Truckers on Edge: The Truth About Brokers, Fees & the Parking Crisis

Truckers on Edge: Brokers, Fees, and Parking Problems
The Truckers Radio Podcast • Hosted by Stacey Yearout

In this hard-hitting episode of The Truckers Radio Podcast, 30-year trucking veteran Stacey Yearout breaks down the pressure cooker that America’s drivers are facing every single day on the road. From shady broker tactics and hidden fees to the national truck-parking crisis that’s pushing drivers to their breaking point, this episode goes straight into the issues that keep truckers frustrated, exhausted, and unheard.

Stacey delivers raw, real-world insight from decades behind the wheel — explaining how broker rates get manipulated, why fees are out of control, and how the lack of safe parking is turning every shutdown into a gamble. If you've ever dealt with lying brokers, unpaid detention, mystery charges, or the stress of trying to find a legal spot with minutes left on your clock… this episode is for you.

Truckers keep this country moving, but the system keeps stacking the deck against the men and women doing the work. Here, we shine a light on what’s really happening — and why drivers are fed up.

It’s time to talk about it. Loudly. And with no filter.

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Transcript

Dolores 0:00

Welcome to The Truckers Radio Podcast, where the miles meet the truth and the industry finally gets a real conversation. Today’s episode is all about the stuff drivers deal with every single day but nobody wants to talk about broker games, hidden fees, and the parking crisis that’s pushing truckers to the edge. Your host, 30-year trucking veteran and industry coach, Stacey Yearout, breaks this all down from the driver’s seat no corporate filters, no sugarcoating, just real talk from someone who’s lived it. Settle in, turn the volume up, and let’s get into what’s really happening out on America’s highways. Welcome to the Truckers Radio podcast. Today we got Sean out of North Carolina on here. We going to kind of kick it around a little bit, talking about some of the new rules and regulations for Federal Motor Carrier on the broker and freight forwarding, and a couple other problems that we see running around our industry. Anything else we can find causing problems, we going to call it out on blast. Sean, you with us today? Hey, how's it going, Stacy? Alrighty. Good deal. Doing pretty good, man. I was just reading up on some of the freight broker and broker, a lot of people are calling this a big win for trucking companies and especially small carriers and things 'cause this definitely is something that,, it can really make or break a, small carrier. And when the brokers are financially responsible for getting you your money, even though they're a third party in the middle, when you don't get paid for a load that you've spent money to pay, that tends to be a real problem. That can actually bankrupt a lot of smaller companies, taking measures here with the federal motor carrier to starting January 16th. To put in effect, they require a minimum, which is $75,000 and it's not replenished in the final security falls below the surety bond falls below $75,000, and these brokers are not replenishing the surety bond. And that's a real problem because when a broker owes somebody money the surety bond ends up being empty, there's nothing else there to get. And failure to resolve that they're going to start putting these brokers out of service. I think that's most definitely something that needs to be looked at. The US treasure bonds and qualifications for somebody to be a broker because just anybody comes in and sticks up a sign in the yard and gets a, an internet phone and a laptop. Signs on with a company or either they can start their own brokerage authority. They can just say, Hey, we get some freight out here, we've brokered around, and they get theirself financially in trouble. And then one day they decide, oh, I've got X amount of dollars in the bank. I'm just gonna call it quits and take that money and run and not pay anybody. That tends to be a big problem in this industry. And I've seen that happen from time to time. That's definitely something, when, when a company, especially in the days economy, a lot of the drivers, owner operators are requiring on every dollar to operate. That's, that's big. Yeah, it definitely takes, especially some of these new owner operators, they may or may not have the operating capital to sustain themselves until the broker pays, and if the broker doesn't pay, and like you said, they're just out of business. And in most cases that's exactly what happened. When the broker don't pay, they're done. And there's a lot of people suffer from that too. The driver, the driver's family, even the creditors, for the truck and the people that he owes money, it all rolls downhill. He ends up losing his truck, outta the bank. They gotta repo the truck. They lose money, credit card companies, they lose money if he files bankruptcy. And it's all because of a guy that's not doing what he's supposed to do. There's things in place, these bonds and us treasury bonds in place to protect their American truck driver. And in some ways, everybody finds a loophole in something. Even