Celebrating White Line Fever, 50 Year Anniversary: Rob Mariani On Legacy And Grit

A kid growing up in 1970s Milwaukee falls in love with trucks the hard way—by hanging around the 76, flipping through Overdrive, and begging to climb into a Peterbilt. That kid was Rob Mariani. Today, he’s the creator of American Trucker, and he joins us for a candid ride from those early memories to a primetime television series, a white-knuckle whiteout on Donner Pass, and an ambitious plan to honor the film that sparked it all: White Line Fever.

Rob breaks down how one movie shaped not just his career, but a mission. He shares the years-long grind to get American Trucker made—cold calls, a make-or-break WebEx, a self-funded sizzle reel—and what changed when the network finally said yes. The show’s power came from looking beyond stereotypes, opening doors into America’s logistics backbone: UPS operations, NASA’s overlooked fleet, heavy haul outfits, and the owner-operators still carrying the torch.

We also revisit the most intense shoot of his career, embedded with Caltrans during a freeway-closing pileup on Donner Pass. From there, the conversation turns to today’s realities—CDL mills, wage pressure, road culture, and how viral outrage often paints the industry worse than it is—while autonomy and AI loom larger by the day.

Rob’s answer? A new documentary that recreates White Line Fever’s legendary Blue Mule stunt with Hollywood veteran Mike Ryan and stunt legend Buddy Joe Hooker. It’s a visceral contrast between real, analog stunt work and CGI, making the case for human skill you can feel when the glass actually shatters.

If you care about trucking history, driver training, practical stunts, or simply love diesel and clean chrome, this conversation is your lane. We talk enforcement that works, recruiting the next generation, and how pride returns—one pre-trip, one clean cab, one good pass at a time.

Key Takeaways

🟩 A single film (White Line Fever) can spark a lifelong mission in trucking
🟩 American Trucker succeeded by telling stories beyond the driver stereotype
🟩 Persistence matters: cold calls, sizzle reels, and one do-or-die meeting changed everything
🟩 Some of the most important trucking stories live inside fleets few people ever see
🟩 Real-world experience beats viral outrage when it comes to industry perception
🟩 CDL quality, pay pressure, and road culture are real issues—but solvable ones
🟩 Practical, human skill still matters in an era of AI, autonomy, and CGI
🟩 Pride in trucking starts with fundamentals: pre-trips, clean equipment, and professionalism

Enjoyed the ride? Follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review to help more people find it. Got thoughts on autonomy, CDL reform, or the Blue Mule revival? Join the conversation.

YouTube link to American Trucker

YouTube Link for White Line Fever

Fuel your grind. Own the road. Strong, Steady, and 3-Axle Ready.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Rob Mariani’s Origin Story
• 6:41 White Line Fever’s Lasting Impact
• 15:51 Overdrive, Old Iron, And Childhood Obsession
• 24:51 Building American Trucker Against The Odds
• 37:41 Landing The TV Deal And Surviving Network Life
• 47:11 The Industry Then Versus Now
• 55:11 CDL Mills, Safety, And Pride In Decline
• 1:05:41 Enforcement, Wages, And Resetting Standards
• 1:15:51 Autonomy, AI, And The Human Factor
• 1:24:31 Donner Pass Whiteout: Inside The Chaos
• 1:33:41 NASA Rigs, Lost Episodes, And Legacy
• 1:41:41 Recreating The Blue Mule Stunt

Transcript

SPEAKER_05: 0:27

Welcome back to Doss Deliver Podcast. I'm your host, Truck and Ray, and this is where we celebrate the road, rigs, and the big stories of trucking. Today we're going to get we got someone who's been representing truckers for on the screen for years. He's been in the American Trucker, he's been on the Speed Channel. Rob Mariani is back behind the camera with passion for the project and also has a soul for trucking and documentary. So we want to welcome him to the show, and he's going to tell us about his Hollywood stunt legend and all this with Mike Ryan and bring the spirit back to life for so many people out there that want to know more about trucking. So, Rob, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10

Thanks for having me again, Ray. It is going uh right as rain. If we're walking and talking, it's a good day, right?

SPEAKER_05: 1:17

That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_01: 1:18

Another opportunity to take a whack at it. Uh, and that's kind of what I've been doing. Um, this being 2025, the anniversary year of White Line Fever, the movie that came out in 1975, um, sort of was the impetus for this year's uh motivation, if you will, or inspiration. Yeah. Um what for those of you that don't know, uh, the decade of the 70s, when I was a little kid growing up, I was born throughout all the, I was a kid throughout all the 70s. And when when you're a little kid that's, I don't know, five, six, seven years old, and you become enamored with trucks like I did, you didn't you don't have the world that I would I I should say the the kids nowadays, or it doesn't matter what hobby you have or whatever you're into, the internet and and everything that goes with it is like the candy store of all candy stores. There's nothing you can't find, trace, get to, get references on. But there was none of that way back then. There was no, you can just go on and Google that and find a photo of that really cool truck. You like you had to go to the 76 truck stop to see the 359 bill or be on the interstate while it was rolling down, you know, hauling bread, you know, to the Mrs. Carl's bread store. And that's what I grew up in. So every time I would see trucks and growing up in Milwaukee in the city, I would ride my bike or my skateboard to all the local places that were the factories that was blue-collar town, and you could see semi-trucks everywhere. And I just became sucked in and enamored with it. And then the older I got, uh, when I say older, when you're cognizant that your grandfathers are truck drivers, about that age, whatever it was, five maybe, that I realized that both of my grandfathers were truck drivers, the drove for gateway in yellow. And then that became um more fuel for my fire, for my passion about trucks. And then we couple that with my grandmother, God bless her, Molly. She ran a tavern in Milwaukee for 48 years. So in the mid-70s, she was humming right along with her business that she's had for decades. And it just so happened that one of my grandfathers drove for Schlitz and uh Schlitz beer, and she had a Schlitz beer bar, and he drove B Model Max with the kegs of beer and delivered them to her tavern. So when I'd see that, it became more and more like dumping fuel on my fire. And then that same grandpa, Amil, he had a subscription to Overdrive magazine, and that would come in the mailbox. You know, you didn't go online and see the local whatever article that whatever they had, Overdrive has now, it's all online. And I would get those magazines that were fresh. You know, he would look at them for maybe 15 minutes, an hour, and then he'd give them to me. So I had a stack of Overdrive when I was a kid. And if you can imagine, I don't know, I'm already bit by the trucking bug as a little kid, and then going through those magazines and seeing the ads for Wilson Antennas or the model of the month or the tractor of the month. It just was crazy. Plus, they had really hot models on the cover, and that was awesome. I always liked the, I mean, I I knew uh what a pretty girl was, but I wasn't into that for that per se. But it certainly is cool. When you get older, you're like, damn, overdrive was just so badass. It was just a badass magazine, and still is, but it's not like it was.

SPEAKER_05: 4:35

It's Milwaukee, huh? My mom's from Milwaukee. She went to Milwaukee. There we go.

SPEAKER_01: 4:39

I love it.

SPEAKER_05: 4:41

And she knows about slits and all that. She's just telling me about that. So how cool is that? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 4:46

Absolutely. So that that became the the impetus, and then all of a sudden, so white line fever comes out in 1975. My parents weren't exactly I'm the middle, I'm a middle child uh of seven, but we didn't have seven then. I think we had maybe four or five. So I was either the youngest or the somewhere in the pecking order when white line fever came out. And it wasn't like my parents would take us to the theater to go see white line fever. We don't, it wasn't a family, let's all go see white line fever. So I didn't get to see it when it was released, but it came out a couple years later, maybe on the late, late show, I think it was. And when they would re-air the the whatever, you know, the any uh distribution for a film or any project like that, you would ring the rag out in the theater, you know, what did it make at the box office, and then we'll kick it into the drive-in theater. And then the advent of VCRs and things were they were a few years in the distance yet. So when I saw it a year or two later, I remember seeing the ads for it on the TV because there was only like three channels when I was a kid. You'd watch NBC, CBS, ABC, whatever, or public channel on the and on the click dial. You know, you literally changed the dial. And I would see the the white blade channel, white blind fever, and the truck driver who's had enough, or whatever it was. And I'm like, Oh my god! And I would I remember saying to my mom, I have to stay up late. Um and she let me, she said, you can stay up late and watch the movie. That was like super steroids for me. It was like the DuPont blasting machine went down and the dynamite blew up in my brain with white line fever. Have you watched it? Have you gone in to retroactively watch the film? Have you ever seen it? No, I haven't. I gotta check it out now, man. That's amazing. Yeah, you absolutely have to. And what's great about it is it was at the time. Now, everything time is a it's it's time as a construct is such it an allusion to everybody. I feel no different than I did when I was a kid talking to you about white line fever as an adult now. I mean, I don't know, there's no gap there for me. The the passion meter has always been pegged, and doesn't matter if I'm old or not or young, I it it's all the same to me. So the uh the the movie was captured as a depiction of real life trucking and some of the plight the trucking was facing with corrupt brokers. Shocking my god, corrupt brokers, can you imagine that? Double dipping and all the rest of it. So it what's old is new. So when they when they created the film, when it was written by Jonathan Kaplan, they wanted to capture the turbulent 70s and they did it well. And every aspect that they did of it was done with the direction or the technical direction of Mike Parkhurst, who was the editor and the creator of Overdrive magazine. So if you've seen Smoking the Bandit, or if you've seen White Line Fever, or if you've seen Duel or Convoy or any of the classic trucking films, and I don't you can go all the way into Black Dog, you can go into every movie that you've ever seen with a truck that's involved with a truck, uh including the 18 Wheels of Justice that used to run on the Nashville Network, uh, any of those shows. Mike Parkhurst, if you go on to IMDB, is listed as the technical consultant. And I mean, I've done my homework on him, on everything, on every friggin' movie, including Spielberg's debut with Duel in '71, all the way through until he died in God bless him in 2013. And I got to be friends with Mike before he died. But anyway, they the the reason why white line fever resonated was because they went to Mike Parker's. He was the technical guy to say, this is how this scene should look. This is how the brokers talk to the truck drivers. This is how the the loads from the you know um uh Red River, where he was the fictitious uh trucking company that he was leased on to. This is how they did it. So when you watch that movie, the the great thing that'll stand out is the vintage aspects because you're talking cab overs, you're talking conventionals, you're talking there is no plastic. I love Freetliner, but everything now is so hard to tell apart. They're all monochrome looking, plasticky, windswept, aerodynamic rigs, which I understand the need of that for fuel, but back then it wasn't, and there was all this character, and that's the cool thing about it that it captured all of the essence of what it was like for me being a kid, looking at it in you know in real time, going down the road in my parents' motorhome and seeing a 4W series cruise on by, you know, at five miles an hour faster than you're going, which is a slow pass, you know.

SPEAKER_00: 9:23

So you seem like look at his dual antennas. This is unbelievable. I go crazy, I go hog wild.

SPEAKER_05: 9:31

How young were you? What's the youngest?

