The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 294: Will Swaim—The Ballad of Tom Odom

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

Will Swaim, journalist and president of the California Policy Center, educates us on CA Assembly Bill 5 (AB5,) which seeks to turn independent contractors into employees, and how it's negatively affecting 70,000+ independent California truckers; truckers like Tom Odom, who calls in from the road to let us know why he is A.) part of a class action lawsuit and B.) moving to Texas.  Spoiler Alert: it's because of AB5!     Will Swaim's article about AB5 and Tom Odom   Contact Tom with your AB5 story at [e-mail]

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Those insights help you get more sleep. Starting night one. Add it to your registry or shop at NANET, N-A-N-I-T-com. Here we go with episode number 294 of the way I heard it. This one is called The Ballad of Tom Odom. And you're probably asking yourself, gosh, Mike, who's Tom Odom? Chuck certainly has that expression on his face right now. But of course, we just met him.

Why don't you tell the folks who Tom Odom is, Chuck? Tom Odom is a long-haul trucker who's, you know, had his own trucking business. owns his own rig, lives in California, is a native Californian, and unfortunately he's going to have to leave the state soon because of a little thing called California AB5. Yeah, this is a little unusual for us. I try and stay in my lane, as they say, but I do think that this is my lane. This is an issue here in California that's going to impact everybody in the country. It's called Assembly bill number five, and basically it's an attempt to destroy the gig economy or freelance work, as we understand it. Tom Odom is not actually our guest. You'll hear from him in this conversation

because he's on the road driving his truck right now, but he called in. My guest is a guy called Will Swame, and Will wrote an article not too long ago that I linked to last week on Facebook and started a bit of a conversation. The article appeared in National Review, and it is a really, to my eye anyway, a really simple to understand explanation of the ongoing effort to destroy freelancing in America. And against some long odds, in my view anyway, it got passed. And it's happening right now. And 70,000 truckers, 70,000 independent truckers in the state of California, are about to lose their livelihoods unless they fall in line

and get an actual job with a trucking company. It's a big deal, dude, and you know, you know how I feel about it, but I assume you're coming from the same place. You spent most of your life freelancing. Yeah, I know exactly what it's like to be an independent contractor,

and it's a lifestyle that I embraced for most of my adult life. And the problem with AB5 is that right now, it's local to California, but it's coming to America. There's a bill in Congress called the Pro Act that basically is the federal version of California Assembly Bill 5. And so Tom right now is finding respite having to move to Texas, but he may not be able to outrun the Pro Act unless something is done and people come to their senses about this. In other words, this is relevant, actually. It's a fun conversation. It's a really thoughtful conversation, I think, but it's also,

dare I say, an important dialogue. We have to have it, right? And you guys know where I'm coming from with MicroWorks. We're not pro-union. We're not anti-union. We don't care. We've got 1,500 people who are working right now as a result of our scholarship program in part. Some of them are in unions. Some of them are not. So this conversation is not intended to be a criticism. of unions in general. It is intended to be an honest talk about the state of work in this country and what will happen if freelancing and the gig economy, as we understand it, really does go away. It's way bigger than Uber and Lyft. It goes right to the guts of our supply chain and really is going to wind up impacting everybody in the country. One other quick note, and we normally

don't do this, but the most important bit of information to come out of this conversation happens at the very end of the podcast when Tom provides an address where people all over the country can help. So I want to give you that address now, just so you have it. So as you're listening, if you don't make it to the end and you feel like doing something about all this, you can get involved. Chuck, what is that address? The address is an email address, and it is my A.B5Story at gmail.com. My AB5Story at gmail.com. I'm just pointing this out now because if you're an independent contractor or if you know

somebody who is, if you've ever been paid with a 1099 instead of a W2 and liked it, you have a chance to help move the needle here by sharing your experience as an independent contractor at that email address. Tom is going to court. This is like Mr. Smith goes to Washington stuff. He's leading the fight against this, and our guest will swain, will explain why this should matter a lot to you. I love this conversation. I hate the topic because I'm scared to death that right now the pendulum is swinging in the wrong direction.

