Beer and Loading at The Mid-America Trucking Show
Hunter S Thompson's hometown hosts the country's biggest annual trucker party, which is becoming something of a Museum-in-Waiting
”Oh would you look at that, country fried steak! And we haven’t even crossed the Mason Dixon line yet.”
My chauffeur, Lora Andela, aka The Tiny Bullhauler ordered something far more modest than fried steak swimming in sausage gravy for this early morning meet up. We had just stopped in Arkport, NY, to pick up another passenger for our bobtail trip to Kentucky, Miss Trisha Severson, and this small diner seemed the ideal place to meet. Trish is a HazMat tanker yanker and mother of two. One of Trisha’s daughters looked the part of your typical teenaged girl, having been roped into dropping mom off at such an early hour - shy, and locked into her phone.
After breakfast, the three of us piled into Lora’s 2025 Mack to head to Louisville, Kentucky, home of the annual Mid-America Trucking Show, now in its 53rd year. We lucked out for a ride down with Lora as she would be heading out to Colorado afterwards to pick up a brand new cattle pot; though as we headed west on New York route 17, winter began to protest its own waning days and we were treated to the nervous attention that comes with bobtailing in snow. Even in Lora’s capable and safe hands, there’s just something about not having any weight on the drives, not even an empty trailer, that makes navigating such conditions unsettling. The wholesome distraction of riding along with a couple of babes couldn’t even shake it, at least until we met sunnier conditions closer to Cleveland.
As you do on any long road trip with more than one person in a vehicle, we whiled away the hours by telling stories and discussing various issues of the day, including the hazards of sharing the roads with so many unqualified illiterates. The three of us, in spite of our perfect driving records and professional standing, were all keenly aware of the risks presented by other traffic, especially of the tangos we may be forced to dance with Somalians or Uzbeks by way of a head-on coming at us across the median in a White Volvo. Lora gave Amazon trailers a wide berth, and did her best to put them behind us, quick time.
A few of our comrades in Steering and Gearing had worse luck; our man Chris Thomas, who had only a two and a half hour drive to Louisville from his home in Eastern Kentucky, was detoured along the way due to a wreck. Two of my colleagues from American Truckers United who drove up from Little Rock, Arkansas, were delayed in stopped traffic on an interstate near Nashville for many hours due to a fatal collision involving a big truck. And then another of my favorite trucker friends was tailgated by a mewling cabbage at 75 miles an hour.
The Worst were pulling Mad Max stunts on the Best, right before our biggest party.
In spite of the various gauntlets run, all of those whom I expected to see at MATS had arrived safely, and we spent much of Wednesday evening hanging out with Taylor Barker and his wife Sherie at their RV, drinking beers and talking shit; a sort of pre-game tailgate party that was once a regular feature of truck stops on the weekend for that cohort of drivers who didn’t get home all too often. Whether from drivers being broke, or recently arrived to America and observant of certain imported cultural restrictions, the truck stop beer hangout is another of these working class institutions that’s almost disappeared, like Big Joe in the old Red Sovine hit song “Phantom 309”, covered here by Tom Waits.
One of the problems our industry faces is the increase in the number of wannabe Big Joe’s on our roads and the Phantoms they create out of otherwise innocent motorists.
Rather than a shortage of truckers, we have always had an excess, at least of the lower quality kind. The growing domination of our economy by Private Equity and various other parasites seeking to scrape all value out of the American Worker’s pocket has resulted in scams from our political class which produce even more truckers, further debasing everyone’s wages and opportunity, and animating phantoms from lives lost on the roads.
Thankfully, the organizers at MATS are well aware of this, and happen to like my writing; they once again invited me to submit a short essay for inclusion in the program they hand out to all participants of the show, and I was happy to oblige.
To save you peering at the screen, here is my submission to MATS, in full, titled “Too Many Truckers?”