SPEAKER_01: 9:34

I was seven, seven when I saw White Line Fever, seven. Wow, seven, something like that. But remember, I'm building models, I'm reading Overdrive magazine, I'm going to truck stops every weekend uh in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. If you know that where that is on 994, they had a 76 truck stop, which my grandma would take me there every Saturday for we'd get strawberry pie ice cream, and I had a 110 clicky camera, and I would go up and down the roads knocking on truck doors.

SPEAKER_04: 10:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 10:01

Hey, can I go in your 352 Peterbelt? And the truck drivers, yeah, were like salt salt of the earth guys that would not only, you know, and they're they everything from the way they dressed to the way they carried themselves to the way they maintained their trucks, polishing up all while they're on their brake. I don't, I was never turned down once. I think I might have gotten turned down once from a guy that had to leave the maybe the fuel island, but they never turned me down. They would get out of the driver's seat, let me go up inside. Most of them would let me start it, you know, turn the key and hit the button. And I could go, I went crazy. And I mean, I did this, Ray. I did this for 15 solid years as a kid, 15 at least, just nuts on all of it.

SPEAKER_05: 10:45

You were getting content back then.

SPEAKER_01: 10:47

Well, white line fever, I I didn't know. I was just kept creating my I was just the content was there. White line fever, though, is a it's it's a complete time stop if when you look at it, and you then you factor in the how absolutely um brutal the industry can be, and even even though it's a Hollywood film, it resonated big time and it got it got it did a lot of it made a lot of money at the box office. It it was critically acclaimed, and it's aged like anything, like fine wine, because you can never see that that era of trucking ever again. It's it's long gone. And I got I was fortunate enough to grow up in it and to be immersed in that on that passionate side, which is where all my passions came from. And when I mentioned that white line fever was um definitely one major aspect of me creating the um the American Trucker television series, that's not hyperbole, that's it's very true. All of those little nuances and things that I picked up from all just being a fan, and then my grandfathers never left me. And that's why when I went into excuse me, the creative world in my adult years, I went to college for design. Um I never I started working at loading docks when I was in school because you can make big bank at the loading docks. Yeah, and I would I would load um uh we we worked at a uh a big glass warehouse that did international like glass shipping and things, and and they had crazy specialized 18-wheelers to haul glass to job sites, and they had they had they had two 83 and 84 CL9000 Fords, they had an LTL 9000 with a 13-speed 350 small camp Cummins, no big cam Cummins, they had um a Mac cruise liner, a 75 Mac cruise liner with a maxodyne and a five-speed. And I don't know if you've ever been around one. The five all drivers out there that they'll laugh at me, but they'll know to drive a Mac five-speed is one of the hardest things in the world. Manual steering, that was the first truck I ever got to drive from my boss who would let us drive these things, and we didn't have CDLs, but we knew how to drive them because he taught us how to drive them. We had to drive the trucks everywhere, load up the truck, go get trailer number eight, hook it up to tractor five, and I'd be like, yeah, yeah, CDL, or my the LTL 9000. They had an LTL 9000, which was a conventional with a 36-inch bunk on it, which was like if you go look up that truck now, it's super super badass. We had one of those anyway. Um, all of that, all of those components fed into me then sitting down to write what would become American Truck or the TV series. Most people think that I was just like an actor and I was plugged in because I'm crazy hyper to do the show. I wrote it all, and and I I I spent years trying to get the show off the ground. Actually had pilots. Uh the hosting aspect for me is I've always told people I'm an Italian kid from the Midwest, so there was no problem with me with the camera. I talk to you like I talk to a camera. It's all the same to me. So and the camera's very weird though. I I can't just say, you know, arbitrarily let everybody can do it. The camera sucks energy out of you. And if you've ever had to stand and do any kind of live thing, or or God certainly hosting a sh a show with no script, and that camera, when that camera's put in front of you, let alone if there are people around you, yeah, all you can feel is like this vortex sucking energy out of your mouth, and you'll end up saying dumb things, or you'll end up like, Oh, I don't know what to say. I just naturally had a talent for it to to stare at the barrel of the lens and and deliver the message. I'm trying to bring everybody into what trucking is. And and and so it it took off. It took off with trucking fans.

SPEAKER_05: 14:37

Yeah. How did it come about? What was um some of the origin of that?

SPEAKER_01: 14:41

Um, well, we I almost got the show funded independently from pilot travel centers in in the mid-2000s. I was invited to what they call pilot university, okay, and that's where all of their corporate uh business deals happen, or wherever they, you know, it's like their Oz Behind the Curtain Empire, if you will, if you go into Knoxville. And I what I did first is I wrote it because again, I go back to my design um prowess. I would I wrote everything at PowerPoint. I would just build elaborate PowerPoints to write and then get my message across with graphics and video and things that I would want so that I could pitch it to get to the next level. So it's one thing if I could pitch you on a phone call or uh in this case, uh like a uh you know, internet, something like that. We didn't, I didn't really have that that stuff was around when I was doing this. It was called, I think it was called um oh, I can't remember the name. There was a there was not Zoom, not what's the one around with this duck here? What's the one? What's this what's this interface we use? This one's StreamYard, yeah. StreamYard. So there's a lot of them. This one seems pretty cool. I've never used this interface. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, it's very good. But they were the software was still evolving in those days where you could get oh, WebEx, it was called. So I I put it together for a WebEx meeting, and so what I would do is I would script, I would script myself, even though I've never scripted on American Trucker, and I'm not scripted now, certainly. I would just make myself some notes that I could spin it where I could read it if I had to get somebody on a voicemail and it sounded organic. Right. I would make sure I wouldn't miss my points. So I would, because I'm I all I was used to was rejection. Who is this guy that's calling? Uh I would call, I can't even tell you all the companies I would call. I would do all my I would target what would be relevant for the industry, what would be a good sponsor for this, what this segment could be, all of those things. And then I would call through the firewall. If you can imagine calling pilot travel centers, now this was back in again the mid-2000s, early 2000s. There are there's a litany of people that are listed from the marketing on down, and who's in the executive VP of blah to get to whoever that gets to whatever. So I would delineate who and what, and then keep my target numbers ready to go. And then I would wait and I would rehearse myself and I would read what I could write in case I get voicemail because I knew that I was gonna get voicemail. And you know, once you get voicemail, you can trip yourself up. Oh, uh hi, it's John. You know what I mean? It's like, okay. So I started leaving these relevant, but when I say relevant messages where you I didn't want people to ignore me, I didn't just want to sound like I was selling insurance to somebody over the phone. I I was coming up with things that were like trigger words that might get them to call me back. And and I would keep it short and sweet. Well, one day, and this is after, I don't know, lots of rejection, I wouldn't get any responses back. Um I get this phone call. Hi, is this Rob? Yes, this is blah blah blah from Pilot Travel Centers. And I said, Oh, great, great, excellent. Thank you for the call. And and I I remember her saying, get a piece of paper. This is the number you need to reach. You're you're I'm not the person, and I've they've been not ignoring me, but they know that when they came in, it took a long time for them because I was congenial with them. I didn't want to pester them. And I would even write down on my on my calendar when I left a voicemail for so that I would space it out and not be one of these abrasive. And so I was like, Oh, great. She gives me the number uh and name of the executive vice president of the national marketing director of pilot travel centers. And she then cleared me through the firewall and said, There's a guy, blah, blah, blah. I I set it up. She she said, she called me up and she said, now I have the the big one on the line here, the big fish. And she and she said, I'm gonna give you, I like what you've uh what you've got. She said, I'm gonna give you a two-hour WebEx meeting and you can pitch me. And if I like it, I'll take it to the executives. If not, um, you know, I'll wish you the best of luck. I said, okay, great. So now at this point, right, I'm calling a couple of guys that I know that are in corporate marketing for like wireless on the wireless side. They would they would sell um the uh insurance policies to like all the major carriers. This is a good friend of mine. And so I would kind of bounce some ideas off of him over beers and and do some things. And and I'd say, okay, once I told him that I had the WebEx meeting, he went, his antenna went so far up, he's like, What? You've got a meeting with the blah blah. I mean, oh yeah, I do. And so they're like, Oh, now suddenly they're the attention starts to come on. Oh, crazy Rob has a WebEx dedicated WebEx meeting with the executive VP of marketing for pilot. That's no small affair. And I pitched her on and had my PowerPoint running. Um, it wasn't called American Trucker, it was uh it was like it, but it wasn't quite what it became. And she said after the meeting, she said, I am I am very excited about it. She said her um my passion for the project, she said is is uncharted. She said, I'm gonna bring this to the executives and uh congratulations, where I'll get in touch with you. And that's kind of how it went. And then from there, they invited me into Knoxville, and I had high level meetings with I mean everybody, everybody from the the you can cut this if you want, or you can do whatever you want with this. But this is a very interesting little side note. This is this is some good dirt for you. Pilot travel centers, I don't know if you remember this, they got involved, they got their hands slapped big time by the feds. They were bilking people out of their fuel points, and it was a major sting. And the feds came in and raided Knoxville, where I was. It was you can find this story, and the guy's name rhymes is it's like a nut. Okay, I'll just say that. It's one of the nuts. I don't want to give his name, but you could say an almond, or you could say a walnut, or you could say a blah, you'd eventually fight figure out his neck name because it's gonna show up in the news stories. He was a perp walked. The guy that said to me after my next meeting with him, he said, Rob, this is what he said, my ass is puckered up on this chair. I'm so excited. He said, Your passion, he said, is off the charts, and I am my interest level is 9.5 out of 10. That's what he told me in the meeting. In the in-person meeting. Well, this guy then got perp walked years later. He's kind of wiped out, but but that's where it sort of crumbled down the mountainside. They were gonna fund what was going to be American Trucker, and this isn't conjecture. So, whatever you're saying out there to you, lawyers, uh, all I'm saying to you is the honesty got truth. This is just how it, because people say, How did you get American Trunker? Because I basically climbed Mount Everest to get to the show, and it was my child from my childhood on. And so it it didn't happen. I ended up spending a lot of money, the money I didn't have on lawyers to wiggle my way out and get control back of my intellectual property. Because then what happened was these guys that came in when they smelled all the money, and there were there were millions of dollars in in uh at stake to fund the show. And when you know, when people smell money, that's when you see who's honest and who's not, real fast, you know, and and these guys try to usurp me and and melon ball me out of it and act like it was their thing. And and I I ended up getting it. I then went on, I don't know. I you know, I was doing interior design and I and I was a little dejected at that stage, but then the show came on on this uh HE TV. It was a Sunday night show, it was their biggest show, it's called Design Star, and they had this season one, and they had designers from all over the nation could join and try to get on the cast of this reality show where you could win your own reality TV show uh doing a design show. And I had friends from all over and clients that because I've done a lot of cool stuff that was in magazines, got a lot of magazine work from hot rod guys and things. I've done hot rod garages and just cool, cool stuff. Um, and they would um uh encourage me, you should send your stuff into that show before blah, the deadline. And I was like, I'm not going on television, I'm not doing any of that. I'm a private person, this is how I am, and so I thought, huh, but I have I accrued such a portfolio from my design stuff that I thought, all right, I'm going on with the hidden agenda. I'm first I'm gonna I'm gonna do it. I'm literally Ray made the deadline by uh maybe 10 hours on FedEx because the the cutoff was so tight, and they wanted you to do, they wanted you to do this is in 2007-ish, somewhere. They wanted you to do uh film yourself with an interior, a commission that you've done for a client in the space that you've done, and then uh about yourself, and then send in three of your favorite examples of your portfolio. Three for me is like I have three million photos. I don't how am I gonna pick three? Well, then just so happen, so happened that I can pass the smell test for you, Ray. Because back before this ever happened, I already bought a 74-4W1 uh 9000 out of Smithville, Tennessee, with 53,000 original miles on it, which was the exact truck that I wanted to build the blue mule for White Line Fever. And I was doing this in 2009, 99-ish. Okay. I was obsessed with this thing, okay, since I was a kid. So I already had my truck and it was in Florida where I live. And um I had filmed myself with it because it's who I am, and I'm like blah blah blah, and this and that. Well, I FedEx the thing out to LA, thinking, thinking that if if they could maybe, if I got a bite off of that apple, maybe I could parlay that into trying to go back to the my truck show, which is what I'm trying to get. I don't want to do a design show, but I thought, okay, but I don't know. I just put the stuff out there. The I got a phone call from uh the guy's name was Jesse. He was a producer, he said, Hi Rob. My name is Jesse. I'm a producer with H HTTV. Um, and I have a couple questions for you. I said, shoot. He said, let me understand this. You do you do interior design, you're overtly straight, and you own a big rig? Is that correct? These are the three questions he asked me. I asked that plus yes and yes. So I'm an anomaly. I'm already so far out on left field that here comes this butch dude with a big rig that does interior design, and I send in what I bought my I mean, my stuff was good. I can't say it wasn't, and it was in magazines. So it went down the rabbit hole where they wanted me to be on this show, and I wasn't gonna do it, but I ultimately said I was gonna do it. I went on with the agenda of trying to get to another show after it. And when I went on to HTTV, I ended up being in the final four. I ended up, I thought I was gonna win, but the whole thing was rigged. That's a whole nother topic. We can talk about that later because there's lots of Design Star fans that are out there. The whole thing is fake. Reality TV is so fake, but Ray, what it did for me by going on that fishbowl reality show in Las Vegas and trying to just hold my own with these challenges was if you could imagine, and I in fact, I know that YouTubers can't imagine what I'm gonna say. You can't imagine what it's like to be on a show like a big brother kind of a show where you have, I counted them, no less than 25 big cameras shooters, 25. When you're when you see the local news guy or girl that's out on whatever, and they've got the big camera on them, oh, we're live reporting at the scene of the illegal CDL crash, yeah. Whatever that camera, imagine 25 professional shooters that are get that get you at all angles from everywhere, and you're mic'd almost 18 to 20 hours out of a 24-hour day. So, whatever you say, imagine right now we're doing your podcast, and when we're not on your podcast, if you were mic'd and on camera, what you might what anybody might be doing or saying throughout their day. Anyone, so that's how it was, and they tried to get you with gotcha TV. Well, I learned fast, quick, because they would say you have to be able to design and execute and host on the show. So I had invaluable experience going on a major, major show like that. It was a that's a major operation, sponsored by it was Sears and God knows everything else. Uh, all of these major sponsors and corporate everything. You're in New York and Manhattan, you're in Los Angeles, blah, blah, blah. And I was in Hawaii. They brought me to Hawaii to do some other hotel rooms with the other finalists and all this crazy stuff.