But, hey, let's see if we can push it back a little bit. It's episode number 294, the ballad of Tom Odom. Well, people are still wrong. Raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Rowe gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding and well-established commitment issues, you'll learn about the latest offer from Pure Talk, which includes unlimited talk, text, and data for just $3499 a month,

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At puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure Talk. Well, here we are. I've done a speed check. What do you think, guys? Sounds great.

Yeah. Yeah. You haven't frozen up again, so that's good. Well, it's one thing when my producer gives me a thumbs up, but when my guest, Will Swame gives me a thumbs up, I know we're going to be good, even though, Will, you and Chuck appear to have called one another last night and settled upon a plum-colored attire?

Was this intentional? Yeah, we went for Glasgow Rangers colors. I just made that up. I have no idea whose colors. Who are the Glasgow Rangers? I don't even know. Premier League team. So we're...

But what sport? Was it rugby? Is it? It's soccer. Yeah. Or what the British call football. Right. Plum tops, blue bottoms.

Wow. That was pretty good. From tops to bottoms. All right. Well, that's a good goal for this conversation. I'd like to discuss from the top to the bottom, not just your sartorial choices, but what in the wide world of madness is going on in the great state of California vis-a-vis. freelancing and gigging and all that stuff. But first of all, are you pals with Charlie Cook?

You guys know each other? Yeah, we do. He's full-time at National Review, and I'm a contributor, and I run a podcast on California Politics for National Review. I've listened to it. Is it free Radio California?

Is that the one, or is there another one? It's radio-free California podcast. So close. So close. What did Radio Free Europe actually mean when it was a thing. Yeah, that's where we borrow the name. And, of course, Radio Free Europe

was designed by the United States government to broadcast news to occupied territory. By occupied, I'm talking about like the Soviet bloc, Eastern Europe, Russia, that sort of thing. So giving the people in those benighted countries an opportunity to hear what was going on in the real world. So we do the same thing. Yeah, I was just going to say,

in some subtle or maybe not so subtle way, are you comparing the golden state to an occupied land? I know it might sound hyperbolic, but I think it's true. And we can describe, you know, just one example of how that's true. That is the trucking bill and the gig economy and that sort of thing we'll be talking about here. Good. Chuck and I, while we don't drive trucks, we spent most of our actual careers, such as they are, freelancing and gigging. Granted, we did it in a profession that's demonstrably different than driving an Uber or a truck or writing code or any number of other things.

But for me, I started paying attention to this topic about a year ago. And I just couldn't believe the bill would get traction. And again, I know my slip is going to show here and I'm going to break some eggs with my pals in the unions. But I just couldn't believe an idea that seems. so fundamentally at odds with the business of making a living and taking a measure of responsibility for yourself, I just couldn't believe it would make it through. And God help us, it has. So if you would, I'm looking at your most recent article on this. If you could just give a supremer on what's happening, where we stand in all of this, and et cetera.

Sure. In 2019, California's Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill called Assembly Bill 5. For short hand, we call that AB5. So the bill said that it was addressing a problem of exploitation of workers who were freelancers but should have been full-time employees of the companies who were their clients. So in the example you guys used, you were freezers. You were free. Relance reporting, and probably are still to some extent, freelance reporters, clients bring you on to do some work for them in a contract kind of relationship. You do the work and then you move on. You get no – they don't tell you how to do the work. They don't tell you you have to be at a desk at 8 o'clock and you leave at 5. You punch out for a 20-minute lunch or whatever. They don't do any of that stuff. There are no benefits, but it's an agreement between two parties, an employer, if you will, a client and the provider, the service provider.

So what California was trying to accomplish in that moment, it said was to address exploitation, situations where freelance workers, independent contractors, they're called in the law, should have been technically full employees with real hourly pay and work schedules that were utterly predictable, nine to five, whatever, and benefits. And, of course, taxes to the state. The real goal, I'll just give you the shorthand here, Mike, the real goal was to drive. independent contractors into large employers that could afford to manage all those benefits and costs and to eliminate the competition for those employers. So if you have a bunch of truck drivers out there who own their own rigs and they're able to set their own schedules and their own pricing, well, they're running as competition to large transportation companies that don't like that competition. It keeps the prices low, right? That's what competition is for, in part, to provide the best value at the best

cost. So in the trucking industry, what this meant effectively was it 70,000 people as of 2019 when the bill was signed, 70,000 truckers suddenly had two choices, go to work for a large transportation company as their employee and surrender their businesses or get the hell out of California. I talked to a number of truckers, one of whom I featured in the story you mentioned, a guy named Tom Odom from the Central Valley of California, who has decided to go for plan B. He's closing up shop in California and moving his family to Texas, and he's going to continue independent trucking in Texas. So to be as clear as possible, the government isn't saying you must leave unless you do this, but the practical reality of falling in line is going to,

