Josh and Aaron explain how the current state of global supply chain logistics affects big-rig training, oversight, and accountability.
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0:00:00.2 Aaron: Hey, Josh.
0:00:00.9 Josh: What’s up, Aaron?
0:00:01.5 Aaron: Have you ever heard of the NTSB?
0:00:02.8 Josh: National Transmission.
0:00:08.6 Aaron: National Traffic Safety.
0:00:13.2 Josh: Scottish.
0:00:13.9 Aaron: Administration. Good. You got it.
0:00:16.1 Josh: Bollocks.
0:00:17.8 Aaron: And we’ve all heard of that because we as children and adults have tuned into the news whenever there’s a big plane crash. Right?
0:00:26.0 Josh: Yes.
0:00:26.4 Aaron: Or say a railway incident.
0:00:30.7 Josh: Yes.
0:00:31.6 Aaron: Some newsworthy, national newsworthy, horrible catastrophic event. Horrible catas… I can say words.
0:00:40.9 Josh: Because someone has to investigate horrible, catastrophic major events.
0:00:47.9 Aaron: Yeah. When it’s big, we send in the feds. And that’s in part because the local police have other things that they’re working on and they weren’t exactly prepared for this volume of stuff. But in part also because at a federal level there’s a mandate to create safety policies and sometimes that can trickle down to rules that affect manufacturers and the way they put products out into the market stream can also affect regulations that govern, you know, entities that transport either humans or goods in our economy. Right?
0:01:25.0 Josh: Root cause analysis to figure out why something happened to see if a new policy needs to be handed down to prevent that from happening again.
0:01:34.4 Aaron: For the first time in my life, I became aware of the NTSB investigating something in Austin that had not happened, to my recollection, before, it probably did. But, you know, in my personal history, I don’t recall it and our listeners probably already know, if they’re local, that it actually involved a regular old wreck on the interstate kind of recently. Kind of sad, right?
0:02:05.5 Josh: Not regular, it turns out.
0:02:07.6 Aaron: Yeah, it turns out not regular. And that’s kind of what we’re here to talk about today is the fact that, this is a… And I’ll just tell the listeners this is a trucking accident, it happened on I-35 on March 13th, 2025. It involved a person operating an 80,000 pound vehicle at highway speed who apparently didn’t stop when everyone else was and hit approximately 15 other vehicles, according to the NTSB report that’s out today. Actually a preliminary report, it was a total of 15 other vehicles involved and there were deaths and there were injuries, including to our own clients. And we’re gonna be careful today to not talk specifically about our clients or all the intricacies of that specific case. But it’s a newsworthy item and it’s… You know, this is in the news. We have been in the news talking about this case. So it makes sense to bring it on the podcast today and talk about, you know, what’s going on. Why did the… What is the NTSB gonna find when they come and investigate this trucking crash.
0:03:10.8 Josh: Yeah. Is this an anomaly? Was this a one off type of event? Or is this a risk that is now being posed on our roadways, in our communities more and more and more frequently as a result of our changing society and societal needs and expectations?
0:03:33.6 Aaron: Yes, exactly. And my sort of hot take here is that if you’re tired of seeing personal injury lawyers advertising for trucking crashes, you’re like, why are they so obsessed with semi trucking crashes? You know, is it because they’re manufacturing drama and manufacturing these big verdicts against trucking companies by scaring everybody? The answer is no to that question. The answer is that there’s actually something to be afraid of out there. And we’re not trying to scare people. But the reality is that there’s a lot more than meets the eye. When you see a tractor trailer out on our roadways, there’s a lot more going on there. And I’ll just say, if you imagine a person clicking on the purchase now button online, that sends out this sort of global signal and mechanisms start clicking into place, you know, from the factory abroad, there is going to be an order number and all of a sudden human hands are starting to move around objects.
0:04:42.0 Aaron: Those objects eventually coalesce into some pallet, that pallet eventually finds its way onto some sort of, you know, straight truck, straight truck gets to some terminal where it meets a tractor trailer, tractor trailer, has an intermodal unit that can basically be interchanged and put onto a rail, you know, carrier, and then the railway takes it to the, you know, the harbor, the port, a crane moves it onto a ship. From the ship it goes to some other place and you know, eventually, so on and so forth and so on and so forth. What happens is there’s like a number of hands, number of entities, contracts that govern the relationships between those entities. And along the way, everyone’s trying to save money and no one is taking responsibility for the actual package. They’re basically saying, well, I’m just the intermediary in between A and B. I don’t really have anything to do with it. I’m not taking, you know, the brand that you purchase from is not there the whole time.
0:05:43.8 Josh: Right. And that culminates. So you have this massive logistical chain to get item from point A to point B, you being point B, and to get it there as quickly as possible. That has resulted in some pretty precarious situations, some pretty precarious policies and procedures by some major, major international players.