SPEAKER_04: 27:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 27:56

I'm I'm I'm I know I'm long, but when the edit, this should work for you. So after LA was the final uh obligation for the network, and we all had to be there in the studio. My good friend of mine, name is Matt. Um, I've known him since he was 15. He was living in LA and he was working for a major Hollywood film director as his assistant. And he's a screenwriter, but he was cutting his teeth. And he was working for a production company that was in Ojai. And he said, When you're when you come out to Los Angeles, extend your ticket and then stay with me for several days. And then I said, I will be so glad to do that to decompress. You know, let's just cook some food, drink some wine, get the hell away from fishbowl reality. I couldn't take any more of that. And it's crazy, it's a grind on you. It's a grind. And so I said, Okay, and he said, Bring your truck shill, which was the PowerPoint, because I didn't have it in into it, I didn't have it into a video format, like I could send you things now.

SPEAKER_04: 28:56

But PowerPoint was okay.

SPEAKER_01: 28:58

So I brought it, I brought it. And he said, I'm gonna introduce you to my boss. We'll come in. And one morning we went in to see to meet his boss, his name was Steve, and I started whipping through it and started telling him what what the show is and and what what I think it needs to be done. And and and it's about time somebody started singing the praises of the unsung heroes because without them, you don't have a job as a TV executive by simply you have to eat food and put fuel in whatever car you're in. Yeah, I don't care who you are. The industry touches you. Okay, it doesn't matter if you're some uh you know ex eccentric, crazy Hollywood executive living in the Hollywood Hills, you're affected by the industry just like we are. Okay, and so that he went, You're the show. And I and I said, I'm I'm not the show. I said, here's who I want. I at the time I had Jerry Reed, I had all these people that could host it. And I said, and he said, no, no, no, you're the show. So from there, it took me almost three years, three years of going out with him on our own time and dime filming places. He would say, I want you to give me uh some locations that we could shoot at. And I would say, Absolutely, I have copious amounts of this stuff. I so I said, I want to go and shoot at the Nationals, I want to shoot at the Diesel Thunder Dragons, uh, all these things. And so we would pick and choose what for his schedule. I'm just going along doing what I'm doing, doing commercial interiors. And that then he would say, I have a date on such and such for four days. Could we do something with it? And and so we would hunt and peck, we would go and film a lot of the stuff that you'll see in the show open of American Trucker, where I'm like, look at this lineup, and I'm going crazy in New Jersey. That all I can tell you exactly where every single one of those pieces were, and they ultimately built into the components that we were pitching to networks. And at the time, once we got that, it's called a sizzle reel in the industry. Once you get that sizzle reel done, which is the tangible at that time, it's probably different now in today's landscape of streaming, but at that time, you really needed to have that to get eyeballs from the networks to see if you were there. People try to get TV shows all day, every day for decades. You just can't get them. They're very hard to it's it was so hard to get a network to show. Well, we had at the time, it was what is Paramount now was True TV, it's still the same network. Paramount, um, History Channel, Discovery Channel, and Speed Channel, which was Fox, all were interested and wanted American Trucker. One came to the forefront because they wanted a primetime show, and that was Fox. And that's how the genesis of it got you know to be uh, I guess, put into the chamber, ready to go. And once they picked it up, once they pick up it's a great day in your life when you hear that a network has picked up your show that you've worked so hard to get, but then you're terrified at the same time because I don't have a freaking clue how to host this show, and I don't know what it's gonna be like. I don't know if people will like it. Yeah because if the networks, Ray, if you put out your show and you know this, even if you when you put out episode one of your podcast, it's a giant gamble. Everything's a gamble. You don't know if someone's gonna watch it or if you can hopefully just stay with it if it if their numbers are low. You just keep gotta keep going and going and going and going and going and keep climbing, right? So I thought, okay, I'm gonna here we go. Once we did it, and once we hit the air, January 27th, 2011 was episode one, season one. The networks will they do this. I know this now because I've been a producer in the game for quite a long time and I've got experience. They'll pull your show just like that. It doesn't matter how much they put in, if they don't get numbers that they want on that show that they put all their treasure into, then you're pulled. You're pulled within two episodes. So when you go out on episode one, season one, it's like walking off the proverbial cliff. I don't know where it's going. I mean, this is a passion of mine, but maybe it won't, maybe people won't go crazy on that. Even though American Trucker is a show about uh trucks in the industry, it's not a show for truckers per se, it's a show for everybody because we're educating people on history. And I I took them into deep dives on things that they would never have a clue were involving, you know, the the industry. Yeah, it it took off. It it went it went crazy. It was in the top five immediately and out of 27 shows, and we just kept going. And the only thing that stopped it was we got our legs clipped down from underneath us because of the format change where speed wanted to have an ESPN rival, and they simply bumped the everything and shelved. I didn't own the other thing. I had to sign a grant of rights, even though I created the show. The grant of rights, anybody will know in contract language, is it's kind of like your doomsday. You're not gonna get anything out on the air if you don't sign it, because no network will ever let you control a network television show. Like if I'm Rob Rogue, executive producer, and I say it's my way or the highway, they don't want any of that stuff. You know, the network ultimately owns it. Right. And when they fund it, that's how it works. So it wasn't mine, it wasn't it was out of my control, but it it's it's like I look at it now, right? With where the industry is and the plight of today's industry being oversaturated with illegals that have come from every country there is that have suddenly got a fake CDL from a 24-hour CDL mill. We can see it, we we see the crashes, it's horrible. We know what the DOT is doing, they're cracking down. That the the dichotomy from American trucker to today and where the industry is, is it's almost an it's it blows my mind.

SPEAKER_05: 34:48

What do you what's your thoughts on a lot of that stuff, man? I mean, you see it in the videos, you go online, and I mean, man, it's like another accident. How did they get that footage? Man, wow, what what are we not seeing?

SPEAKER_01: 34:59

We we we did we did um some we did episodes on everything. I mean everything. I've done heavy haul, I've done uh we've hauled potato chips over the continental divide with uh Sy Sandy, with Western, Western uh distribution with Gino and everybody in Colorado, um, to NASA to NASCAR uh to NASCAR to UPS to I can't even tell you all the stuff that we've done, and we've covered a huge swath, ag all of this. I look at where and we did I went to CDL school. For those, this is what's relevant now to today's topic. We anyone can read now if it you have to be living under a rock if you don't know that there are now there's a major problem in the in the trucking industry with illegal CDLs from foreigners that have come in from their country. I don't begrudge them trying to come in, but you come in illegally, and then when you do that, you're getting a fake illegal CDL license, and you're putting you, me, and everyone else in jeopardy that's done it the right way. That's not the way the industry works, that just doesn't count work, and you can see the carnage as a result.

SPEAKER_04: 36:07

Yeah, people are dying.

SPEAKER_01: 36:08

I went to CDL school on camera. Now, this is the thing. If you've gone to CDL school, you did it on camera, why don't you do it on camera? Because it is not easy. And I can attest to you when I see this and I read about these stories with these CDL mills, my blood boils because I know they used to call it your cola test, like your cutout low air, all those things that you learn uh in in school. I learned it on camera live, like a complete guffey fish, uh I know like everyone else. And then to do it, and I see this how they've just looked there's no sugar coating it. The former administration was into some nefarious stuff, and they've tried deliberately to flood in all these people and overwhelm the system, and they've done it now. The trucking industry is catching all of it like a fishnet, man. It it is it's like a full net of trash that we've got to compete with. Where we all know that they have watered down all the wages. It wasn't but three or four or five years ago that most truck drivers can make six figures respectably, on top of that. Six figures all day. I have driver friends that were making big bank. You can't uh I have friends that say they were offering me a load from Georgia to New York for$800 or$600. It's like, what? Because some guy from Ethiopia or India takes that load, they're undercutting all of the wages, and then you have all these corrupt brokers that are in now. I have I've been told by guys and I know they're on the road that the Russians, okay, there's a whole influx of Russians, the brokers, that have taken and figured out ways that they reset your 24-hour clock, and they've got guys out driving indefinitely on because the the the uh electronic log says otherwise, but this crazy dude who's on pills, like the guy in uh California last week or whatever that killed three people and plowed right into it without even stopping, and outside of Fresno or wherever he was, yeah, was on drugs and didn't even so much to slow down. We've got huge problems, huge problems, and it it it bothers me immensely. And so I can look back and say, I I there there something's gone awry here and it needs to be fixed, and it needs to be fixed in a big way because the there's there's pride, the pride is gone.