I mean, how exactly is it hurting the independent trucker financially? The assembly bill, you mean? Yes. Yeah, well, it basically says to them that they can't operate outside of an employment agreement with a larger carrier, where they are, in fact, employees rather than independent business owners. So it's a little bit like if you wanted to continue to do your work, Mike, anybody you worked for had to hire you as an employee. And they had the right there for, and you might say responsibility to set your work hours, watch how you do your work, lean over your shoulder all the time. You can imagine that for truckers especially, I mean, these are the, you know, 20th century, 21st century version of cowboys. We have an entire genre of music dedicated to guys out on the open road and an 18-wheeler.

These are not the kinds of people who typically are looking for a 9 to 5 gig in an office someplace or, you know, I'm being euphemistic here, but they're not the kinds of people who really want to be somebody else's employee. They bought these rigs at tremendous cost. I mean, you've seen these machines. They can cost $250,000 or more. And that's an investment. These guys, these men, these women, and a huge number of them, it should be said in California, are immigrants. I mean, sometimes, like, they just got here from someplace else,

and this is their second or third rung of the economic ladder. They're moving up out of total poverty from some other country. And now they own their own company. They carry freight out of California's ports, out of our warehouses, into California. and the state suddenly told them, you can't do that here. It's against the law. And you're right, Mike. Thank you for putting a finer point on that.

They don't have to leave California. But if they want to continue their operations, they have to leave California. Well, the thing that worries me most is, I mean, as always, it's unintended consequences. I think the intended consequences of this thing, frankly, are scary enough because it's rooted in the idea that everybody thinks the same way about the business of making. a living. And not to sound too well, I'm trying to be careful, but the employer-employee relationship is sometimes paternal. It feels that way. It's an attempt to eliminate a lot of uncertainty from the average person's life or from some people's lives. I don't even want to paint with that broad a brush. But you're so right. I've been on Outlaw Trucker channels. I've been

interviewed on those things. There's an entirely different type of mindset that's so completely human, and this just glosses over that. And I don't know that we can compare a lift driver or an Uber driver to a long-distance trucker, but, you know, a different house on the same street, maybe, right? There are a lot of people whose lives only make sense when they can work on their own terms. And this just seems to run over that rough shot. It does. And I would say, you know, it's probably worth pointing out that when the bill was written, it was, how shall I put this? It was aimed directly and with great publicity at the gig industry, the gig economy. That is particularly Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash. These companies that depend on kind of, you know, more or less, they are independent contractors. I interviewed a young woman who lived in the Bay Area and had to go to school in the city of San Francisco. And she loved driving for Uber and Lyft because it allowed. her to wake up in the morning to determine whether she was going to go to school, whether she was going to pick up a writer who was going to help defray the costs of her transportation into the city,

her gas, her, you know, her mileage, etc. Or whether she wasn't going to do any of the above. She was going to drive by herself, perhaps. So for a certain number of people, that kind of casual relationship to the business owner, the client, is remarkable. It's liberating. It's freeing. If I want to work, I do. If I don't, I turn off my app and I don't work for Uber or Lyft. But you're right, Mike. The folks who backed AB5, particularly the Teamsters Union, I can get into that if you'd like. And the Service Employees International Union, what they really wanted was a one-size-fits-all kind of situation where those kinds of people, those drivers for Uber Lyft and DoorDash or truck drivers or translators, translation services, graphic designers and photographers, you name it, where all these freelance people were.

hurted out of their independent little shops, if you will, and into large employers where they would be more easily organizing targets for unions. That's their whole goal in this thing. You mentioned numbers. I do want to focus on transportation and supply line, too. God, in terms of unintended consequences, that's got to be somewhere near the top of this. It's going to impact everybody.