The American trucking industry in 2025, just like America itself in every other year, is facing some significant challenges, and is likewise experiencing notable social and political upheavals downstream of the re-election of Donald Trump. Will Trump’s second term, with the addition of Vice-President J.D. Vance, bring positive changes to the trucking industry, or more of the status quo?
Though some claim we are beginning to see the end of the Great Freight Recession of 2022-2024, a recent earnings call from CH Robinson, one of the largest freight brokers on Earth, indicated a “drawn out stage of capacity oversupply” and as the hangover from the revelations of how fake our economy was during the previous administration, they note that “demand has yet to materialize.” All of this means that the trucking industry is still facing a challenge of low rates and a dearth of work.
‘Capacity oversupply’ is a telling choice of verbiage from Robinson, when a number of questionable schemes to further flood the market with “drivers” continue to be revealed. A recent news spot from WFAA, an ABC affiliate TV station in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, showed us that fatal incidents involving truckers are downstream of a freight market which continues to be rife with double brokering and thoroughly unqualified drivers put on the road by CDL mills; the gentleman in question behind the wheel in the particular incident highlighted by WFAA publicly admitted having never had any winter driving training during the three week CDL course he took after arriving in America from Haiti. So much for the rigor and focus on safety we are lead to believe animates these schools.
Meanwhile, the driver shortage narrative, as it has manifested with our neighbors in Canada, has shown their trucking industry to be infiltrated by narco traffickers, and they are only too happy to use recent arrivals from India as mules to move product into America. Recent talk of Tariffs applied to Canada and Mexico by the returning Trump Administration have cited this problem, and one wonders how the North American trucking industry has fallen into such disrepute with our political leaders. How did it come to be this way?
An interesting change to the industry that took place in the waning days of the Obama administration can give us some clues to what is going on here. A memorandum was issued by the FMCSA which waived enforcement of English language proficiency requirements as required under 49 CFR 391.11(b)(2), preventing DOT and other law enforcement officers from placing out of service those drivers found to be functionally illiterate for the job. A loophole large enough, you might say, to circumvent any walls, and certainly large enough to have hobbled the market so badly that trucking industry website FreightWaves has a whole section of their platform dedicated to discussing bankruptcies and layoffs.
While the trucking industry faces these oversupply challenges, the Biden administration, on its way out the door, issued more work visas for truckers to foreigners, and Elon Musk, who is playing a significant role in the new DOGE, has repeated the driver shortage myth in a recent earnings call for Tesla. Does the American trucker have any friends in government?
It is now being revealed by a newer advocacy organization, American Truckers United, that a number of states are issuing CDLs to drivers who do not live in the US, are not citizens of the US or the state issuing the license, and are accepting learners permits from other countries without scrutiny. They have also found a marked and incredible increase in the issue of CDLs in total starting in 2020 that is not easily explained, and all of this has an uncomfortable correlation with a steady increase in collisions and other incidents involving trucks. Hopefully whomever takes the lead at the FMCSA under Trump refocuses their efforts in these areas, rather than wasting time evaluating ELDs, a mandate Trump’s appointee ought look into dismantling; the imposition of surveillance tech being an ineffective rearguard action after so many untrained and poor quality horses have left the barn.
Drivers and small company owners need to start making strong demands of their state and Federal representatives to get a handle on these problems, lest there be no room left for Americans on their own interstates.