us as drivers, we're gonna find a loophole there and I get it, but when you're causing companies to just simply go completely out of business and lose everything that they've worked hard to get, that's a big deal. You can go broke yourself. That's one thing. But when you cause other people financial stress, that's wrong. With this new. Rule coming out here in January 16th. Why this is actually a big win for the trucking companies is it lowers the risk of unpaid freight. That's a big thing because with stricter asset requirements, it makes it harder for brokers to operate without financial backing. That forces them to come to the table and actually pay the carriers that that's a big thing. Cleaner broker pool. That means you don't have to deal with every crook in town. That that's a big thing. Also, leveraging, negotiating, if you're looking at the loads and the load boards and so forth, negotiating is a big part of whether you make money or you don't. You can't just take. The first offer that's put out there. Brokers are trained to always, in most cases I will say this, they're trained to give you the lowest price because they're expecting you to negotiate. So when you don't, you're not making what you should be making off that load, and they're sticking that money in their pocket, and that was another thing too, where. A lot of people are calling for broker and carrier transparency. They want to know what the load's paid. And I know that's been a hot topic on both sides, and, and it's supposed to be pretty transparent. Like when a, when a company brokers will load for you, a lot of times they'll hide that rate they will suppress that rate and make another load confirmation sheet with a different figure on it. Or they'll have it fixed to where the broker won't tell you what that load pays. The company will tell you what they want you to know. And I think that's kind of shady business also, if a man's paying for his own truck and his own fuel. I've run into that myself over the years, being leased onto some of these companies, they take their percentage and, when they book the load, they send me to Raycon. But the actual rate would be blacked out. They'd take a magic marker or something and cover it up before they send me the rate con. Well, that automatically screams shady right there. Big time. And, that's never the way that's supposed to be done. The driver that is a independent contractor, he has a right to know what his pay is. You know what the gross of that load is. And I think that's a big push right there. You agree upon a percentage and then you hide the gross amount. From the driver that's leased onto your company. So he don't really know what the load actually paid that he's getting a percentage of. And another way these companies take advantage of drivers is, they're not supposed to take a percentage or a cut of your fuel surcharge, but when you do a load through a broker. They pay everything on a flat rate, most cases. So everything's all throw in there together. The stop pay, the tarp, pay the fuel surcharge, the whole nine yards is all throw in the pot. And as a flat rate, it's all in rate. So when you're leased onto a company and they say, Hey, we're going to give you 75% of the gross. Well, they're getting 25% of everything. They're not supposed to get 25% of your fuel surcharges, but they are on a flat rate. There's no division, and if I'm out there tarping a load, ain't nobody needs 25% of that tarp pay. That's my ass out there doing that. Not them. And Exactly. If I'm doing extra stops. I'm going outta my way. I'm taking time out of my workday. What do you need? 25% of the xal pay there? No. And that, that's where you get kicked on these flat rates. A lot of times. If I was the broker load and I was leased onto a company, I'd tell 'em, Hey, I want, no, we're not gonna do this on a flat rate. We're gonna break my Fuel Sur Church off, separate that out. So the company I was leased onto only got 25% of the line haul rate. And if a company gets mad about it, well, you know what, maybe time to find you another company because that they're, they're cheating you and that's how they're making their money. Well. If they're mad, well, there's obviously a problem. We don't come out there and live on the road and sleep in a truck. The size of a third of the size of a federal prison cell away from our family endure multi-level. Different cultures of life out here. You're looked at like a third class citizen and all the above, got a arm wrestle somebody every day for a parking place, not to mention pay for one. In most cases, you're charged 15, 20% upcharge on food and truck stops just simply because they know they got you. Where they want you. You can't just go somewhere else and go get food. All the truck stops mark shit up that, that's another hot subject right there. We're going to get into eventually is like, why are we done this way? We're the backbone of the company. This industry is the only industry I see that the entire world depends on us to run the country, to keep everything moving. But the entire country kicks us in the teeth. That don't make a lot of sense to me. Every chance not everybody, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of people out there