But back up just a little bit, and you just went through a pretty good laundry list of the gig economy or the freelance mindset out there. How many people are we talking about? How many working people are we talking about all over the country who labor in the style you've just described? It's in the millions, Mike, nationally. I mean, this may be the largest part of the economy, in fact. If you start to talk about small businesses and then look at those small businesses that provide a service for other businesses, you're getting into the tens of millions of people. And while we can keep in mind that AB5 is only a California state law governing independent contractors in California,

the Department of Labor has since announced that it's going to take AB5 National in something called the Pro Act. That's a big Biden administration piece of legislation now in the Congress. And the Department of Labor is saying, like, look how well this works in California. Everybody should have the benefits of this law. So if I live in Texas or Tennessee or Michigan, Wisconsin, you name it. If I live anywhere else in the U.S. and I look at this, I would be very afraid. Maybe I'm overreaching, but I know there are a lot of people listening to this. God, I hope there are.

Last we checked, we're doing okay. But look, people are really divided over this. And I think part of the reason is because they haven't embraced the truth of of what you just said. This podcast right now, like what we're doing right now is way more gig-ish than not. I mean, you talked about the relationship before that a trucker has with his client. And for the independent trucker, that's sacrosanct. Well, here, I mean, I've got shows on cable. I've got shows on broadcast. I've got relationships with publishers. I do all sorts of different things. But there's nothing like this. I can sit here in my office with two guys wearing

plum-colored get-ups and talk about anything I want. I can write an unauthorized jingle for the sponsor that's coming up next. You know, there's nobody there to tell me I can't do that. And I know that there's a conversation going on in the halls of entertainment. I know there are a lot of people out there in my business who are going, wait a second, what the hell is going on? here. This whole podcast thing is getting out of control because the podcast thing is rooted in the very principles of freelance work. I'm just filibustering for a minute because I want people to understand, you know, it's not just a long distance trucker, it's not just a weekend Uber driver. This is the fat part of the bat when it comes to work. I want to jump in here for a second because

you said that the labor department is saying, hey, look at AB5 and how great it's working for California and let's bring that to the rest of the world. What are they pointing to? Like, what is the upside in their mind? Well, the upside is they know what's going on. I mean, first of all, it's absolutely clear. If you looked at, so let me just back up and set the stage for you, this is the port of Los Angeles last Wednesday. You know, we're recording a Monday, so five days ago. The Labor Secretary shows up with the Deputy Labor Secretary, Teamsters Union officials, two truck drivers and port officials and representatives of four very large union carriers, you know, trucking companies.

And to a person, what they said was, I was a victim of worker misclassification. It was terrible. It was unpredictable. I had no idea where my next meal was going to come from. And the trucking company said roughly the same thing. It's so unstable. It's so unpredictable. We just don't know how to operate in this crazy environment of having to hire an independent

trucker. This makes everything stable and predictable. But it doesn't take much to understand that what the administration, the Biden administration, is trying to do in that moment is just sort of exclude any contrary evidence. They had two truck drivers who said how terrible it was. They didn't talk to the 70,000 members of the California Trucking Association who protested wildly when this law came out. They shut down port traffic in San Francisco, Oakland, Long Beach, L.A., just so your listeners know, The port of Los Angeles is the largest port in America. It accounts for something like 80 to 90% of all imports in America. It is a gigantic facility.

They shut it down. These independent truckers did. So, sure, you can find, as you put it, Mike so eloquently, you can find the few people who say, you know what I really want is a stable work schedule. I want to know where I go every morning. I want somebody else how to tell me what to do every day. But these independent truckers did not like this. So you come to, if you're Washington, D.C.,

labor department official. You show up at the port and you say, hey, here's two guys who say it was terrible. Here's some companies who say it was terrible under the old regime. Thank God we've got AB5. Now let's take this national. They just simply ignore the obviousness, Mike, that you and I and others can see down there at the port. And the obviousness of eating what you kill and working in an environment that's defined inherently by some sort of competitive rubric. I mean, if you want to freelance, if you file a tax return and under profession you write performer or actor or anything like that, then 90% of the people who identify themselves in that way are making about 10% of the total revenue that's coming into that entire industry. It's always a struggle. But to paint

with so broad a brush. I mean, look, we're just saying the same thing in slightly different ways, but I want to get to, there are 70,000 independent truckers in California. This bill is going to impact virtually all of them. What happens in Indiana, in Cleveland, in Baltimore, in New Orleans, in Phoenix? What happens when that chunk of our supply line goes elsewhere? I love stories. like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled

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Hey-haw! Well, it's interesting, isn't it? Or maybe serendipitous or ironic, depending on your sense of humor about these things, that this bill really has its toughest impact, its hardest hit on these truckers at precisely the moment we need the most, you know, the supply chain crisis. I don't know about you, Mike, but I don't think I'd ever heard. I was involved in transportation industry, and I hadn't heard so many people ever talk about the supply chain.

And suddenly, I think, you know, my mother, who's in her 80s, knows what the supply chain is. And she'll come back from shopping at the local grocery store and say, my gosh, the supply chain is just a mess. Have you seen the price of eggs? It's the same thing with infrastructure, right? Yes. Like 20 years ago, no one said infrastructure. Right. Now, you know, oh, yeah, the infrastructure and the supply chain really are forcing down currency to valuation.

We're going to have to have a real chat about the overarching demographic impact. Bad sign in America when everybody is familiar with public policy. So I think that this has a huge impact on the supply chain, as you say. I mean, who is going to haul these goods? But I'll tell you, here's how unions and major corporations who are unionized see this thing. It's like the Oklahoma land rush. It's a land grab, right? They've got all this opportunity out there, but these stupid independent contractors are

hogging up the airspace and taking away their deals. So it's a way to crush the competition for large corporations. It's a fascinating thing. I'll just get a little wonky on you here and point to a 1963 historical text that I read back in grad school called The Triumph of Conservatism in which the guy said, look, when somebody proposes establishing regulation, what they're really saying is, I want to own this, right? So you say, you talk about how you're going to liberate workers and you're going to make their lives more predictable. This is going to be really great. But who's going to run this agency?

Who's going to run the group that oversees this whole business? It's going to be those large corporations and the unions that help run them. So this is a land grab, really. It's crushing your competition through government power in a way that strikes me, frankly, is, you know, no matter your politics, it's an American. There's just, I mean, everything old is new again.

I mean, you point out in your article, It was 1929. It's Stalin. It's the Kulaks, right? I mean, it's this same thing played out in agriculture. And talk a little bit about that. How were the Kulaks somehow, how does that correlate to independent trucking? Sure.

And what might that do to three square meals a day? Yeah, I know it's always dangerous to compare people either to Stalin or Hitler, but I don't know what better example exists than Joe's wrong. I mean, of the two, Stalin's probably the better choice. I don't know, man. It ain't good. Just for comparison's sake. Yeah, just for comparison's sake.

I'm sure that the editing will take care of that. We won't have that part of the conversation. But all kidding aside, you get the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Revolution, if you will, in 1917. And then 12 years later, things aren't moving quickly enough for Joseph Stalin. There is widespread hunger. There is a lack of food. And he looks to the independent farmer. These are people called Kulaks.

They are small farmers who operated throughout the Russian Empire. They're small landowners. They run their own little business, and they, shock of shocks, they can supply the market. They know how to produce food. They know how to make a profit. They know how to get it to market. Because if they don't get it to market, they don't make money. So they know how to do their thing.

Well, the Soviet Politburo, and especially Joseph Stolm, they don't like this. This is a problem. A, it presents an alternative model for economic organization. But B, it's a problem when you got to be. all this food in one place and not in another. So what does Stalin do? He collectivizes these farms. The government takes them over in 1929. It's called the decoulocization. That's a really unwieldy term. All it means is we're going to get rid of the farmers. We're going to kill the farmers, literally, push them off their property and or just shoot them on their property, and take their land and give it to

a bunch of peasants who will be overseen by a Moscow-based committee and who will demand that those people produce food for the Soviet Union. And I think the example is exactly the same. We've got these independent truckers who know how to move stuff from point A to point B. They know that their livelihoods depend on getting it, you know, picking it up, getting it there safely, moving this stuff across great distances. So they're totally dedicated. As you said, you eat what you kill. And if these guys don't deliver their product, they're never hired again. They're done. They're gone. So they are on it. And if they're not on it, the market takes care of it. They are eliminated, not in a Stalinist fashion, but they go and find more useful labor someplace else.

