not what the founders ever intended. This is we live under 10 active emergency declarations right now, and on average, an emergency declaration last for five to 10 years. Like these things are. Everyone does them. Every Administration uses these things. So your question like, should a small company in New York stop a use of the emergency powers? Absolutely, absolutely now it'll go to the Supreme Court, and it will likely fall six to three, maybe five to four in favor of Trump. Like, this is, this is a foregone conclusion, like the IEEPA stuff will stand like it's not going to be knocked down. But it is a case that we all have to watch, because now it's going to be massive. It's the biggest case in separation of powers in my lifetime. So what do we do? I hope for the best. I will drive cars. I would vote out every single incumbent, like any incumbent in office right now. They shouldn't be in office. You have more millionaires in our Congress than we have ever had since the Gilded Age. It is crazy that the power that they've accumulated and the power they've given up. Up. They've given up so much of their power to the executive branch, and all have become wealthy, wealthy people, Democrats, Republicans, they all should go, hopefully no one's listening at this point. That would be the best case scenario, because I like I like everybody. I want people to be happy, but that's what I would do. I think they all need to go, Yeah, same, largely, same, yeah. Are we running for office that Blythe? Are we? Are we doing this? God, no, I would never want that position, but it's probably people like us who don't want any of that that should be. Those are the right leaders. Those are the ones who don't want are the ones that you gotta have. I still don't want it. Okay? I think I am at my legal limit, as far as just brain power of, you know, all of these things that are going on, people that are trying to help, people that are trying to stop, people that are trying to, you know, come up with new ideas and advance this industry, which a lot of these things, it just feels, you know, like a normal, maybe process of doing business and advancing as a society where there's, you know, it's almost like a whack a mole, where you solve one problem and 17 other ones unintentionally show up. Where do we kind of go? Like, as if you work in logistics, where should we kind of go from here, as far as, like, paying attention to these stories. I mean, obviously follow you, follow your podcast and all of your different updates. But how many of these are, I guess, realistically going to impact the our day to day? I think the big thing to think about, least immediately, is watching how the tariffs kind of play out, right? So we have, I think tomorrow, that's when this thing can get released. But on August 29 Friday, August, 29 the de minimis exception goes away. So in people who are bringing in things into the country, if it's under 800 bucks, there's no tariff that goes away on the 29th so we're going to see cost increase. This is all part of this understanding of what power does the President have. Now, this is not the IEEPA stuff, but it's just kind of understanding how the president can change things on IEEPA, it's a case you have to follow and understand. I mean, just as an American citizen, you just need to know, like, what does the Constitution say, and what does it mean? And like, you need to, you need to look at these things for autonomous vehicles. There will be a time, probably by the end of 2026 where there will be proposed rules on autonomous vehicles. When that happens, you should make comments. You'll have 30 days, maybe 60 days, to make comments. You should do that other than that, and that's just kind of just enjoy your life and be kind to people. Don't watch things of power. It's so bad. It's so I tried to tell you years ago how much of an abomination that But in fairness, like the other stuff that, what is it? Game of Thrones is also terrible. I mean, season well, it was house of Dragon. And Season Two really did jump the shark a little bit. And I don't know who to blame yet, but I tend to blame the merger of the new HBO executive, or the new Time Warner. I think it's uh, Time Warner executive that told h you know, Game of Thrones to or house of Dragon to go from 10 episodes to eight episodes. And don't like it, yeah, obviously, because I think of anybody who watched that, season two, I thought was fantastic. Season or season one. Let me correct myself. Season One, I thought was fantastic. Fantastic. I would like to because your husband's a big comic book fan, right? The biggest, okay, I was like, every night before bed, I have a question I'd like you to ask him, okay, so, and you will like this question too, all right, so Sauron made the One Ring. And the One Ring, it's a lot of his essence and His power is inside this ring. And the idea is, like, who could claim the ring? Like, could, could, could sauruman, could Gandalf, like, it's questionable they could claim it. Or if just Sauron would, would conquer them mentally, I would like to have your husband answer the question, could Victor von Doom take the ring and claim