do have respect for drivers, but in the same term, you have a lot of industry that works alongside the industry and the trucking world that does take advantage of drivers. You can't tell me that you pulled into. I'm not going to call out per by name, but just to say any truck stop, that you pull in that charges for parking. They don't charge for parking because they need to charge for parking. They were many, many years that nobody charged for parking, and that was everybody survived is fine and the trucking industry. The trucking stops ended up, they survived off of fuel and what we, what we spent our money in the restaurants and in the store and buying our supplies. And that's became, a money racket because now they're anywhere from 15 to 25, sometimes even $30 a night to park. To do your 10 hour break because they know you have no choice but to park. That all kind of got implemented in when the E-logs came about. So once everybody knew that we were, had no choices, so now we're going to start charging for parking, and then now, I seen the other day. Sign up $25 for a shower. Yeah, we, come on man. We wanna turn. That's crazy. $25 to wash your ass to be a human being. When we're already out here counting chicken feed to feed our family. Now you know that that's a hot topic. Then you go in the restaurant. It is a dollar, two, $3 more for everything on the menu than what it would be down the street in the actual restaurant, just simply because we're in a truck stop. I remember back in the day when a family was out traveling, that was the going thing. They'd stop at a truck stop to eat because it was great food at a reasonable price because it was made reasonable for the drivers. And that's just what they did. I wouldn't stop at a truck stop for food now if I didn't have to. I meal prep most of my stuff because I just can't afford to eat the truck stops. It's ridiculous. And not to mention that it goes against every moral in my body to spend that kinda money to live on the road. Ridiculous. We don't make that kind of money. But the world seems to think we do. Yeah, I know. I bring my food from home. I don't buy food out here on the road. Yeah. You just can't, but unfortunately, we're in a situation to where, we're home a little more than the average OTR driver. And we're, we're kind of worked ourself into a situation where we're able to do that and that's great. We both paid our dues out on the road, what about these new yas coming out here on the road and they're spending half everything. They make sometimes not more than they make out on the road in cash advances, just trying to survive. You're talking about the paying the part. It really all kind of started with the idle air program. Yeah. The, but you know, the crazy part about the idle, the ILE Air program, if you needed a spot, they wasn't allowed to tell you not to park There. You could still park there even if you wasn't paying for the idle air. There was a few of 'em tried it, but they wasn't allowed to run you off if you needed to place park. The biggest thing I seen kind of ran us in the ground with the paid parking was at ELD. They know they had us nailed down. There was no way out of it. It was too big a risk before because if we tried to pay to charge the par, if they'd have tried to charge the part before we would've just left. Now, a lot of times you coast into the truck stop with minutes left on your clock. You can't leave. You have no choice but to pay the people their money, and that that's horse shit. You go in there. You spend $3 for a cup of coffee, but even if you buy fuel in a lot of places that I heard, a friend of mines tell me out in Ontario, even it used to count toward, if you bought fuel, you didn't have to pay the Parker. It at least it counted toward your parking. Or if you spent $20 in the store, it counted towards your parking. Out in Ontario with the TA and Petro out there. They say that that's not even the case anymore. They don't care. It's, it is that much to park and I think it's like $30 to park or you just don't park there. They don't care. It don't matter if you spent $200 in that store or you just fuel up it doesn't matter. You're still going to pay the part, and I think that's, not right. No, not at all. I know when me and my wife were running team, we'd have to park at that petro out there in Ontario quite a bit, and we'd just go in the restaurant and between two of us, we'd probably spend 30, $40 on a meal. Oh yeah. Which we needed a good, needed a good meal anyway, but you know. We spending that much on the meal, we wouldn't have to pay the part. But I don't know, man, I think with those truck stops doing that now they're gonna find their restaurant and in-store sales taking a dip. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. 