0:06:22.9 Aaron: Yeah, And I mean this case, it’s no secret, involves an Amazon truck, right? You’ve got the Smile truck, so to speak, is on the road. And you know, we’re all participating in that. I think everyone’s an Amazon consumer at some point in their lives and you kind of think, okay, well, just like in the old days, I would see a Walmart truck. There’s a Walmart employee driving the Walmart truck. From Walmart to Walmart, here you have a company. And this is not just true of Amazon, many companies define themselves this way. The company says, we are a technology company. You know, we, our job is to be an intermediary. We connect willing suppliers and sellers with willing buyers. And what we’re really good at is putting a series, a chain of contracts together at the lowest possible price. In other words, it’s kind of a race to the bottom. You’re gonna underbid the logistics contracts so that you have the most sort of minimally qualified, minimally trained, minimally supervised third party carriers bidding to move those loads from point A to point B along that chain, you know.
0:07:35.9 Josh: Someone’s gonna offer to do. Someone has to be the person who offers to do it for less than the other people.
0:07:45.6 Aaron: Right. And there’s people in Silicon Valley who are walking around patting each other on the back saying, what geniuses are we? We are just so smart. We’ve just figured out how to sell a lamp for half the price that you people used to pay. And we consumers, you know, in the economy, we’re grateful. We’re like, hey, we really needed that lamp. And you know, gas is expensive and insurance is expensive, so thank you. But there’s a price to cheap freight.
0:08:09.9 Josh: That’s reflected in staggering profitability to the entity that pieces it all together, including putting the founder of said company as one of the richest human beings ever to walk the planet Earth.
0:08:29.4 Aaron: Right. And whereas previously with that great profitability came great accountability, ie, the Walmart guys driving the Walmart truck, from the Walmart to the other Walmart. Now we have this sort of loose affiliation of third party carriers who are saying, you know, kind of like the guy with his pockets turned out, it’s like, well, I’m sorry that I just killed five people and injured 11 others, but I just don’t have any money. I basically am in… Like my LLC was incorporated four months ago and it was based in an apartment in Dallas. You know, just…
0:09:07.2 Josh: I’m not Amazon.
0:09:07.3 Aaron: I’m out. I’m not Amazon. So, you know, as a society, what I’m advocating for obviously is that we start to scrutinize that relation, those sets of relationships, and say, okay, NTSB, you’re here to see if we can do this better. I think we can. But it starts with having accountability from end to end.
0:09:28.9 Josh: So let’s break this down because obviously the number of hands and the number of locations that result in getting that lamp from a manufacturer in China to your front door in Austin, Texas, there’s a lot that goes on. But what probably is most impactful and should be most concerning to the people who are tuning into this podcast, is what happens when that product is on the road in an Amazon container being delivered to either a centralized warehouse or to your door, most likely to some warehouse. What’s happening? How is it that the person behind the wheel of the vehicle that has a giant trailer attached to it that says Amazon across the side can in any universe say, I’m not Amazon, Amazon’s not responsible for this, come after me. But you can’t come after them and have Amazon saying the same thing, which they do.
0:10:50.3 Aaron: They will and have in prior cases and also in prior cases, it’s been disclosed that in fact the… When you’re operating a FedEx or UPS level global logistics enterprise, you can’t do so without tons of control. People have to know when the items are getting where, who’s unloading them, and what the metrics are for the different logistics or the different carriers who are offering to move product from point A to point B. And that requires lots of tracking. And with tracking comes notices, you know, for example, that a driver’s violating speed or you know, doing something else that violating, you know, straying from the route that you preset, whether they’re in… Being late, perhaps to the agreed upon delivery time. So ultimately, in these cases, it is possible to connect the dots. It’s difficult. That’s why lawyers are here. You know, lawyers have to get in there and discover everything. And we, to be fair to Amazon in this case, for example, we don’t have all the information yet. We’re still gathering it, the NTSB is still gathering it. But it’s important that we drill down on who’s controlling what, because when you decide to control something, at least in Texas, under our laws, you’re gonna have to take responsibility for it.
0:12:19.0 Josh: As you should. You should be required to take responsibility. And what we’ve come to understand in researching this case and researching other cases that have been filed against Amazon, similar circumstances, Amazon states that they don’t employ the drivers who are driving the trucks that say Amazon on the side. Amazon says we just put the container out there and open up a bidding process to any person who has an 18 wheeler company or a trailer company, I’m sorry, a tractor company that has tractors, they can come and pick up these containers that say Amazon on the side and drive them around. But they’re not Amazon, therefore we’re not responsible. And the requirements that Amazon puts on those drivers and on those trucking companies is very, very basic. You have to have the minimum amount of insurance required by the federal government to operate a truck interstate. And you’ve got to have a license.
0:13:30.7 Aaron: And a not… This is a weird voyeurism. A not unsatisfactory safety rating with the FMCSA, which is the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. And what’s tricky about that is that most of the carriers that we are encountering who are doing this, have a safety rating of none, meaning they’re not yet rated because they haven’t been around long enough. And people might have an understanding of this. But it is very easy to open up a new LLC.
0:14:02.8 Josh: A new company, if your old company is determined to be unsatisfactory.
0:14:06.7 Aaron: Right.