SPEAKER_05: 38:33

What's your predictions on the next let's say five years?

SPEAKER_01: 38:37

I I think Ray that from what I'm seeing in Florida and at least um Governor DeSantis is doing some great things where he is stopping everybody at the at the DOT stop at the way stations. Okay, and getting checks. That is the perfect way to fish him out. You you could be cut you've got to go in. You know that you're a driver. When it says it's open, you're hitting to the right. Okay. So and then if you go in and then they do these CDL checks and they're they're pulling them out. I read that, I read they're pulling them out. Uh it's actually frightening how many they're actually pulling off of the roads quickly. But that's I think a way that definitely is going to call the attention onto it where they're fleeing now. And now that you've got, but there's so many other issues. You've got these leasing companies, these unscrupulous guys that are leasing these guys' rigs, which have no business being in one. If your CDL is illegal, so is your insurance. How are you supposed to get insurance if you're illegal and something happens, but you don't find out until after the fact because they're all just like, hey, here's your buck.

SPEAKER_00: 39:40

Let me just give you what I got here.

SPEAKER_01: 39:42

Get out of the road. And then they all the problems are backlogged. Well, now they're leaving trucks in the middle of nowhere. There's a shortage of guys even go get the trucks that people don't think of that either. Oh, they pulled Manuel out of his GOT stop in Missouri. And where's his truck? It's over there in Missouri. Well, how's that small company supposed to be able to pay to fly the guy out? And right so many ramifications to this. And it listen, I wouldn't mind going out there with a cape if I could and and going out there and doing anything I could to help out. But it it I could look at the catalog of American Trucker and the people that I know and who I've met, and certainly the large companies that that facilitate this. industry, certainly the Freightliners and the Macs who I've done some work for, and the Cobra electronics. And there's just so many people that are affected by this because we're all out here with to no fault of yours or no fault of mine, we've gotten the food thrown on us. You know, we've got it's like the food fight. You know, we're we're we're hit with it.

SPEAKER_05: 40:42

What do you think uh what do you think it's gonna do for a lot of those major companies that do need people, the reliable truck drivers going to have a hard time finding them or and what's your predictions that you're hearing out there?

SPEAKER_01: 40:55

I've I've thought about this because when I did an episode on UPS, UPS is the largest trucking corporation in the world. Okay. To go into there and get that whole episode done was not only a uh eye-opening um but I saw it from so many different angles. And I know the the the episode that we did was called Searching for the big dog and Ron Souder was a driver at he's retired now. Hey Ron hope you're out there brother have a cocktail at your dog he was such a cool guy he was at UPS for I think 50 years something crazy some crazy nine million miles I don't know some some ridiculous number and not even a not even a scratch fender bender nothing zero on his record. So I went to find him deep down inside of UPS in the episode to track him down and I I I rolled with him from Cincinnati to Worldport and and um from Chicago. So we did some some cool things in there so when to your question I what brings to mind my question is how is the UPS how is uh the that type of a a company handling this where there's a they all say there's a shortage and we all know that half of that is talking out of one side of your mouth they say it for whatever reasons oh there's a shortage no there's not a shortage but you brought in people that have watered down the the wages and they're not even legal and that certainly is what you could say the shortage and that fear porn panic stuff again get them all the panic there's a shortage no there really isn't a shortage if you would have I don't care who you are what color creed or whatever your uh flavor of the month is if you have a desire to go to CDL school and get a commercial driver's license legally through the schools like I even did. Yeah yes and and to to to wear that there is a an uh an innate sense of pride and satisfaction that you get when you not only did you set out to do it because it's not easy to do it. I was shit in my pants half the time with like oh we gotta do the alley doc and I'm on camera doing it. I'm on mic I got cameras on me. Imagine you're in CDL school and you got cameras on you for the audience it's like well man if I screw this up I'm gonna really get my ass kicked in on the in the blogs everywhere. Yeah all of that I that is such a for me uh uh it's like an American almost like a birthright is you got your CDL you've achieved the highest driver's license you can really get certainly with your hazmat tags on there and all that you achieve something that few people do and if you do once you are once you get it how in the world are you not so mindful of every day when you're getting in holding that wheel and shifting gears or or in this case pushing pushing drive now that you you wouldn't have the pride that came along with it that I knew you don't want to lose it. You want to hold on to it well now they they've watered it down to the point where I was just in North Carolina at Brad's and I drive it's a eight nine hour drive for me and every time I go every year and just this I I make mental notes like nobody makes mental notes I'm out there Rob from American truck or whatever you want to I'm I'm in my car and the lane jammers I can't they they lane jam these drivers now they just get in the other you know they're just sitting there holding up everybody they won't even pass they're so rude there's no there's no i i half of the rigs i i mean i make note of all the details right they're dilapidated garbage piles they they they're i don't even know how they're even allowed to be on the road and you can always tell because one of them has like hey here's his name and it's taped onto the side of the door anti express out of wherever it is with the temporary dot number right and you're like what what is that truck and it's cockeyed on the door it's like that is not exactly my type of American truck or I don't know I would have to call it anti-American trucker what's on the roads they don't and going in the truck stop flip-flops the pea bottles the trash it's so embarrassing it is embarrassing is it's embarrassing and it's it's really it's gotten to the point where I think I fear Ray that the older generation like guys my age I'm in my 50s that they're going out they're getting out of those seats and they're not coming back and so whatever the new influx is somebody needs to get a hold of the it and sort of you know tie its bootstraps type get rid of all of this stuff and make it exactly like it was uh a whole 12 13 years ago when I was doing it on TV it's completely changed the landscape is completely changed and and the reputation of truck driving now is I'm not I'm not gonna lie to you it's in the gutter.

SPEAKER_05: 45:53

Yeah deal DMV or DVS or however whatever the state government agency that's there they need to enforce it companies need to enforce it unfortunately that's their last um that's the last area where you know we can stop it like you said at those uh at those truck stops and um way skills I mean that's uh that's a huge thing I mean not just to say ah well I'm glad they're here I'm glad they showed up no you should actually be ready to work um like you saying even your footwear should be good to go like what if you break down on and the ground's soft and you got to get out and put your your your triangles out with your foot flops and you break your toe when you're on the on the and you're kicking on the step there's a reason why truck drivers wear boots and jeans.

SPEAKER_01: 46:37

Yeah protect you yeah you're going out there with the glad hands and you got your flop t-shirt on and you're you're all full of grease it's it's it's there's no the the pride thing is gone. I think what they need to do is what we're talking about. Hit them right where they need to get them at the dot stops there's no way that you won't be able to flag them all down because if you know that if they go rogue and blow by you're you're done they'll find you you're on camera everywhere they'll get those tags and hopefully that's the way they can get them out. And then what I think needs to happen is there needs to be like a grassroots and I would start at the high schools I remember being in high school at the science fair you know you're in the gym and all the recruiting for the job people are there they should be right there getting the kids out of high school because it is still if you go into it with with the advent of technology now and the the unbelievable things that these truck drivers have now what you guys have at your disposal for a truck not like a blue mule 1975 Ford W series that I mean it had air but that was about it. There was no GPS there's no power anything is what you have now is a very inviting world for the people that want to go out and still drive the miles and see the world and not be chained to a desk and and and do this unbelievably important job with pride but it's just got to start the it can reset I know that it could reset and the DMT and the feds are the where it can and will have to be reset.