'Cause I know if I was forced into a situation to that degree. I believe I would stub up and not spend $1 in their store. And I'm sure there's a whole lot of other drivers feels the same way. You're going to put it to me like that. I'm not going to do you no favors and I'm gonna remember that. But you know, when they charge you like that, it ain't something that you forget. So you know you're going to remember that. And I'm not going to try to go back to that truck stop again. If I don't have to. I'm gonna go to one that treats me better. And I think a lot of times if your truckers in your industry would get to that point, I think you would. I see a change in attitude, but they control the market 'cause they're the only game in town right now. And they're all we have, until the drivers start setting their foot down a little bit and saying, Hey, we're not gonna deal with this. We're gonna go over here to a different truck. Stop. Somebody that doesn't treat us that way. But that leads into the next problem, the, parking shortage. We have another guest that just called in here, Daniel from Florida. You with us? Yes. Hey, how you doing today? I'm doing pretty good. So we got Daniel and Sean on the phone here with us. Call in. Okay. How you doing Daniel? Good. Sean, how about you? Oh man. Trying to make it through another day, bud. I hear you. I hear you. Aren't we all Seems getting harder. It's been a rough week for me down here dealing with some of these trucks stops. Yeah, I've seen, I guess everybody's. Hot tempered around the holidays. I've seen a lot of arguments at the fuel islands, guys taking too long and, so I got snapped at me the other day. We got all these apps on our phone and they work great. You get your fuel receipts, if you gotta send them in to somebody, it's no problem. I just email it to them. But, here lately I've been having problems at these pilots flying jays it's not giving me my fuel receipt on the app, so I'm having to go in, of course I pull up. I don't park at the fuel island, but, I'll pull up, go inside and, well I'm in there. I might as well, go take a leak real quick. But, I get my seat come back out and I got some guy, I guess he only got about 20 gallons of fuel or something. I guess I was taking too long. I gotta wait in line like everybody else to get a fuel receipt. So, I just see it, it's getting crazy out here. The parking, I thought might get better with, a lot of the drivers taking out of service, for the, fraudulent CDLs and things. I'm still waiting to see if maybe we'll start to fill the effects of that cutter parking. If you have noticed anything or not, it's gotten any better. Well, in all reality, there's still a large amount of those guys still in circulation. A lot of your states are working very diligently and putting them out of service. That definitely takes time and I don't think we're going to feel that. Effect quite yet. I know. Across 40. Yeah. And me, myself, I think it's a great thing. If you come here illegally, you come here illegally, if you want to drive a truck, come here the right way, obtain. You're CDL in the right manner and nobody will have a problem with that. But it is far too dangerous for somebody that cannot speak English. And I think that's the the biggest thing right there. If you can't read a street sign, you know you got a problem. 'Cause how do you know? How do you know where you're going? You're just blindly, right? Letting Ram McNally or Garmin lead you across the country through massive cities. Not to mention that, how many million people are you riding along every day? Kids, grandmothers, mom and dads. Your family. My family. And you can't even read the sign that you just went past that says, Hey, you gotta stop. You don't know what that means. I was wondering the other day about that. I actually used my pilot points and bought myself an early Christmas present. Got it. Got me a garin. And, I haven't used one in, in years here. And, I had to look at it and it's got every damn language you could think of. So I guess, it prints out. I haven't looked at it yet, but maybe it reads the signs out on the screen and, and whatever language they have it set for. Yeah, they do. How accurate do you think that is? How many times has that GPS routed you through a neighborhood? Right, right. How many times has that GPS not picked the road up that you were on? It ain't fell safe. The only true fail safe, is knowing how to read. Understand the English language. That's what we do our signs in. You don't pull up at a stop sign and it's not printed in 13 different languages. Oh. That wouldn't surprise me one day that it would be wrote in 20 different languages on the stop sign and ever road sign on, known to man. I've never driven in a foreign country, but I would have to imagine that. If I went over there and saw a red octagon shaped sign with something written on it, I'm gonna assume that's a stop sign. But you know, these guys are getting slick. They're, from what I was seeing out there, they're driving at night now. They think they got a better chance of slip by driving at site and then, read an article. I thought it was kind of funny. They've been letting them read Cat the Hat. Guys have started memorizing Kat, switched it up on and pulled out green eggs and ham and, I got a little laugh out. That is pretty funny there. And that's bare minimum. Bare minimum, of what they should be at the level they should be able to read at. And I think that's, you, you see so many people on Facebook. Oh my god, this guy's drove for 20 years, and all of a sudden he is losing his CDL. Don't expect me to feel bad for you because you've had 20 years to learn the English language. You live in an English