In addition to the PKY Truck Beauty contest, various vendors from all over the country selling everything from maintenance lifts, to insurance, to the latest gadget meant to reinvent the wheel and save truckers precious seconds while the government allows customers to waste our time by the hour or day, to country music concerts and race car drivers with a coterie of scantily clad young women, MATS also provides the ‘Pro Talks Seminar Series’. These talks run the gamut from executives of trucking companies, to service providers hawking their wares, lectures on business development or fuel efficiency, and sometimes, representatives of the regulators who are the trucking industries most loathed burden. MATS 2025 was no different, and one of the first presentations on Thursday featured two of those regulators - Ben Seacrest, who advertised himself as an ‘outreach guy’ for the US DOT, and Chief Counsel for the FMCSA, a lawyer by the name of Jesse Elison. The both of them engaged in what we might politely call a self congratulatory circle jerk about themselves and the new administration, though a nugget from Elison describing how one attorney he knows is dealing with 150 cases of freight fraud a year shined some light on the reality of the business. Any excitement from this anecdote was forgotten immediately by the droning banality and lack of substance one would expect from minor functionaries of state. The real show didn’t start until the audience picked up on the fact that no formal request of input from the crowd was forthcoming, and they took matters into their own hands.
Although Mr Elison described the incoming Trump Administrations commitment to a deregulatory environment, he certainly didn’t inspire any confidence with the fact he didn’t know that his own agency is responsible for setting CDL standards, had waived one of those standards, and also did not know that state DOTs were no longer placing drivers out of service for failing to meet those standards. Any of the people in that room not on stage would do a better job of regulating trucking than these clowns.
We later learned from a second FMCSA gig at MATS regarding the very major issue of Freight Fraud that another of their functionaries was unaware of what a TWIC card is. Transportation Worker Identification Credentials are required of any trucker or other worker at United States port facilities. Getting one involves a background check inclusive of Biometric data such as finger printing or a hand scan, and you have to live in the United States or Canada to get one. It was suggested to the FMCSA that the employees of any load brokerages, in applying for an MC number to operate in the US market, should likewise be required to have the same credential. Given that the vast majority of freight fraud taking place in the American trucking market involves offshore load brokers and dispatch ‘services’, this requirement would solve most of the problem in one fell swipe of the hand in a FedGov Gom Jabbar test. Like many of the people reading this who failed to get that reference, our man at the FMCSA likewise didn’t know what a TWIC card is. The Spice must flow, and so will the scamming.
Later in the day my Old Man finally showed up, having made the drive from Louisville from his home base in Ontario. Along with another writer friend who came to cover the show, they were both first timers at MATS, so we decided to check out the official welcoming at the end of the day, which featured a half decent bluegrass band, and one room dedicated to bourbon and beer tastings, and a bunch of free food. My fellow truckers did not disappoint in living up to stereotypes, and the lines for all were a mile long. We decided to go downtown instead, where a number of FreightX peeps were congregating at Patrick O’Sheas, an Irish bar in the center of a city known for Bourbon. What could possibly go wrong?
Well … not much, as it turns out. The Old Man was tired, and I had a lot of hustling for the book to do the following day, so I regret to inform my readers that there were no Thompson-esque benders undertook on that first night - at least not by me. Would have been fun though, given the crew, including a six foot nine tall Texan flatbedder towering over the crowd and keeping everyone in line. Long Haul Paul, the famous guitarist and writer for Overdrive Magazine held court, mostly talking to my Dad. American Truckers United and their whole crew were there, along with all of the high energy maniacs from Truck Parking Club. We had picked up a dude who specialized in hauling jet engines for airlines and the Air Force from another event with Paul, and then added in some absolute smokeshows in the form of Farahn Morgan, a belle of Appalachia on assignment from the Washington Examiner, and former FreightWaves editorial head Rachel Premack, taking a break from her new gig as a researcher for an asset management firm. If only we were all younger and less married.
Before the show I had been privy to (or perhaps a victim of?) a bunch of emails from various suppliers who would be having displays at MATS. Part of the deal with my VIP media pass, I suppose, but methinks some of these guys should look into the people they choose to send emails to. Our culture is awash in what you might call ‘AI Slop’ right now, which is to say that everyone and their robotic dog claims to have Muh A.I. Driven Solutions to problems which don’t actually exist, and because of all this hype the rest of us are along for the ride, even though we didn’t buy nor request a ticket.