SPEAKER_05: 48:04

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 48:05

They're gonna have to gain control of it and then go out there and do a push and simply recruit these companies I I'm I'm if you watch these TikTok videos I laugh my ass off on these TikTok videos where like the Warners of the and the and I I you can blurt out these names we'll just call them the big box truck drivers where they they make fun of them with cartoons it's the greatest thing I've ever seen where you know they've got the action figures with a big urine bottle as part of the accessories in the toy and they buy they've got all of these flips and all these things it's absolute parody but where does that parody come from from reality right it's it's it comes comedy comes from somewhere real and that's real that's where it is I just was out I I I I look at it all and I think you know oh my you know what's great though right when I'm on the road when I can see and very rarely do you see them but they're there you see the owner operators that are still out there and their truck looks like night and day next to some some other plasticky whatever run down fake driver rig. And when you see it it's like oh there's one of the last of the cowboys yeah out still running and that that gives me hope but the it's this younger generation and and this is this is it's on topic when I would go out and meet thousands and I've met thousands of fans from American trucker over the years thousands of them at truck shows and whatnot and I love them all and I would talk to them as much as I could talk to them and I would always ask them what's your favorite episode all kinds of things and these kids were some of these kids were uh didn't matter boys girls um maybe 10 12 years old and they were crazy they'd never miss episodes they'd tell me everything they would quote me stupid stuff that I would say on the show hilarious stuff then I've met I've met them again and they there were drivers with CDLs that were 21 said I got my CDL because of you and I just said that's the greatest thing I've ever heard I said even if it was one person that made American trucker a phenomenal success it warmed my heart. Right you don't know who you're impacting and who you're influencing and it doesn't matter and I say that about any truck driver that could be driving down the road right now today if you have pride in what you're doing it's up to you guys individually to try to clear out this all of this this noise that has entered the industry and and bring it back bring back some polish to it some pride to it. So what's your friend speaking of reset what uh what helped you um I know you've been through a lot yourself um even in the content world the creativity world um I mean you mentioned a few things to me backstage uh there's been a lot of targeting that goes on even with you as your uh public figure is if we can reset yeah I know you found some peace in your life if we can reset the trucking world we got to find that peace where we can bring it back to why don't you tell the listeners about what you've been through man um well in in those of you who have that used to follow me on social media um this is around 2016 after American trucker I never left the game I mean I left the stage of network television but I was again I was a brand ambassador for Cobra for a number of years I worked with Freightliner I worked with Mac we'd done some MCs and did lots of can't can't count how many truck shows I'd go to and we would as a producer we're always filming things so we we were out in Sturgis doing some filming with Evil Knievel because the evil can I did on my show yeah that truck has never left me and all the guys that now have it at the Las Vegas Evil Knievel Museum I think it's gonna be moved there from we restored the truck I went on with overdrive and did some podcasts over the years when we restored the truck after it was on American trucker and now it's like a showroom quality it's a museum piece. So we were in Sturgis doing some filming with the truck with the Evils Mac and some other things and um uh some a good friend of mine names Tom sends me a text hey have you seen this meme of you and I I didn't know what a meme was it's 2016 ish and and I I don't pay attention to that stuff I'm kind of crazy that way I don't really care about it and I'm like what is that and he sends me this and it's me and it's this promo picture and I know the promo picture well I'm sitting in Jerry Howard's um auto car which is one of the most badass autocars that the world has ever seen. I think there's a buzz and dozen in it um and it's me in this promo picture which I recognize and it says something like you're not a real trucker unless you've hit a hitchhiker with a piss bottle some some crazy stupid thing that I would never let my you know young audience ever you know I would never say such things and so all I did was I went into Photoshop and I just crossed out the thing and put not my words never would be that's it okay I didn't cross swords with anybody I didn't get into the keyboard warrior you're a douche and blah blah blah blah blah I'm rob I didn't care about I just put it out there well then some for some reason this one guy and I know his name in fact I know I know everything about him he doesn't know that I know but I know I found out who it was started this avalanche of uh I don't know if this was the early bot days but it certainly seemed like bots within they were just pounding and pounding on my Facebook and Twitter just going crazy on um the one guy doxed it it got to the point where I could care less I wasn't you know again I don't want to go in there and it takes two to tango and if I go in there start swinging you'll be swinging and then we're all in a fist fight. And so but if you don't swing you're not in a fist fight. I mean you can defend yourself that's that's what I was doing at this point. They publicly put out what they think is my address it's a family member it's not my address and my family member has a disability and they literally I I I I think I'm sort of paraphrasing it was something along the lines of here's the address we're gonna drive by and shoot that mother effer um and I mean multiple and they kept going with the address and they kept putting all the location it got to the point where I had to go to the police immediately my local sheriff and they told me exactly what to do I said I am a second proud Second Amendment uh supporter I said I've got guns to defend myself in my house because if somebody comes to my house I'm I I'm defending myself they said oh yeah you need to put on a no trespassing signs I got different cameras I went to the news I went to the news media they didn't exactly give me the most flattering edit because I was the point that that I was making was at the time um I'm Rob from American trucker and if they can do this to me and and still keep it up they that was my beef with Facebook I complained in the early going and whatever you you have to go through that some arbitrary ridiculous you know AI now uh gatekeeper yeah wait this guy posted this and can you please take a look at it in one of those things but this is pre-AI and so whatever the the gatekeepers were then they just decided that no this was all good this was on the level you can keep up all that you can post uh addresses of my family and give me death threats and it's not even me there'd be killing my family and all these things so I went to the media with it and I out of good conscience after and it took a little bit of a slow boil and I was working on these projects and I it's the one thing about social media that I cannot stand. It's a constant vice on your skull that you have to be producing something. You have to be out there everybody thinks that everybody's word needs to be heard by everybody all the time I'm I'm just like I don't want to bother people with whatever I'm thinking people think whatever they want to think. I just stay in my own lean right the same way. Yeah you be you I'll be me we'll get along just fine unless you do a piss meme and then threaten to kill me and and all the rest of it. So it's like okay I wrote a I bet I could find the letter I wrote a well thought out letter to everybody on Facebook and all my ardent fans that were on there um that I you know loved and adore them still and I said under uh as good faith good conscience I'm a man of principle I have to walk the walk the way I'm I I was raised and I cannot stay on Facebook or Twitter Jack was the owner of it then and he was worse of a tyrant than Zuckerberg was at that point even though they've all flip-flopped since and you know we've seen the ebb and flow and the evolution of social media and how they've the free speech is the greatest thing and they've got all these free speech platforms but yet they police free speech so it's like stop talking you're a complete hypocrite you're making money while you're doing it yeah and the only people that are out there and disenfranchise is you and me and everybody else that that wants to pitch a bitch and and and and gripe about something which you have a right to think about what's going on out there in uh I think uh the UK um 12 000 or more getting arrested for memes can you believe that's gotta be devastating I mean it's it's but this this is what I think that's the only good thing is that now because of the the reach of it they can't control it the water's coming in into the front of the Titanic and they're not stopping it where they're caught because they can't police everybody and every angle and get everything at all. And so now there's awareness going on and people are seeing how tyrannical they are and free speech must be preserved because if you lose it once that's the last time you're getting it right it's the reason why the founding fathers came and did what they did to to build the country and to establish the country in the constitution because we were still in a world that was like that then it might not have been social media but the tyrannical kings and leaders and imperial whatever these people these oligarchs ruling over the masses when the masses are the leaders there we're the rulers it's not them it's just small faction and so now after all of that I pulled out of it right and it was good for me because I didn't feel that vice on my skull that you're always looking to post something and and what should I say here but if somebody says a spontaneous um they're watching something and they see it and the worst thing you can do is knee jerk reaction and then when we knee jerk with the keyboard it doesn't go away and then and then it get it stockpiles and and compounds and rolls downhill like the snowball and the next thing you know you're you're you're completely canceled this guy's a blob I told you um when the Canadian truckers were doing their strike over the uh illegal mandate to to have them take experimental vaccines for the whatever you want to call their virus I I went right back into action i i was banned on youtube within 15 minutes i was on two podcasts and they banned me within 15 minutes because i was i i don't go out there i've never been one i've done media in new y on those morning shows i brought a 69 peterbilt into fox and friends once upon a time i've been out there i've done i i can't count it all what the things even news nation a year or two ago had me on it whatever the stuff comes on i don't uh go out and and and just disparage people and and throw stupid you know bombs at people i i i i just call it square and uh but i'm not afraid to call it when it's out in front of you balls and strikes that was absolute ridiculous uh i don't know what you want to call it tyranny that they were inflicting upon the canadian truck drivers so i was trying to get there you know delivering socks and supplies to them and then i'm banned and it it doesn't matter if you want to come out as a crusader against it if your crusade is against the narrative of the ones that own those companies or the ones that are paying their bills you're shut off you're shut off it's not like the town square where you can go out in the town square and nobody can they can hear you with a bullhorn but that's it and so if you're on the socials oh it's a double edged sword you know you got we got to save We have to stay as vanilla as vanilla can get, and most of the stuff we're working banned off. Which pisses me off.

SPEAKER_05: 1:00:30

Yeah, I like the vanilla concept. I mean, that definitely does help keep it in perspective. A lot of times you you can get caught up in all of it. I mean, it's a lot out there. I mean bombarded by the content. I mean, it's just sense, and like just taking that break because it gets that peace. I mean, that's that's huge. Uh good good advice for a lot of people out there that may be going through the same thing. So I think the trucking industry will will hear that. And um when maybe we'll uh just stop posting all these things that that are screw-ups out there on the road, stop giving them the attention that they that they're looking for because they're they're just trying to get people to see how you know how bad they can they can get the truck industry. I think I think that's something.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:10

I think you're exactly right. And the way that oh think about it, it's it's the backbone. And if you could you know uh mess up the backbone, the spine, well, you're really gonna create havoc, right? I mean, I mean well, I mean it's it's there, it's getting into the backbone of our country, and it's it's it's arrived. It's like a cancer that's on it, and we need to get that gone and put the steel spine back together, which is the trucking industry. And because every single person on the planet, uh, your entire life is predicated on food, fuel, clothing, or some something that's delivered eventually by somebody with a steering wheel.

SPEAKER_05: 1:01:50

So when you devalue the human and you think about all the money that goes into the autonomous trucks, you know, if you if we can just make the truck industry seem so terrible that the autonomous truck looks better, um it kind of makes you wonder is that intentional or is that this is just happening by mistake?

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:07

Ray, man, I can't agree. You're you're my kind of dude. I I talk about the I was just talking about the autonomous trucks. We we've all read when they when the advent of the technology came on several years ago through Tesla. Um, I remember reading where one Tesla guy was decapitated when he would get underneath an 18-wheeler because he was on autopilot, and the autopilot couldn't recognize the glare from the trailer and the sun, thinking that it was okay for him to drive underneath it, and he cut his own, you know, he chopped his own head off while he's on autopilot. Now, there's a flip side of that. Is for me, I the term is driving. I like driving.

SPEAKER_05: 1:02:43

Yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:44

I don't need to get into what do you even need a driver's license for if you've got a car that will drive you somewhere? You don't need one. So driving is a yeah, if you keep driving out of driving, what are we left with?

SPEAKER_05: 1:02:56

You know, American dream, have a driver's license that freedom and independence and the Tesla trucks, the Tesla trucks.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:04

Although I think that um I know that the evolution has always been there. Even when I was a kid, I remember seeing the um turbine-powered Ford truck that they had out in the 60s. They were trying to do massive um futuristic renditions of what the trucks of the future would look like, and they weren't far off at all. You know, they were they were coming out with the arrow noses. In fact, in the 70s, you could get these arrow noses put on, like the if you had a van trailer, uh, they're called uh there was some kind of a bubble thing, and it was a brand name. You could put those on aftermarket. It was like a plastic bubble on the on the on your trailer. This is before side skirts and all that came on, but they were doing these evolutionary, you know, inevitable changes to the industry and making trucks all look like I mean, I am Rob from American Trucker, and people know that I'm a retro style dude and I like old iron. Okay, there's no doubt about that. And I have no problem with modern trucks and the fact that they look, unfortunately, they all look the same. Although I did see a new Volvo going to North Carolina that was pretty badass, look pretty good, and then EKW is badass too. Yeah, they are there are there are there are those, but those are some of the manufacturers that I hope that they was Freightliner, was doing it a few years ago with the Coronado. They really tried to embrace the the retro look of the over uh over-the-road owner operator rig with the coronado, and that was always a good, I thought, uh uh uh litmus test of where the balance of fuel economy and still not taking the character out of the trucks, but a lot of characters gone. And and I when I when I say a lot of characters gone, well the characters gone between the the mirrors, the the the driver character. The driver character right now is like I'm wearing you know a flip-flops and whatever. Yeah, it if they don't even it's like they don't even care. They're they don't care, it's just it's a job, and they're they're all of that pride stuff is gone, which is which is probably a good segue for me to mention to you why I am escaping it all with white line fever in 2025, where what's old is new, and it's the anniversary year 50 of the 50th anniversary of this movie that came out. But Mike Ryan, who is a good friend of mine, is a stunt man in Hollywood for 35 years, and he's done a lot of things, hasn't he? A lot. A lot. I met Mike at Freightliner and Richard Petty when we were in the booth for their 70th anniversary. I think that was somewhere around 2012. I met him way back then, and we got along immediately, and I started picking his brain because I you know I love the craft of of filmmaking and all I love all of that.

SPEAKER_05: 1:05:42

And Terminator uh two terminator two. He did some of the stunts in Terminator 2 with the record, so he knows about that futuristic stuff too.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:50

Right? The guy the you love the guy, he's just he's salt of the earth, and we've never not been friends. And so, over the years, like when we were in Sturgis, we were gonna do this thing uh for the full throttle saloon at the time. This is before it burned. We were doing some things and um for the rebuild, I should say, burned and then rebuilt. Um, and so over the years, I've picked Mike's brain on a few things, and and he's always doing things. I mean, he's done five or six of the Fast and Furious films. Yeah, I don't I don't watch the franchise. I watched the 50s one, I like the 50s version, but I've never watched the franchise like the you know crazy fans that that love it, which is great. But Mike is the guy that's doing the big stunts in it, with it's not the cars, he does all the big stuff. And when you've seen five or six of them, you already know Mike's work without knowing Mike.

SPEAKER_04: 1:06:43

That's crazy.