speaking country. Why is it that? Someone can come to our country and expect you to know their language and expect you to communicate with them and get an attitude with you when you don't understand or cannot talk to them. That's not my problem, right? You're in my country. But it just goes to show you the arrogance of these people. I know. If we go to a different country, we're expected to learn their language, follow their customs and their culture, but they can come here and just do whatever they want to. Exactly. I guarantee you call China, there's not an option for English or Spanish on their phone. Guarantee it, that's most definitely a problem, I think, where they don't take us as a country serious and they just come here, they kick you. You're not gonna go to China, illegally. You go, they catch you over there, they're probably gonna shoot you, throw you in prison for the rest of life. Right. Well, I was just using that as a, as a. I get it, but even if you went to any other country, they're not going to give you the option to speak or in your language if you don't have to. Even though, the English language is probably one of the most predominantly known languages around the globe, but you still gotta argue with somebody to come to air country to learn air language. That's just not right to me. Who am I though? Oh, I do. I know the universal language, everybody understands it. Yeah. I know what the universal language is. It has to do with fingers. Is that sign language of sorts? Yeah. Yeah. Sign language, that's for sure. But, there ain't no, there ain't a problem with people coming here, man. But it's, it's shows some respect, and that, that's, you see it, you see it all day or year after year. People burning their flag. Stepping on it, stomping all it, if that's the way you feel, go back to where you come from. What are you doing here? I've never seen somebody go to another country except for the United States and hate their flag, hate their language, hate their culture. And demand respect. They love their free handout. They love their, but I think on Big Daddy Trump's trying to cut that handout off well, I understand. It's gonna be real interesting. I don't know if you guys saw it. They, I guess they're gonna release them Epstein files in the next 30 days. They said 4 27 to one vote to release them. So curious, see what happens there. Yeah, I'd definitely like to see that myself and I'd like to see if there's truth in them or if they've went through and scrubbed them. They've had 'em for so long, who knows if we're getting the truth or not. It's been such a con, I don't think it should've ever been taken off of livestream TV to start with. I think that judge, he knew the people they were protecting, and I kind of wonder, are they still gonna protect them? Why? Why the change of heart now? Talking about, losing a lot of the non domicile drivers. I think 15, 16, 17,000 undocumented drivers should definitely make a dent in our transportation. I seen that they finally came out the other day and actually admitted that there were no driver shortage. They've just been flooding the market. I saw that too. Well, we all knew it. Yeah, we all knew it. There's a parking shortage. Oh yeah. They've been a parking shortage for a long, long time. And every year you see state, after state, after state, oh, we got X amount of million dollars of lotted for parking. But you never see any more new parking, oh, putting parking. I've seen a lot of states, they went up, went out and maybe extended the blacktop a little on the side of the ramp, pulled up the no parking signs. If they call that, making more parking for us, that's basically, it's kinda like throwing a, a rug out on the ground and telling your dog to go sleep on it. It, but that's the extent that, that's basically the, the body language they're doing. They don't care if you sleep on the side of the ramp or you know where to go to the bathroom, know where to eat, know where to shower. Oh, here's y'all's parking. That says volumes about who we are as an industry. You know what we mean to the industry, it's like we're just the dog here, go sleep on the side of the ramp. Yeah, we may do some more parking now. We did it the cheapest way we could do it. Now we're gonna take the rest of the money and we're gonna allocate it, and we're going to go do somewhere else I wonder how much of that money ends up in Somebo. Some politician's pocket can't prove that, but it's going somewhere. It sure as hell ain't going into parking for us. I noticed that Ohio tore down and rebuilt every rest area building in the state of Ohio. Hmm. No more parking though. They redo the same parking area that they were, they may have had another spot or two just to justify that they did it. Still the same rest area. They just upgraded the building. We needed to upgrade the amount of parking. Well, yeah, I've been seeing rest areas all across the country. Closed, closed, closed, rest area. Closed. Everybody's screaming about, trucks ain't got nowhere to park. They keep closing these rest areas, closing down these parking areas, just making the problem a lot worse. Yeah, that's for sure. It's just a matter of we gotta get everybody on board and. Just basically get something