One of these clownish outfits called “Bubba AI” had asked me for free advertising, in the form of discussing their product on this substack. Given that one of the features of their product is a translation service that will make it even easier for the likes of Jeff ‘Bozo’ Bezos to insource illiterate foreigners on to our turf, they clearly hadn’t read my work, or their Artificial Intelligence had lived up to its Artificiality by not understanding who they were dealing with. I emailed the head of this company back and told him as much, who turned out to be a Mr. Chaudhari, and he made the very bold claim that no, in fact, his product would solve the problems of insourced drivers brought here under very suspicious circumstances. It’s a good thing he didn’t tell that to a relative of the López family of Austin, Texas, all four of whom were killed by one of these cretins brought here by Biden.
There were a handful of these outfits at MATS, pimping whatever newly re-invented wheel fitted with AI tires as the next step in the evolution of logistics. It wasn’t surprising to me, at least, that the booths for these services never appeared to have much in the way of a crowd, in stark contrast to both the PKY truck display outside, and the American Truck Historical Society and their display of older classic iron at the south end of the South Hall. Navigating the trucks outside was an exercise in human traffic, not unlike a shopping mall in the week before Christmas; at least until Amazon took that away, too. People have an intuitive sense that much of the modern technology presented to us today is very fake and has long passed the point of diminishing returns in its utility. The diesel engine is over one hundred and forty years old, Mack Trucks turned 125 this year, Kenworth is a hundred years old, and so is Cummins. There are only so many improvements one can make to the very simple task of getting product moved down the road; though in deference to my friend Jamie Hagen, who is a big fan of Mack/Volvo (might as well be the same platform now), they have pushed their drive train technology to some very fuel efficient territory, and good for them. I’ll place my bets on Edison Motors - at least their trucks haven’t caved to the false gods of sky worship in the form of appearing as Aerodynamic Golden Calves upon 18 wheels. It might be worthy to note here that none of the major truck manufacturers known for their sleek aerodynamic designs (Plastics) had any displays at MATS; only Kenworth was present.
All kidding on the Plastic versus Hood preference discussion aside (I love you, Hagen, you know that) at very least we didn’t see anyone at MATS pushing Autonomous Truck technology this year. Perhaps Aurora decided against returning, having given a Pro Talk last year which resulted in them being grilled by yours truly along with my colleague James Year. Maybe their cool reception was relayed to other competitors, or maybe its just common sense that those seeking to replace America’s truckers with robots wouldn’t show up at a trucker party. Hell, that’s probably why the American Trucking Association wasn’t there, as they’re just as guilty of engaging in a replacement operation by supporting the import of indentured servants, not machines.
Speaking of indentured servants, and that terrible tragedy in Austin, Amazon was at MATS as well, with a big display for their ‘Relay’ load board, where they tempt truckers to haul your packages for you at the lowest price possible. I attempted to have a discussion with one of their representatives about that incident, and what Amazon was doing to clean up their vetting processes so that we might prevent insourced labor from outing Americans off this mortal coil. It didn’t take long for the young blonde lady, who seemed so keen to speak to me at first, to freeze up and get uncomfortable from my line of questioning. I was nice, honest! I’m always nice in person with new people; to no avail with Amazon lady.
”There is no one here who can answer those questions for you right now.”
From insourcing to outsourcing, we had this booth from the former Soviet state of Krygyztan, advertising cheap back end labor.
Usually the offshore scammers who view America as an ATM from which they may freely withdraw value stay home and do all of their business online; pretty ballsy to rock up to America’s biggest trucking show, where many of those truckers wives and other relatives ARE that back end labor.
Every year I’ve been to MATS there has been an assortment of Chinese parts manufacturers onsite, often with fairly elaborate displays, if not tons of people around. This year, MATS had them all grouped together in one particular spot within the huge South Hall part of the Expo Center, including a number of manufacturers from Thailand, curiously enough; make of this arrangement what you will.