the ring and actually beat Sauron in a contest of wills? Because Dr Doom, he is a human, but he's the second greatest sorcerer in all of Earth. I mean, underneath the Doctor Strange, he's the second greatest intellect behind Reed Richards, second greatest engineer behind Iron Man, and he's known for having this incredible sense of will. And there's a lot of comic book feats that I think he could tie into, like, could Sauron overcome? Like, could he overcome Saurons will? And I have my own beliefs, but I'm not going to share them with you, but I think you two should talk in depth about this? And I expect, like, a pretty good, like, two or three paragraph, I mean, a couple dissertation, yeah, that'd be good just a little bit, just to kind of make sure we're all got a ducks in a row. That's my question. He would happily have to sit on that question and then come back to me after he. Done a little research. That's probably what would happen. That's That's all I ask. I think that. I think that's where we can kind of bridge the gap between Lord of the Rings and Marvel with some of the greatest characters or villains out there. What about the rest of the the Marvel Universe? Have you? Have you enjoyed any movies that came out this year? Fantastic. Four was great. I really enjoy. It was very enjoyable. And I like that. They finally kind of demonstrated how powerful Sue Storm is. Like, Sue is really, really powerful. And they did a good job in Galactus, as opposed like a giant, like Cloud monster. It was a, it was a good Galactus. I am. I'm excited. I've not seen, is it Thunderbolt or what is the other one? Thunderbolts? Yeah, I've not seen that yet. It's supposed to come out on streaming like this week, so I'm gonna watch it this week. I love the century. That character is crazy, so I'm looking forward to seeing that. I do. I did really like that movie too, so that I out of the all of the movies, because I the only ones I can really remember, the ones that I've seen over the summer. So Jurassic Park, you know, I would, well, Jurassic, whatever, the dinosaur movie, yeah, that was, it was good. The writing could have used a little work. You didn't seem like you're really excited about that. Well, they're definitely you. I've gone back and watched the other one. So the, you know, the first original three with, like, the, I guess, the current storyline. And then there was the next, like, three or four movies, and that's like, sort of the Chris Pratt era. And then I was really, really, because I'm a big ScarJo fan, I was a little disappointed with how, you know, the the writing of some of a little bit of that movie, and, you know, but I'm just, I'm hoping for the best. I I'm not, seen, I watch a lot of, like, Kid movies, so, like, I watch a lot of bluey and things like that. So I've not seen a ton of movies. But I was, like, I said, I was pleasantly surprised and fantastic for I'm looking forward to the next iteration of the Marvel stuff. Like, I love Doctor Doom is my favorite fictional character ever. Like, I love Doctor Doom. There's, there's no one cooler than Doctor Doom. Awesome. Well, that, I mean, I'm sure you're pretty pumped that, you know, Robert Downey Jr is back, and he's going to be playing man, I'm just, I'm trying to figure out, like, he, is he the real doom? Is he just pretending to be doom? Is he an alternate version of Iron Man who became doom? Like, there's, there's so many questions that I have. There's so many questions. That's one that I sort of trust to the the Russo brothers to sort of reel it in and bring us back. Because there's a lot been a lot been a lot of, you know, between Star Wars and Rings of Power, and you know, some of these other fan bases there's, there's been a lot of turmoil, you know, over the last handful of years or so. And I'm just ready to get back to good quality content, and I trust the Russo brothers to be able to do that for Marvel. I have a plan I'd like to run by you, and this, will you cut this out or not? Doesn't matter. But I want to do a, like a freight of the Living Dead. And so I want to do, like a series of podcasts, as if we're pretending like there's been a zombie apocalypse, and we're talking about how we're how the freight industry is behaving after this has taken place. So I got already talked about bug out bags, actually. So I got Charlie staff row lined up for helping with this. She'll talk about how you when you interview candidates, how you can search for bite marks and things I got Chad Oleson from avrl is talking about how he's automated so many processes so freight brokers have less people that can get infected. So I have this plan. I'm building it now. I'm thinking like, middle of September, I'll start doing something. Do we want to be part of this? This, this experiment? Yes, I have to figure out where I play a role, because right now I'm just thinking of like, who I would absolutely hate, as far as like characters are concerned. Well, it is all improv. This is gonna be the part that I'm excited about. We're gonna see what we can come up with. I think it'll be fine. Be a nice little change of pace from the other stuff we see on the internet