done about it instead of putting a bandaid on it. That's a huge problem is, we're always just putting a bandaid on what needs to be done. They allocate money and stuff and they'll throw a little money at it, and then the rest of the money gets, diverted over to something else. Yeah, they'll put a bandaid on it, if you're lucky. A lot of times what they seem to be doing is taking a Dagg or two already open wound. Yeah, that's for sure. They said on an average that a driver burns about an hour of his work day. Every day in a lot of cases, even runs around 15 extra miles on a daily basis just trying to find parking, and spends up to around $4,600 a year just in paid parking fees. That adds up. When you're only making 50, $60,000 a year as a company driver and the company don't wanna pay for your parking, even if you paid 80 grand a year and you're spending $5,000 a year out of that 80 to pay for parking, now you're at 75,000 a year let's face it, if you're not making six figures a year nowadays, you're hurting. The price of everything's went through the roof. And that's just talking about your company driver. I know a owner operator can absorb it a little better 'cause he can use it as a write off. There's a certain amount of things you know, you can write off as an owner operator that you know, either write off or you're going to give it to the government, but it still affects your bottom line. You see these drivers, parked in these abandoned. Truck stops abandoned lots and everything else. You know how unsafe that is. You're just a sitting duck there. Anybody that wants to come by and rob you, break into your truck, steal, like, flatbed wise, you're pretty vulnerable. I seen a guy at a truck stop. He was the back row of the truck stop and he went in, literally just went in, the guy was in there taking a shower, got him something to eat, sat down, took a load off his mine a minute, went out to the truck. Somebody had stole all his chains off his load. But you know, when you're in these abandoned lots and everything else and parking anywhere and everywhere you can, you don't always think about it when you're trying to find that one last little place to squeeze into because you're running out of time on a knee log. They need to build a parking status button. If you go into parking status, it allows you. An hour, hour and a half, two hours leeway to find yourself a parking place. And I think that definitely would help take the heat off, but in the same turn, it still ain't going to put together parking places that ain't there. I was looking at some statistics the other day where they said there was 3.5, 3.6 million drivers out here, give or take a few illegals. And, they were 300,000 parking places. So that's a pretty big deficit between the parking places and, it don't seem to ever move, we're just not, we're just beating a dead horse here. That ain't never, and then they wonder why the trucking industry is creeping up in its numbers and drivers with mental health. Suicide rates, depression, just people are jumping out of this business like rats out of a sinking ship because they can't mentally survive out here. It's too hard, and a lot of the younger cats that come out here, they don't last probably two or three years. They go home. It ain't worth it. And in a sense, they're right. It ain't worth it. If you have to live out there, a month, two at a time on the road for the amount of wages that they make, you can go over here and work at the factory nowadays and make the same thing. So, why be away from your family? And it's not like the trucking industry is known to have. Great benefits, or astronomical healthcare. Everything that they hand us is kinda mediocre. Even with the good companies, they're still somewhat mediocre. Some of 'em do a little more than others, but it is still lacking compared to corporate jobs The healthcare is still lacking. Basically they give us just enough to keep us shut up, especially the ones that knows right from wrong. That's the thing, a lot of people just take what they're given and they don't question. And then those of us that know the difference, we ask questions and they don't like that. That's another thing too, besides mental health. You're seeing drivers more and more that the BMI keeps creeping up that, they're forced to eat. Ramen noodles and all the things cheap that they can find. Let's face it, if you can't eat decent food, where does your health go? It goes downhill and then you got the sleep apnea cracked down. You got a lot of that going on, which I can't say nothing about sleep apnea. I've got, sleep apnea. I use the machine too. It is a constant revolving cycle there's just zero support system out here for truckers. That's one of the reasons that we started the whole Truckers Radio podcast is for that support system. Somebody that was a voice for the driver. Yeah, it's been fun. My mind off some things, and I know, I think I've mentioned it on here before, you've done some work with one of my boys there, my oldest boy. Yeah. And, it really made a difference. That's, there's a lot of drivers out here, got issues going on. I know a guy, I believe you've had him on the show, getting to divorce. I was talking to him a couple of days ago and, I