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:43

And if you're a fan of you know, whatever these movies, like you mentioned Terminator 2, Paul Walker, yeah. Paul Walker, awesome. Mike knew Paul Walker, he had nothing but great things to say about him. Um, but again, we don't know how long we have on the planet, you know. One day we're here and the next day we're not, and that's why when I say it's good to be walking and talking, it's true. Yeah, so over the years, I'm I've got this white line fever episode that I I was trying to get off the ground, and I thought the 50th anniversary would be the ultimate uh impetus to try to get that done. And so Mike and I started cultivating this thing in January, and it has taken a long time, and we're where we are now is we we launched the Kickstarter, we did the uh we did some stuff with Overdrive. We're supposed to go on some sat, do some satellite media. Um in fact, the truth be told to the audience, Ray is a very cordial, nice man because he had contacted me and I said, I want to do your podcast and I'm gonna do your podcast. I'm just not at a point because I couldn't say anything when I was doing with white line fever, I wasn't at a point where I couldn't get to it. But I'm a man of my word. So I said when it came around and and and and I got it back around. Now the cast out of the bag, which is why Ray's gracious enough to have me on to talk about it. Um, thank you.

SPEAKER_05: 1:07:57

No, you get back.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:59

So so Mike Ryan was he's personal friends with Buddy Joe Hooker. And Buddy Joe Hooker, again, people that don't pay attention, this is for me, this is the storytelling that I love to tell to the audience, is that you might not know his name, but you've seen what he's done in his work. Because if you went out to the IMDB, internet movie database, and you put in Buddy Joe Hooker and you look at his list of films, and I don't care right now if you're a mom that's out there uh cleaning the bathroom or changing a diaper, or you're a dad in the yard putting a pine tree in, go look at his IMDB. I guarantee you, with 100% certainty, that you've seen or loved some work that either Mike Ryan or Buddy Joe Hooker has done that you don't get to see because the second units that are in all the movies that make it look so good are the ones that you don't hear about. You'll see them in the credits, second unit director. Those are where the actor says, I'll kick your ass, and then he cocks back, and then the second unit does everything from that on. The other stars don't even see the second unit, they're shot on different time frames, and they just piece the movie together with that. Well, in White Line Fever, they crashed a 1974 Ford W T 9000 Big Rig through uh the corporate glasshouse sign and the nefarious corrupt trucking company in the film was called the Glasshouse G H. And they and the character had so much of the uh corruption in the industry, they tried to kill him, they killed his best friend, they uh they maimed his wife. You you need to see White Life Here because it's very much a hard-hitting depiction of trucking in the 70s and the plight that they were going through. But the stunt we get to is for me was always it's jaw-dropping. When you see the actual real stunt in the end of the movie, for me, I've always lived in that pocket of how they did that, who did that, and how I was always still framing what was then my VCR. Yeah, um, and in fact, laugh. Look at this. I've got my VHS. Nice, I've got my VHS of white line fever, which is still wrapped, it's still wrapped in the self, it's still wrapped in the plastic. I paid$86 for this way back in like the late 90s or late 90s on VHS. Okay, and you couldn't you couldn't get it.

SPEAKER_05: 1:10:26

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:27

So of that.

SPEAKER_05: 1:10:29

Oh, I'm gonna check it out.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:31

Yeah, you can go now, you can get on Tubi, you can see it all, it's all over. I mean, you can you can watch on YouTube. I I watch, I have several copies, but I never if it's on, I'll I'll always watch it. And so this impetus of the redoing the stunt came on with Mike, and I thought, well, there's only one guy because he's the guy that's done it in Hollywood. I mean, they're they're the guys that do it, right? And he loved the idea, he's always been open to it. And so what we did first out of the gates, I want to just preface to everybody that if you did go on to our Kickstarter, which we made yeah, yeah, the Kickstarter thing, we made like nothing. We did that as a we we just tried to dip our toe into the water with that to see if if we could get to our goal. But the problem is is to get eyeballs in this day and age. You just you can do these things, and if you don't get the circulation or you don't get the right eyeballs on it, and it doesn't go to the algorithm to wherever, you you you're often you're floating out in the sea, and so that's kind of where we were. But our Kickstarter just ended, I think it just ended like uh yesterday or day before, and we didn't meet our goal, but we're not quitting by any stretch of the imagination. We're now and we're working on trying to solicit sponsors, relevant sponsors that want to join us for this crusade. And I have copious amounts of this the video from the Kickstarter and lots of polished things in our in our pitch package that what we can bring to the table and what we're going to do, and we've got two locations. Uh, it's either LA and a private film ranch that Mike owns, and or a really big facility in Vegas, which has that one, we really like it. And and it's it's there, it's it's on the platter for us to to get to. We're just trying to put together, like I said, some relevant sponsors. One or a dozen, doesn't bother us if they're a smaller sponsor or a larger sponsor. We just need to get in some traction and going on shows and talking to you know, guys like you is a big part of it, uh, to see if maybe we could find the right person that say, hey, I've got an ad budget with some leftover dollars. And if you want to take a look at us, we're squeaky clean dudes. We're we may be old as dirt, but we're still kicking. And all of these stories, if you don't tell them now, will never be told. So what we want to do with it is juxtapose the stunt and what they did in 75 with Buddy Joe. And Mike's parallel here is how the industry of stunt men and stunt coordinators, stunt women, are under siege from AI. They're it's taking over what even where traditional stunts are in a film or would be, they're doing it for budgetary reasons. And now, as the audience member, we're all in there. I mean, who are we kidding? I saw Jurassic Park in 1993 when it came out. I was in line. I loved it. I thought it was the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life. AI or whatever it was, CGI then, yeah, not AI, but CGI has been around for a long time. Well, what we want to do is go beyond in into the story, into this documentary of we are going to show you because he's got a really good friend that's got a studio in um New Mexico or Arizona somewhere that does hot top Hollywood stuff that you've seen, I've seen, and it's a good friend of Mike's because again, he's been in the industry for a long time. And Mike's very he's a very interesting character to talk to. And we want to juxtapose what they did with White Line Fever with the Blue Mule stunt and how it has changed the game. In like today, if you were if you're producing a film and it's that's delivered movie, and we had to have a truck stunt in it, you're gonna either go to an AI house and you're gonna pay them a chunk of money. Okay, it's gonna cost you a chunk of money, or you're gonna take a chunk of money, not as much money, and pay the stunt coordinator to do it in the analog way, which is the best way. Because you know that when you're watching a move a movie up when I am, if it's so overdone with the special effects, you're like it loses your attention.

SPEAKER_05: 1:14:36

Isn't that crazy?

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:37

Uh it's like I can't.

SPEAKER_05: 1:14:38

There's no way that's real.

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:40

You can't even watch it anymore. It's like, what is this? So that's sort of the pocket that we're doing with the white line fever stunt. And this the the biggest point that I can underscore, Ray, is Buddy Joe Hooker himself. The guy is 82 years old. He does Pilates every day. He just finished a movie with major stars in 2025. He's still in the business. You could go on and watch, like on our Kickstarter, if you went on to that. I don't know if it's still up or if you can still see it, but if not, I can you can check it out. Um, you can look and see where or go on to Buddy Joe Hooker onto YouTube and and look up Buddy Joe Hooker and Quentin Tarantino. Okay, Quentin Tarantino is uh quite famous as a Hollywood director, he's done everything. Yeah, he he loves Buddy Joe Hooker like he's his dad, and I'm it's not just me, he's beloved throughout Hollywood, he's an absolute living legend. And not only is he into what we want to do with white line fever, he's uh he's I've got videos of him talking to me, saying how he's expressing everything when I first got his phone number through from Mike. It's so I we've got major components put together for this, yeah. And it's really, I want to get to buddy Joe Hooker so he can tell that aspect and then go back to like I said, white line white line fever and the magazine, which had it on the cover.

SPEAKER_05: 1:16:08

Oh, yeah, you got it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:09

I gotta show you. This is hey, this is white line fever and laser disc.

SPEAKER_05: 1:16:13

Oh, laser disc laser disc. Man, gotta hold on to that one. I'll get rid of that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:16:22

Those are lobby cards from the film. I don't, I'm not just a uh a poser, right? This is this is my part of my office, and and I I love this stuff. This is white line fever on the cover of Overdrive, Overdrive, on the cover of Overdrive. You can see it. Here's the truck smashing here. Okay, so that that is from the independence issue in '75. When I was a little kid, I got this from my grandpa, and this is before the movie came out. When I when I opened up and saw 15 pages worth, holy lord! So that is where we're gonna dive into that pool with Buddy Joe Hooker, who was the man that coordinated the stunt. He's the man, he's the guy. So it can't get better than that. So we're hoping that we can get a few, you know, people that you know, sponsors that like history, like uh anything with an engine, and certainly stunts. I mean, stunts are as cool as it gets. In in I mean, everyone likes a stunt man, right? It's like if you say to somebody, what do you do? What do you do? I'm a stunt man, and you're like, Uh oh, he's a badass, right? Yeah, you automatically know a stunt man's a badass, only now it's AI. Now you're like, Hey, I'm a badass with my keyboard. They're not even stunts, really. They're not even, I told Mike is this AI stunts aren't even stunts.

SPEAKER_05: 1:17:41

Yeah, so you guys got that same problem that the trucking industry has with the artificial intelligence, the uh autonomous trucks. You're like, Well, we're at a race. I'm like, who's gonna win or who's gonna are we gonna just work together, or is one gonna eliminate the other? And um, it's all about what the people want. So we got to keep pushing the human factor, I think. Keep telling people how important it is that the humans are involved in this whole process, not to not just go off.

SPEAKER_01: 1:18:06

100%. Because remember, technologies are they're they're not foolproof. We how many times have we been watching our smart TV and you've got to reboot the smart TV sometimes? Oh, yeah. Sometimes it doesn't matter if it glitches out one time, and you're if let's say it's a major truck manufacturer that's making an autonomous 18-wheeler, and if it glitches and has a software issue one time in Ohio on the turnpike, well, do you want your family next to it when it happens? Because I don't want my family next to it when it happens, or however it's gonna happen. So that that's really where the double-edged sword is. I'd rather have a truck driver, okay, not a truck driving.

SPEAKER_05: 1:18:46

Yeah, going down Donner's path or something. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_01: 1:18:49

Did you ever you've been down Donner's Path?

SPEAKER_05: 1:18:52

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:18:52

I'm gonna tell you this. I'll tell the audience the same thing. Of the all the episodes of American Trucker, I'm very proud of all of them. Um, Bud Bretzman and Steve Beebe were my other executive producers, and Steve Beebe still to this day is one of my favorite people. I learned so much from him. He is uh, without him, there was there would be no American trucker. It was he and I that built it. He's the guy that I told you about that we'd fly around with on his dime in time and the guy that we we did an episode that on Whiteout, it was called White Out on Downer Pass. And and this is in season one. When when you pitch a show to the networks, they want a list of your episodes for forecasting where and what that's going, what the series will be. And I had listed 25, at least 25 episodes written out. One of them was White Line Fever. Um, another one was um the pusher trucks on Downer Pass. And people didn't know what the pusher trucks were. And I knew them since I was a kid, a because of Overdrive magazine, reading it and seeing them. The CF guys were um running out Pacific Northwest and they would be up and down the summit on Downer Pass on 70. Is it 70? Um and they would get their trucks stuck sometimes in the snow. And these guys back at the garage said, We're going to go up there and rescue our trucks because they're stuck. So they took the they were always running doubles and they had freight liners, day cab, single screw, uh, you know, just mini tractors with the doubles. And they had them all bogged down with chains and all kinds of cool stuff. And it just looked gnarly as hell. But they'd get stuck. Well, they took those cabs and they built a box over the rear axle and filled it with cement. Then they welded a huge stinger bar, they called it a stinger on the front of their trucks. They did this back at the CF shops, the mechanics, and put some lights on it. And they went up onto Downer Pass and found their trucks and pushed the suckers over the over the summit through the snow.