That's why I think the example of the Soviet Union is, and I know it could strike some people as way over the top, but I think it's fair warning. As you said, we've seen this before. We have seen it before when the government says, you know, hold my beer, I can do this better than the free market. And then suddenly, you know, here we are in California with, hey, don't worry about. about the homeless problem, we'll take care of it, and it gets worse every year. Or, hey, we're gonna build a high speed rail system connecting LA to San Francisco.

Still unbuilt, wildly over budget, stalled somewhere in a little part of the little patch of the Central Valley. Don't worry about water, we won't build infrastructure, but you also won't have any water. And so most of the rain we're enjoying right now is running right out to the ocean. We haven't built a reservoir in this date in 40 years.

So I could go on. Desalinization? desalination is amazing. Right. Yeah. Well, there's also a technology that's pulling it out of the air. Yeah. There's a guy, Moses.

That's very old testament. Yeah. He's a different rocks, I think. No, it's different Moses. Moses separated the Red Sea Chuck. He didn't pull the water out of the air. This is basic. Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. All right. But in fairness, he did tap a rock and then water came from it. Well, okay. So you made fun of a word. D-Kulac is, say it again? De-Kulacization. Kulakization.

De-Kulacization. Okay. I mean, we laugh because it's absurd. But the way this plays out with the language is interesting to me as well. Like, we've used the word gig in this conversation more than we've used the word freelancer. And that's interesting to me because when I grow up, I just loved, you know, the etymology of being a freelancer. Your lance is free. You serve no lord, right? You're out there on your own, you know, hitting the thing over the head and dragging it back to the cave and eating and so

forth and so on. Gig sounds, oh, less dimensional, more frivolous in the same way that the vocational arts used to be this really wonderful way to talk about the mastery. of a skill. It literally kept the art in the very description of the thing. And of course, arts got rubbed out and then Votech became hyphenated and then it became shop, right? And then it's gone from high school. So like when I look at what happened to the vocational arts in the language, and when I look at what happened to freelancing, this noble attempt to embrace your own individualism through hard work and so forth and so on, to gig. You know, it's all, it just, and then the decoulocization,

it all kind of feels like somewhere, oh, and God, not a month goes by where the dictionary doesn't, you know, make some incredible concession that is just an assault on the vernacular. Have you noticed that as a writer as well, is the language shifting under our feet in the midst of all this? Oh, I wish I had prepared better for this segment. The misuses of language. Yeah.

So I'll say this, that I think gig is an attempt to capture the energy of the entertainment community, right? So if you were a jazz musician, what were you doing on a Friday night at a bar? You were gigging, right? And that's Silicon Valley, right? It is born out of this desire, partly, I think, just for branding purposes, like, we're having fun. What we do here in the Silicon Valley, when we run Twitter or Google or whatever. We're having fun, man. We're sitting on a beanbag.

So you put a beanbag under every 22-year-old, and suddenly he or she is a king and the beanbag of throne. And then you hand them a cup of espresso and let them play, I don't know, hacky sack or whatever. And they're gigging. Man, they're not working. They're gigging. This is my gig. So I think the etymology there is supposed to capture some of that fun and frivolity. you know, we're all boys of a certain age, and freelance really did have, like I remember

becoming a freelancer in journalism out of choice first, because it just seemed so romantic. All of my heroes in writing were people who had been real public intellectuals, I'll call them, you know, people like Edmund Wilson who would show up here or there as a writer and had no permanent fixture in any kind of university or government. He was a free agent, and I loved that. I thought that was really the remarkable way to live my life. Are you a freelancer now still in your practical reality? In practical reality, I am a boss.

I am an employer and I run an organization called the California Policy Center. And we work on problems like AB5. I write about them typically for places like National Review or the Wall Street Journal. But my job at the California Policy Center is to help our job, is to eliminate any kind of government barrier to freedom and prosperity. And if you look at California law through that lens, we're not doing a great job here, Mike. We're falling behind. We are trying.