was worried about him. He's really down and out. Done sir. And, not focused, definitely some significant work with him. He, he definitely, he's in a bad situation. Good, good boy, but bad situation. Sometimes, we end up in situations like that as a driver and we kind of get taken and we get extorted. You'll see a girl that, they'll latch on to a driver 'cause they know, hey, he's gone. He makes good money and she can go do whatever she wants to do whenever he is gone. And that's not always fair. It happens both ways. I I'm not biased one way or the other. It happens. We're all human and we all have things happen in our life, but. As a driver, whether you're a female driver or you're a male driver, we all have been taken advantage of simply because, this industry, kind of puts us in a bad light. People struggle to have a normal life being a driver, that's the thing, it is hard to have a marriage. It's hard to raise kids. It is hard to have, situations that tally out in the end. It's kinda like, me and Shaath just talking the other day is like, we spend so much of our lives in these trucks, and then when the kids grow up and they're grown they don't they ain't got time for us either, but they don't realize the life that we sacrificed to take care of them. And they don't. We don't matter. It doesn't matter. They think, and I think that's the biggest misconception is people think we're just out here riding around on these trucks, like we're just having fun. It's just a great big ass amusement park. They don't realize the hell we, we put in in these trucks. The life that we give up in these trucks. And I think society is bad for that. Also, we're all looked at, how many times have you heard, man, all you do sit on your ass, look out the window. How hard could it be? Well, that's probably one of the, that's probably one of the biggest things right there. That just pisses me off to no end. It's like, come on man. You have no idea what I go through on a daily basis to bring people their goods or anybody else, some days are better than others, of course, but over the years you kind of getting numb to it. You don't even realize the life that you live until you stop living that life. And then you're like, man. Man, I was pretty hot tempered man. I was, I was just in a bad place. It takes, even, and I think even with you, I've, I've talked to you many, many times. You get stressed out here like, man, you, you're going to have to hold it together here. This is how accidents happen. You get consumed by arguments at home. You get consumed by. Marital problems. You get consumed with kids acting like little assholes like they do from time to time, and all along while you're doing this, you're sitting behind the wheel of this 80,000 pound rig, and that makes for a bad combination. But you know, you have no other choice but to deal with life as it comes at you sometimes. We don't always have the choice to stop I just, I can't drive, I don't feel safe. You've got dispatchers, you've got companies, you've got, deadlines that you gotta take. You know when life happens all around that, it's, we don't live in a perfect world. I know safety likes to say, oh, well, if you had an argument with your wife, you probably shouldn't drive today in the other world, from the dispatcher's point of view. You don't give a damn what kinda arguments you've had, you better get that load there, and as an owner operator, you got a pavement that's gotta be made. They don't care about what kinda arguments you just had or how you feel or whatever. You gotta make your payments. So in the real world, it all sounds good on paper. But it kinda loses its weight in reality. Yeah. The world won't stop because we have a bad day. Absolutely not. The only difference is, is we're juggling an 80,000 pound rig while we're doing it, and not to mention the times that people do so many things that just. They'll come across three lanes, slam their brakes on in front of you, and, dart off that ramp, flipping you off in the way of coming across the hood of your truck. Now we're, was I at the fault because I was in your way talking about narcissistic behavior? Me and a guy was talking about that the other day, in narcissistic personality disorders, you can see it in the way people drive. You can see it in their actions or body language. You can see it all day, every day on the road. It's like, don't you know who I am? Get outta my way. You're in my way. You need to go park on the side of the road because you could spot a narcissist a mile away. And you see that a lot in driving, the road rage. Just all kinds of sort of stuff, and like a buddy of mine used to say, don't you know who I think I am? I see that a lot. Big time out here on the road. You see it a lot in society, and I think a big thing too with the personality disorders and stuff is, back, we had a kind of, in our generation, we grow up probably not as hard as the generation before, but then somewhere along the line we decided, Hey man, I don't want my kid to grow up like I did. Why not? How, what, what's wrong with the way you turned out? Well, I had a pretty hard life. I didn't have much money and I was raised really poor or I was raised really strict, but you ended up being who you are