SPEAKER_05: 1:20:49

Wow.

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:49

It became legendary. I know when I knew this as a kid. Okay. And this is again the industry is so not what it was. Okay, it's just so not what it was. I I was enamored. These were like superheroes to me, totally superheroes. I mean and and so we wanted to do this episode called White Out on Donner Pass, where I would go when a whiteout happens. Nobody wants to deliver you don't want to go to Donner Pass and get a whiteout.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:14

No.

SPEAKER_01: 1:21:15

Right? We I came back from shooting an episode. I literally landed in Orlando. The uh Stephanie called me, one of the producers, and she said, Rob, I know that you're supposed to have a week off, but um, oh, we just got a call, and they're supposed to get a ton of snow on Donner Pass. And and can you go tomorrow and fly out? And I'm like, uh, yeah, because we've been chasing the episode for two seasons. I said, Let's go. And so when we did, we didn't know what we were getting into until we got into it. Um, during the episode live, I lost my camera crew. I I had one small camera that was with me that salvaged the episode. There was they shut down the entire uh interstate. There was uh 47 vehicle pileup, including I think eight big rigs, fatalities. This was I was embedded with Caltrans on the show. It's the best I should have won an Emmy Award, but I didn't realize that you had to pay to play for Emmy Awards. This white out whiteout on Donner Pass from American Trucker is the best episode I've ever done, and it was all so they were all real, but this one was way beyond. I literally was out of the Caltrans vehicle with people screaming, sliding in diesel fuel. There were people there were uh there was this lady who was driving a uh doubles, and her truck was over the cliff, had to be 5,000 feet straight down. The only thing holding her truck on was where the metal guardrails are, and then there's the the wooden posts that go in. Those posts are probably eight feet long. I didn't know they were that long. It was sucked out all the way to about six feet, and it was barely holding her truck on. She was in the cab. There was no there was nobody on site yet. There wasn't even I was I was standing in in mayhem, mayhem, mayhem. So yeah, done a lot on American Trucker. Done a lot.

SPEAKER_05: 1:23:11

I was gonna ask you, what's your favorite uh or most memorable moment? And that I think that was it, man.

SPEAKER_01: 1:23:16

I think I think you're right. I think that's got to be one, but I mean, for sure. I mean, CDL school was cool, but White Out on Donner Pass was just over the moon. But NASA was, I mean, NASA, that was that was insane. We did the last launch of the space shuttle challenger, no or discovery rather. Discovery, yeah, we did the last launch with it, and nobody knew that there's a fleet of 67 Peterbilt needle noses that have supported every Apollo program all the way through the space shuttle. And we I took I take him right on in. We we I went to go find the rigs. There's just there was a ton of stuff that we you know what needs to happen. We need to put the show back on the air right now, as it is, out of its time capsule, and watch how beautifully it's aged because the show is the show, the show is amazing. I like I said, Steve B, he's the man behind it all.

SPEAKER_05: 1:24:06

But man, everything goes on a truck. I mean, I think they put that that uh shuttle in a museum, and I think they had to uh close out a lot of roads, and so that was on the back of trucks.

SPEAKER_01: 1:24:15

There's still a whole lot that I've got. Listen, uh, I this is sad because I've got full tanks on on episodes and things. I've tried to get um I tried to read, I couldn't go out and make American Trucker 2 because that the network would slap me down quite hard. So I I had uh come up with an alternate series. I had come up with um Smoke and Mirrors. I did projects called Semi Freaks, where I have all this content. And yeah, and it is it is there's so much more on it. And and going back into my episodes, I really want to go back to the NASA guys because these trucks are that supplied, um, they're called refrigerant trucks. They cooled the the space capsules down when they landed and or supported like the Apollo rockets, they would have all this nitrogen and weird things that they would put in their rockets, and there was pierbilts that were pulling them out to the space uh pad to the launch pad. Oh those trucks are still around.

SPEAKER_05: 1:25:10

I I I think they're around because my research, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:25:15

Yeah, yeah, they're so so I want to go back in and get one of them stuck into a museum. There are so many things, and it's like, well, I'm to the point where I'm just by myself, and if I go and I I need a I just need I need a crew, you know, to go out and film it all. And I can't, I gotta do justice to it. So that's why I'm I'm sitting on a couple of things.

SPEAKER_05: 1:25:35

Yeah, I wish you could join your crew. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_01: 1:25:37

Consider it uh you're a consider it it's a done done deal, uh, with best friends. Um but there it's just it's interesting content. And what I was saying, it about what we're doing with white line fever is it's sort of an escape, it's an exit off of this crazy industry that we're facing right now. And and I I I want there's gotta be more of that around so we can, it's not all doom and gloom, and they're and it's not all hurry. We gotta the news media is playing another crash, they love the sensationalism of it. And and you know, I'm not saying this, it's a good thing that they're discovering illegal CDL mills, it's terrible. I mean, get a license in 24 hours. You went to school, man. Could you imagine that? 24 hours.

SPEAKER_05: 1:26:19

That's crazy. Professional test takers, too, people that go out to the DMV or whatever and just take tests and then hand off the license because I don't know, maybe they can pass off as looking like the other guy.

SPEAKER_01: 1:26:31

Ray, imagine now imagine this. So let's just say you or I went out and we we wanted to get our CDL, and within a day, we all we did was we we paid some guy, some skoloda on the side, and he gives us that license. And now you somehow, I don't know how. Think of this. You end up getting a job at a company or you getting into a truck how with insurance, I don't know. However, they actually get up in it, and the day comes where they're with an elite, they know that well, you'd be getting into your truck with a it says no name, no name CDL. I don't believe that that that's real. No name, it's real. It says no name, and you're the guy. Let's say you're a key, whatever his name is from India that did the U-turn on on the turnpike in Florida, yeah, and you get it, and you're in that truck. Wouldn't you be terrified of killing someone, let alone yourself? I mean, I you you don't even know how to drive.

SPEAKER_05: 1:27:24

Well, yeah, what is scary?

SPEAKER_01: 1:27:26

It is scary, scary driving an 18-wheeler if you don't know what you're doing.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:29

It is scary.

SPEAKER_05: 1:27:30

The first time I got in one, I was pretty scared.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:33

Scary, it's scary.

SPEAKER_05: 1:27:34

You always tell you that, and they're like, Well, I drive school bus.

SPEAKER_01: 1:27:38

No, that's not articulating. A school bus is a straight chassis.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:43

And if you're if you're out there in an articulating rig with 80,000 plus and you're in traffic, totally different, you're in traffic with people with a newborn baby next to you. This guy, these people, they don't give a shit about us. They're just out there hand over fist, taking them and out there crashing and burning and doing whatever it's like, yeah, la la la la.

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:03

Meanwhile, the industry is like getting black eyes every five minutes. Terrible. It's zero.

SPEAKER_05: 1:28:09

You nailed it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:10

Don't get me going, don't get me going, Ray.

SPEAKER_05: 1:28:13

Yeah, something's gotta change. You can't it's uh people out there, like you said, babies, young ones out there vulnerable to this greed. The greed is gonna it's gonna get us, man. It's not it's not good. Money's not everything. All money ain't good, money, right?

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:27

The responsible, the responsible aspects of American trucking are it's that what's seemingly right now dying on the vine. I it's like, whoa. You have that was the thing when I was a kid. When I would meet these truck drivers at the local truck stops, and I would every single time I would meet them, I just was enamored with them. They were just, you know, they wore their chain wallet and they got their hat on, their boots, their Wrangler jeans, and they're all you know, around polishing stuff, looking, checking fluids. Just pride everywhere.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:01

And now the guys he's inside of his cab watching Pornhub and throwing his urine bottle out the door, and it's just like walking. Yeah, out the window.

SPEAKER_04: 1:29:14

Have you heard this?

SPEAKER_01: 1:29:15

Oh god, have you heard this? I this is credible information that I was I got from I've got a lot of sources. I have heard now. This was this was in the last couple of years. There are Chinese groups of drivers that are in the United States, um, and they're from all over. I mean, listen, any person that has come here illegally, it is the when the door was kicked wide open on purpose, and the message was very clear to them that the borders are wide open in America, come on in, right? And one, whatever. And the and the percentage of them that were truck drivers, and there's a great percentage of them that came from everywhere, from Tunisia to wherever, that have gotten in and they've gotten out of the highways. Doesn't matter if you're Chinese or a Venezuelan or I don't care what yeah, the race thing isn't really what it is. Yeah, I don't care what they are. I just heard from the story was that these Chinese guys are in the trucks, four and five of them. They remove the passenger seat, they cut a hole in the floorboards for a toilet, and they never stop running. They just rotate them in and out of the seats and they run the truck 24-7, and they're crapping. Listen, I I I'm not kidding you. The guy that told me the story, who I said sells at the corporate level of Kenworth, knows his customers and is said that there are guys and DOT guys, especially the guys that are in, like my friend Skeet Hardis um of Conover, North Carolina, who runs Skeets towing. He was on American trucker. Those guys see the side of the crashes where they've got to go and clean them up off the interstates, but they crash. And they won't even there, there's now this is a this is a it's like an epidemic in the trucking uh in the tow truck industry that there are drivers, the the recovery drivers that won't even touch the trucks because the entire side of feces and urine from going down. And I mean coated. Can you imagine how long they don't even wash these trucks off? They said they won't even touch them because it's a biohazard. How can you make that up? That's not made up. That's reality.

SPEAKER_05: 1:31:20

Yeah, you got to get in there released the uh the axle to the drive screen.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:25

If you can't get to the boat because it's covered with poop and and pee, imagine, imagine if but if the thing is turned over on the interstate, right? And you're gonna walk up there and you're like it's two in the morning, and then there's mayhem, the roads are shut down, and you're like, I'm not touching that.

SPEAKER_05: 1:31:42

Yeah, it it can you people don't even read that that uh the uh ammonia eats up.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:48

It's a real thing. I'm telling you, it's it's a re it's a real thing, it's a real thing because it couldn't those those that that couldn't be like some uh some folklore tale from the road thing. This is real that came down, trickled down from my guy to where and it all makes sense. It's like oh going in bags and then throwing the bag out the window, and throwing hey, think about this you're a human being, you're a human being, and then not only are you doing that, okay, but you're throwing the bag out the window, which it could kill someone from the bag flying on the windshield. Maybe grandma can't see, or yeah, that's what happens goes all up the windshield or the whatever and you rain in that day and it hit the windshield and bust.

SPEAKER_05: 1:32:31

Yeah, or or your common one.