0:14:07.1 Josh: You can shut it down and open up a new one that hasn’t had the opportunity yet to be rated and still qualify.
0:14:15.8 Aaron: That’s what the race to the bottom looks like. And it’s ugly, you know, and that’s something that I’m hoping there’s gonna be some more scrutiny of. Say, this isn’t quite right because actually, you know, you’re supplying the… Not just the shipping container, but the chassis upon which the container is riding. You know, these are Amazon supplied wheels behind that power unit. And so, you know, my hope is that federal regulators and State regulators will look at that and say, hey, you know, we need more transparency for the public and also we need more safeguards because when you have something that’s capable of doing that much damage, you know, you’re sending a loose missile into our community. There’s got to be some accountability for what you’re doing. So that’s kind of where things stand now, and.
0:15:09.5 Josh: Well, I mean, yeah, like the reality of it is, and we know that there have been large logistics companies that have thoughtfully trained their own employees on how to move the vehicles that are plastered with their names across the side of them safely. They have trained them how to comply with the federal safety regulations, taught them how to make sure that they have adequate rest when they’re out on the roads. Drug testing protocols, a number of different safety protocols in place to make sure that they are not loose missiles out in the community. So we know that companies for generations have been capable of doing these things with some control over how safely it’s being done. And I think the major, major, major red flag and what makes this such a unique topic and why the community should care is it appears as though that protocol has been broken. You have, I think users of the road might look at, oh, there’s a big Amazon truck, that’s a multi hundred billion dollar, one of the richest companies on the planet Earth.
0:16:39.4 Aaron: I believe it’s a $2 trillion market capitalization.
0:16:42.0 Josh: There you go. A multi trillion dollar company, one of the richest companies ever in the world. They’ve got trucks out on the road. Surely those trucks and those trailers are being handled safely. Surely they would not put my community in danger intentionally or recklessly when they’re trying to do their job. But we know from this event and what we’ve been able to dig up from this event as well as other events that have occurred around the country, that that sense of security that people in our community ought to have on the roadways when they see that truck is probably a false sense of security because they’re not training, they’re not ensuring safe practices and safe policies. They’re doing it as cheaply as they can while attempting to absolve themselves of responsibility for the catastrophic harm that they can and do do. Now, that’s not to say that everybody that’s out on the road is a bad person. There are very respectable human beings doing a respectable job, earning a living driving tractor trailers out on the roads, period. But what we have seen and what we know about what’s going on with this particular company is alarming.
0:18:18.5 Aaron: Yeah, I think there’s two big takeaways. The first one is if you see something, say something, right? It’s in this… Just in this case alone, we’ve got documented and just from the superficial information we’ve been able to receive, we’ve got documented hours of service violations. That’s how much the driver sleeps and rests, by the way. We’ve got an arrest for intoxication and you know, there’s no conviction there, but that is obviously raising a red flag. And we’ve got a guy who the week before this happened, I’m sorry, the week after this happened, was due in court for a charge of driving 63 in a 30.
0:18:58.4 Josh: In an unrelated event.
0:19:00.9 Aaron: Yeah, unrelated event. But the point is…
0:19:02.6 Josh: Related in some way, but in a separate other instance of recklessness.
0:19:08.9 Aaron: Yeah. So when I say if you see something, say something. What I’m talking about is, you know that this person’s operating a tractor trailer and you should be in awe of that. This is a massive building sized vehicle that’s going down the road at highway speeds. If you see something strange, understand that it is not uncommon in this world where there’s a race to the bottom and cheap freight. In this current world, it is not uncommon for those drivers to be on heavy stimulants to keep themselves awake, for those drivers to be potentially intoxicated with other substances, for those drivers to be violating their hours of service, and for drivers to not have received any of the training that you assume that a proactive company would give them. You know, how to clear an intersection, how to, you know, check your blind spot, all that stuff, throw all those assumptions out in this current world, you live in a world of, you know, these drivers are minimal, minimal, minimal.
0:20:06.1 Josh: Wild West.
0:20:06.9 Aaron: Yeah, Wild West. So if you see something, say something. That’s the first rule. The second rule is if you get in a trucking accident, I’m not just saying this for advertising purposes. I would say this to any of my family members and I would mean it. You have to hire a lawyer. That’s not the kind of case that you’re gonna be able to figure out on your own. You’re not gonna be able to peel back the layers of the onions and find all the wrongdoing, the root cause that led up to what on the surface may just look like a fender bender. You know, it’s worth getting someone to investigate it and check, you know, the FMCSR rules, make sure they’re following the DOT rules, make sure that they’re being held accountable, and make sure there aren’t, you know, 10 other companies with linkages to that accident who are exerting control over that driver and just aren’t at the table when you think, you know, you’re signing a good deal. So that’s my soapbox on this one.
0:21:02.8 Josh: There’s a lot to learn from this and I think we’re excited to be a part of a case that has implications, well and above, beyond the already substantial implications that this catastrophic collision has had on our community. And it’s really going to be interesting to see what we’re able to learn.
0:21:28.3 Aaron: Good talking to you.
0:21:29.2 Josh: Good talking to you too.