for that reason. So we, we ended up starting this little generation, what I like to call, we were started raising narcissists. Because we pampered, we put kids up on a pedestal. We told 'em they could never do no wrong. We started giving out participation trophies just because they were there. Everybody won. And now look what we're dealing with. Yeah, everybody's got a sense of entitlement today, that's for sure. I don't know what's going on up in front of me, but where I think somebody's riding with her trolley, valve down, smell them brakes for the last 10 miles. Yeah. Either that or they definitely got something going on with their air pressure. If you ain't got the proper amount of air pressure going to your trailer, you got a big air leak, to drag your brakes. That's one of the big reasons, you smell on, especially something like that, if you're not in the mountains or nothing, if you're just going down the road, flat ground, somebody's gonna an air leak. I'm on nine five here, just, just south. Just came across the, the Florida line there a few minutes ago. Yeah, well it's pretty flat. Yeah, you definitely got somebody with an air leak or dragging their brakes or something. Something's going on mechanically, a lot of people don't realize, DOT's pretty, pretty big on audible air leaks because that's one of the problems you got very much of an air leak. And your, your truck can't hold a good enough air pressure. You start dragging your brakes and you end up seeing this guy on the side of the road with a trailer on fire. That's one of the prime causes of that. Yep. And they probably ain't even paying attention. They don't even know they're smoking. Probably not. Yeah. They're on the phone, I'm sure. Well, nobody uses a CD anymore. Yeah, that's, that's definitely, speaking of cbs, that's, they started putting CBS in a lot of these newer trucks when they're selling them. I don't even know if half these cats even know how to outta the damn even turn 'em off or tune them or, set your mic up or any of the above right outta these company, Freightliner and international, all them are selling them, as part of the package. They got them shitty antennas on the back and you ain't gonna get more than a mile range on 'em. And it's alright if you're stuck in a traffic jam. But know these guys don't cut it on until something happens. Now I've gotta wear, I don't even cut mine on anymore. Nobody on there that's off to talk to. You sat on the road, that's the thing a lot of people don't understand that. You cause yourself a whole lot of issues. You're running into weather, ice, snow, rain, whatever it may be. That's your eyes, your ears, listen to that. What's going on in front of me. You're rolling down the road, if you've got an accident, you run up on. A road just closed down. That's a very dangerous situation nowadays. I think a lot of people today, we got podcast, we've got satellite radio. I think a lot of people are hooked on that, so they're not really talking to the fellow driver anymore, between radio stations. And that may be a big reason why they're not using these radios. But, I think it's, I'm up on I 80 and, I'm going through Wyoming and there's a blizzard up there. But we don't have the common sense driver out here anymore. No. No, you don't. And that's the thing, even if you keep the CB on in the background where you can kind of hear it out the corner of your ear, you could listen to your podcast and all the things, you just keep that CB turned on, turned down a little bit where you can hear it. If you've got something going on, you know you're going to see that CB light up. Yeah. Well you can milk your Bluetooth to it as well, and Right. You could still be listening to your music, but have that little head put set on your ear there. Right. You hear the cv. But yeah, that's for sure, like technology, that's for sure. A lot of these cats out here don't have the money to buy one. Out, get some it, you use it for monitoring and things like that, the cheapest one got. So yeah, that's Sure, You definitely need the safety of it, and that's why. A lot of 'em still have 'em in the trucks, I still monitor it all the time. Yeah. I'm one of the guilty ones that I haven't run a CB radio several years. I've always had one in the truck, but. The company I drive for now, they put CBS in the truck for us. I ain't even, I ain't even put my radio in my pickup truck. Yeah, well that last big setup I had, the linear and everything. I sold it to my son. He set some plays around with it. Probably aggravates somebody. But, definitely I would like you more. I was big into them, CBS and. Oh, the big, especially back in the days of the North Star. That wraps up today’s episode of The Truckers Radio Podcast, hosted by 30-year veteran Stacey Yearout. Brokers, fees, parking shortages these issues hit drivers where it hurts, and the only way anything ever changes is when we talk about it openly and honestly. If you’ve got a story, a question, or something you’re dealing with on the road, send it in and be part of the conversation. Drivers help drivers that’s what this community is all about. Until next time, stay safe, stay sharp, and keep those wheels turning. 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