SPEAKER_00: 1:32:34

Yeah, when you're not in your truck, I'm sure you like your car or your motorcycle or whatever you're driving. Would you want that thrown all over your car?

SPEAKER_01: 1:32:42

It's literally on top of it. It's like what you don't care about the highways, you don't care about the people on the highways, you don't care about anything except themselves, right?

SPEAKER_05: 1:32:49

It's disgusting, it's disgusting. Very selfish mentality.

SPEAKER_01: 1:32:52

Greed is it is it's nasty. It is nasty, right? And it's it's gross, but you know what? It's like we said, if we could just maybe take the uh adapt like the Florida, state of Florida, and what they're doing to catch them, because that's all we're trying to do. Nobody, if you got a if you're a legal and and a law-abiding uh CDL holder, you don't have any worries. What the hell do you have to worry about? But if the guys behind you that's running four or five guys in the seats removed and he's pooping and peeing through the hole, and and he did come in and they find out that they're illegal. I want them off the road now. So do you?

SPEAKER_00: 1:33:28

I would want them off now.

SPEAKER_05: 1:33:30

Yeah, I'm a team driver too. So I've been back sleeping and hoping that while I'm sleeping, I'll I'll be able to wake up.

SPEAKER_01: 1:33:38

Yeah, I'll watch, watch uh uh some uh I'll send you I'll send you an episode of uh I think I might have sent it for the CDL episode. I think on there we we managed to get a clip from this driver that was um out in California that didn't make it and he was overdriving the truck too fast on the turns, and uh his co-driver was sleeping in the sleeper when he did it, killed them both. It's terrible. You don't know so that your co-driver has to you have to have as much faith as him is like your your brother. I mean, you you have to be able to trust your co-driver. Yeah, can you imagine if your co-driver is some dude that got his license out of 24-hour CDL mill and doesn't know how to drive to save his life anyway? And he's if it wasn't for you know what this may be a small little microcosm of it, but I know that the made the majority of the trucks are now automatics so they can get more people into the seats to drive them. I think that's also the biggest double-edged sword that there is. Uh-huh. You would eliminate so many drivers that can't drive stick double clutching. I would CDL school double clutching. You would eliminate them because half of these guys they couldn't drive this, saved their lives.

SPEAKER_05: 1:34:49

That you I think you nailed it on that one. That did open up a lot, and then two, I've seen the entitlement where they feel like everybody every truck should be automatic now. Yeah, they got restriction, but you're like, why? What's what what's with the 18 speed and the 10?

SPEAKER_01: 1:35:06

Hey, I know friends like my friend. Uh I have so many driver friends, especially my friend Brad. An 18 speed, I'm terrified. I could never drive in it. I tell them all the time, I'm like, I never drove over the road, and I didn't need to. I didn't, I go, I didn't go into trucking over the road. But I if you put me with an 18 speed, you'd have I'd have to, I'd have to have a week's seat time to watch you to to get comfortable with it.

SPEAKER_05: 1:35:27

Well, at least you respect it, and and the fact that they you know what they're saying is that get with the times, get all they should all be automatic. You're like, what? No, no, actually, I love changing gears.

SPEAKER_01: 1:35:38

Yeah, and and it would eliminate if they said right now, hey, as a mandate, they they couldn't all park all the automatics because everything's automatic. But if you if it was manuals, you wouldn't have probably a half of this problem, yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 1:35:51

Because they just in the schools they they say, oh, it's too expensive to get the manuals work done because the students are grinding the gears, so uh we just got all automatics, and I was like, Oh there, here we are, here we are again.

SPEAKER_01: 1:36:03

So we're we're out here two two two dudes just talking about it, and there's a major issue right there that has um uh ramifications all across the boards, yeah. But that's what's happening. When you make it simple, and then they all think they can drive it because it's big, just oh, it's big, it's automatic. I can drive it. No, you can't, it's eight feet wide for the love of God. Yeah, and your trailer's 53 feet, you're you're pushing almost 70 feet in one lane, and if you look at a guy that doesn't know what they're doing, yeah, the like the one in California. How do you not even stop? He didn't even didn't even apply the brakes. Yeah, I mean, aren't you behind the wheel terrified?

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:45

I mean, think about that. Nobody wants to crash. I mean, could you look up and see that?

SPEAKER_01: 1:36:49

You're not even hitting the brakes. It's like, what what what's going on?

SPEAKER_05: 1:36:51

Andrew, yeah, that's a pucker right up.

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:55

Whoa, Rodney, he's wigged out on whatever he's wigged out on.

SPEAKER_05: 1:37:00

Stomach's in your throat.

SPEAKER_01: 1:37:01

Yeah, I couldn't even imagine, but they've there's so many of these stories, and you know what's even worse, right? Is the families and of the people that they left behind for no reason at all are living now without their dad or their uncle or their mom because because hey, some ridiculous politician got their palm greased at his local level to say, hey, when this bill comes up, we need favorability to vote on that, and we'll give you your uh money for your bridge and your town, and and this is what they're doing, and they don't even realize that the legislation that they've passed to do this or make it however they've made it legal, how did they make it legal? How did I don't know how the previous administration allowed yeah away from the politics?

SPEAKER_05: 1:37:48

But man, it because it's just no, I'm with you all, I'm with you all the way.

SPEAKER_01: 1:37:51

I'm just simply saying the reality is, but how could you, no matter if it was Mickey Mouse as the president, how do you as an industry with regulations and test your your p tests and everything else, all the how are you how are you getting away with getting away with the illegal the uh somebody somebody's turning a blind eye somewhere?

SPEAKER_05: 1:38:13

Yeah, yeah, completely blind, and I hope it gets better. Uh, because like you said, people are dying, and that's uh big time, doesn't matter who's in there. Um, somebody's paying the price, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:38:25

And and eventually we all are, yeah. Yeah, and we also are paying the price. We're also paying the price of diesel fuel being 375. Wow, why is why is diesel fuel so high?

SPEAKER_05: 1:38:37

It's gotta be. Sometimes it's just that easy.

SPEAKER_01: 1:38:41

What do you normally haul? What do you what do you guys haul, Ray?

SPEAKER_05: 1:38:44

Uh so yeah, I I work for UPS right now.

SPEAKER_00: 1:38:47

So oh baby, how about it? UPS are you like a car driver?

SPEAKER_05: 1:38:51

Yeah, uh, go over the road uh uh 48. So right now I'm going Salt Lake. I go nice.

SPEAKER_01: 1:38:58

I'm gonna send you my UPS episode. Yeah, I gotta check it out when you said that and and you're gonna make make note because I have a beard in it, okay.

SPEAKER_05: 1:39:06

And they don't allow it, maybe what it is, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:39:08

You gotta do it now, too, though. But you can drive for UPS, yeah, yeah. At then they didn't allow it when I was filming it. We said to the network, they said, Can he shave? And I said, I simply can't because we were in the middle of filming, and pickups are if we missed something that we had to film, and all of a sudden my beard left in the middle of the same episode, it didn't die. So when we were filming at UPS, it's in the episode, it's hilarious.

SPEAKER_05: 1:39:34

No, no, you're great because at UPS is there's a lot of talk about that too, though. And we lowered the standard. Did they oh see?

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:40

I think that Rob broke the I broke the ice.

SPEAKER_05: 1:39:44

I broke the ice doing a great job, man. If you watch those guys, their uniforms are so crisp and tight, man. They look fresh. There's no great job. I know there was a big lawsuit with Tracy Morgan, an accident that happened, but uh I think they put safety first now. Walmart's probably setting the bar pretty hot.

SPEAKER_01: 1:40:03

They have to, yeah, they have to. There it's the benchmark, is they set the benchmark. You're the largest retailer in the world. Yeah, well, so if you're that and you've got the fleets of everything, and you know that the ramifications of that are industry-wide from they're buying what are the majority have freightliners, those are contracts. Everybody's got contracts for oil, everybody's got contracts for.

SPEAKER_05: 1:40:24

tires they got contracts for light bulbs they got contracts for everything so yeah you better set the trailers uh that that's a problem they got they they uh they subcontract a lot of their work out uh walmart's setting the standard i don't know if people like where they shop or whatever who they want to support but you know those are again the big box stores but yeah we gotta keep raising the bar we can't let it go lower we gotta keep the standards up there and i reach really appreciate you coming on talking about it and how it also affected your life and i mean man you've been through a lot of struggles um just trying to i'm still out there i'm still out there trying to trying to you know row the boat to the shore somewhere but you know it's okay we got a lot of things happening hopefully we can get some sponsors kicking on white line fever and we're gonna show you what we're really up to nice no pain no gain though that's what they say right honest to god it's it's so true and i i i look back at when it took me years to get american trucker off the ground and since it's been like whoa whoa mama but you know what i still have um a lot of energy to to to do it and and we've got i'm i'm ready to rock and roll with it you're gonna be great yeah you're you're great already so we just gotta be blessed with support yeah you're awesome you're awesome certainly appreciate you so man to all the listeners out there Rob i really appreciate you telling about your story it means a lot to you and also it resonates for anyone whoever is uh want to know more about big rigs i mean go all the way back to when you were five or seven years old man that's awesome man and and and this is uh it's like a news flash for everybody i i'm um i'm at i rejoined let me find it for you i rejoined uh oh hold on here so did i just block you off okay no you're good um i just rejoined at real rob american trucker on twitter oh yeah at real rob american trucker there's only a couple little things on there but i i put myself back into the stream on there i know what this like you gotta give it a break come back to it at real rob on american trucker on on x and um we have semi freaks on instagram which they when you see them if anybody ghosts in them it looks like crickets but i'm we're trying to breathe life into it all now and trying to float back into the with these projects what we're doing but i'm uh i'm trying to make a resounding comeback of source in just these passion projects and what we're doing you're gonna do it man oh and trucksdunts.com mike ryan site that's where you can get any information on whiteline fever truckstunts.com that's the spot all right any other spots are you on linkedin at all or um i i don't try i don't don't try to go on linkedin only because it's facebook related and facebook owns it and facebook remember tried to did give me death threats and whatnot so i'm i'm not i'm not i'm not warmed back up to them yet all right i'm just not warm everything you put on ice put those guys on yeah yeah i put them on ice for a while but you know you never know i mean i don't want to be a hypocrite so i mean i'm going back i'm on x i've got you know semi freaks at uh instagram and maybe if i get some traffic on there that'll prompt me to start posting some things sweet i'm glad to have you back on the on the ones that you are on so anybody out there please look for rob and give all the support you can for white line fever project um i think it isn't just about you know recreating stunts it's also about celebrating a trucking legacy and proving that the spirit uh of the open road still burns strong so a lot of people out there hey trucking's not over we're not giving up yet so um that's it man we want to put this episode out there for the listeners uh anything else you want to say before we go I just thank you for having me on Ray I really appreciate it and and and thanks for your patience because I I know that I pushed you off but I didn't I wasn't doing it deliberately my friend oh I know man no no I'm easy going man easy going appreciate that boss man appreciate you you got it hey I'm trucking Ray at NAS Delivered this is the podcast that keeps stories rolling and delivering strong uh stories for people for for the end until that's right that's right we we'll take the trucking industry back we'll take it back by storm that's right