lately. Yes, yeah, let's, let's have a little fun. Let's bring some fun back. Let's bring some positivity back. Let's, that's a perfect place to end the show. Yes, where are the positive moments happening in this industry? Just give us, you know, rapid fire. We don't have to go too in depth. I think that the things that I find the most positive in the industry right now is that there are a lot of people that just are succeeding in bad markets, like bad markets build great companies. And I think people that are bullish on their businesses are doing very well right now, even when they're not doing great. This is the nature of our industry. You don't get into supply chain because it's easy and because it's always growing like this is a feast or famine. So the positive pieces of the folks have embraced this chaos, knowing full well that it will never, ever, ever be something you can escape. So I love that. I would say that I also kind of love the changing of the seasons. I just like to see transitions. Yeah, that's definitely a good place to leave us off. Because, you know, in the words of Tom Hanks, from a league of their own, you know, it's the hard that makes it great. So hopefully these hard times are going to make a lot of great companies. I know I can speak from that. I'm like, oh, it's the next light at the end of the tunnel, but we're going to figure it out on the way there. It's actually a freight train, from my understanding, that that light. The end of the tunnel, and it's coming our way. Yeah, just, is it autonomous? I don't. We need some more thing. I don't know. It's all it's all a mystery to me. It's a mystery. Well, thank you for that. I appreciate you absolutely. I thank you so much for coming back on the show and breaking all of these, like complex things down for us. Because it's, it's very, think it's very easy for a lot of us to kind of just read a headline and keep scrolling, but, you know, a lot of these things have a direct impact. I mean, obviously tariffs, and, you know, everything that you you've spoken about, and then unintended consequences of, you know, some of regulation or deregulation, there's a lot of things going on. So it's good to keep our eye on the ball with some of these things. So folks want to continue keeping their eye on the ball with these issues. Where should folks follow you? Follow the show all that good stuff, because we barely even talked about that. Yeah. You can follow me on LinkedIn. Just Matthew Leffler. You can follow the podcast on Apple and Spotify. Armchair attorney podcast, I'm on Reddit. Armchair attorney. I talk about crested geckos, freight brokers and lawn care, those are really important topics to make lawn care, huh? Oh, man, I've gone down a rabbit hole. My dad is a lawn care business owner. Really, I should. I'll send you pictures of my lawn. I'm very happy with it right now, very happy it's not getting those good edges. But no, I love those things. I love I have all sorts of hobbies. So that's where you could find me. Probably, awesome, yeah, well, at one time, I did hire somebody else to cut my grass, and my dad came over and inspected it and said they didn't edge worth a shit, his exact words. So I have a lawn care company, and I got rid of them, and I've been doing all myself, and it's been one of the most enjoyable things. I love doing it. I love doing it. Well, these are the kind of takes that you can expect to hear if you follow Matthew on all of these different platforms, which I will co sign because I'm constantly upvoting him inside of all of the different subreddits, logistics related subreddit. So great to have you back on the show. My pleasure. Thank you so much, Blythe. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you, you as well, and obviously the beautiful children that you have a beautiful wife as well, like give them all my best. And we'll have to have you back on again in like six months or so, and just break all this down again, the next level of tragedies. I'll see you in Jacksonville soon. I gotta get down to Pontevedra. Oh heck yes, yeah. Let me know when you're in town and we will check out the lawns together. Thank you so much. Have a very rest your day. Thank you. You too. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of everything is logistics, where we talk all things supply chain for the thinkers in freight, if you like this episode, there's plenty more where that came from. Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you never miss a conversation. The show is also available in video format over on YouTube, just by searching. Everything is logistics. And if you're working in freight logistics or supply chain marketing, check out my company, digital dispatch. We help you build smarter websites and marketing systems that actually drive results, not just vanity metrics. Additionally, if you're trying to find the right freight tech tools or partners without getting buried in buzzwords, head on over to cargorex.io where we're building the largest database of logistics services and solutions. All the links you need are in the show notes. I'll catch you in the next Episode and go jags. You. You