If there were any group of Non-North Americans at the show who didn’t reek of Scam Artistry or AI delusions, it was the crew from Copy Southbound, Australia’s biggest trucking podcast. They seemed happy to hang out and do a lot of interviews for their show, and I was honored to be invited to a local Barbecue joint for a group dinner with them by my great friend Flatbed Red, the infamous truck tour YouTuber and sketch artist. Her husband Chris helps out a great deal with the American Truck Historical Society and their display of Old Iron.
The Ozzies were a hoot, asking me where they could find a ‘bottle-O’ so as to acquire bourbon, and generally living up to their own stereotypes where it regards drinking.
I asked them about the famous Clive James quote, about how the problem with Australians is not that they are descended of Convicts, rather, that they are mostly descended of Prison Officers. Like nearly every Australian I meet, they had to look up Mr James and his quote; they begrudgingly admitted to being willing prisoners of an out of control nanny state. I sensed their discomfort with where I was going with my interrogation of their homeland, even though I’d been to Australia four times and worked there for a couple of years of my life, and professed my love for the place.
The small-l folk libertarianism that animates many Americans, of which I am an unabashed and proud disciple, is still a foreign concept to people from other Anglo countries, even those who claim to be our mates. I can’t wrap my head around how so many who were trapped in the regime of 1984 with Kangaroos still identify with the Prison Officers.
As they say in Sunnyvale, Way She Goes, Bubs.
Though I missed the Friday night country music concert featuring MATS and truck show circuit regular Tony Justice, whom I happened to open for by giving a speech in DC last year, I did manage to hit at least one evening hangout with a couple of old boys, who polished off a few beers in the company of myself, James Year, and my six foot nine Texan friend Ryan.
The show I really like at MATS, however, is pretty small, and takes place in the back of a 48 foot van trailer that has been converted to a well appointed bar by the very talented mechanic and fabricator Brandon Carpenter. Mr Carpenter’s Saturday evening events have taken on something of a legendary status amongst regulars at MATS, almost as if an afterparty at a speakeasy where you have to know the secret password; though in this case, anyone is welcome, you just have to know about it.
The bar is built closer the nose of the trailer, with the door behind the bar leading to a small apartment, which allowed Brandon and his wife to take a fully restored International daycab to MATS without having to worry about a bunk nor accommodations. A small sound system is set up at the back, so as to project the music played inside out into the parking lot, where those assembled stand, tailgate, or enjoy the show in lawnchairs. Its all very cozy and Lo-fi, and like the veneration of square hooded Old Iron which surround Mr Carpenters trailer and make up 99.9% of the trucks on display at MATS, the whole scene stood in stark contrast to the visions of tech utopians who seek to automate us all away.
It probably helped my nostalgic feeling that as the tailgate party started to fill up, another MATS tradition got rolling, the Saturday night parade of trucks which make laps around the entire Kentucky Exhibition Center. Lights on and blowing their air horns, it felt an awful lot like that day I stood on an overpass outside of Ottawa, and welcomed the Freedom Convoy as they made their way to the black heart where Canada’s government sits. It’s a good thing we were blessed with a warm spring night in Louisville, rather than the 30 below we dealt with in Ottawa. Beer drinking weather, rather than hot chocolate.
As the night wore on, and Long Haul Paul belted out his signature growl over an acoustic guitar, taking breaks from singing to play harmonica, it all felt very good and righteous to be part of this group of perceived dinosaurs, these NeoLuddites facing extinction. Though MATS and the people who make it happen may represent the vestigial remains of a slow moving blacktop culture, already declared dead by a modern society that moves at the speed of light within fiber optic cables, they are the best of the best of that part of our workforce that keep our economy moving - for now. Perhaps our policy makers ought stop treating them as an afterthought before we figure out what to do with the promised digital looms.
See you next year at MATS, I’ll be there selling copies of the book I’m working on, and I would be happy to sign a copy for you.
Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail are welcomed and strongly encouraged - gordilocks@protonmail.com