Every day we wake up. And, you know, this morning, a friend of mine in the office sent me a story that a bill passed 12 years ago takes effect today that will hit people in the trucking business with a double, a sucker punch. 10 years ago, or 12 years ago, rather, we passed a law that said, you can't have a rig. that is older than 2010, but the log went into effect on January 1st. So if you're a truck driver who bought a truck in 2009, and you're still running it, because these trucks can run a long time if they're maintained well, and you have a huge incentive to maintain that truck.

But, you know, today that truck would be 13 years old, and the state of California has said, whoa, whoa, we've got to save the planet, and your truck is not helping out of here. So suddenly all these trucks flooded the national market, right, because you had all these California truckers, with trucks built before 2010 trying to dump them. But the state estimates there are still 100,000 of these trucks on the road in California. And they are trying desperately to catch every one of them and basically de-licensed,

de-permit their owners. It's one more way for the state to say, hey, look, we're doing this with great intention. We're cleaning up the air because somebody's got to. And your truck is terrible. We've got to get it off the road. But what about the business owners? once again, it's going to concentrate ownership of the trucking business in fewer and fewer hands, largely the hands of people who are very, very wealthy and powerful and well-connected,

and connected to unions, right? Okay, so that's the question then. If we're not going to take them at their word and assume that the reason for all of this is truly in the best interest of the largest number of people who have been suffering inordinately as a result of the current situation, if we're not going to be. to believe that's truly that when you peel back the layers, do you think it's really this alliance between one party and the unions in general? Or do you think it's energy and climate change that's simmering underneath all of it? What's primary? Primary in terms of writing these laws and

getting them passed in the legislature is all about power and who has it? are you an independent trucker? Are you the representative of a big trucking company? Are you a Teamsters union official? Are you a part of the SEIU? Whatever. It's about power. But you cannot market power successfully, really.

I mean, it's conceivable that what you say is, well, we're giving all these workers, like the workers are always saying, if they appear in these union commercials, I'll call them, like the one at the port last week, they're always saying, wow, this gave me a real voice in my work life. Well, if you don't think an independent trucker has a voice in his work schedule or her work schedule every single day, you know, please go back and talk to one. So they will talk about power only in that term. Otherwise, it's all about fairness. It's about equality, equity, income inequality.

And, you know, in the case of the bill that went into effect on January 1st, the one about trucks older than 2010, that was all about climate change. So in order to get these things passed, it's a way for the government to, gosh, I hate to use this phrase, but to signal its virtue, right, to say, look at us, pursuing global climate, a solution to the global climate crisis, knowing that what we actually do has very, very little impact on this. In fact, you know, you could argue that having a 2009 truck on the road is far less material in its impact on the environment and the production of a brand new truck from nothing, right? all the raw materials shipped all over the world and the smoldering and metallurgy that goes into producing. The carbon impact of producing a gigantic new rig is not small. So just like you can shut down oil drilling in California and shut down the oil industry and say that you're protecting the climate or protecting workers or neighborhoods or something like that, but the fact is then we just bring oil in from some other place and the impact of cargo ships steaming around the world,

carrying crude oil from Iran or Venezuela, or the Middle East, that's something. That produces tremendous pollution, but we ignore that so that we can signal that we're doing something to save the planet. So I think, you know, in short, the short answer to your question, Mike, is I think the branding is always about justice,

whether it's environmental justice, social justice, worker justice. But the truth is that when you look at how the sausage is made, what you really see is that it's just fights over power. And in California, sadly, the establishment has all the power. and people like Tom Odom, the truck driver I featured in my story,

they just don't have the power, typically, not even when they're in an alliance like the California Trucking Association. Speaking of Tom Odom. Yeah, let's wait for it. I do want to talk about Tom, but I also want to talk about what happened, and I think you mentioned it in your article, but there was another union involved in all of this. I think it was the longshoremen, right,

when we had all of these ships, just hundreds, maybe more. I don't think people really, if you don't live in California and you didn't see the drone shots of hundreds of tankers all over the place. And one of them apparently was anchored over a part of the ocean where some oil lines were running. Well, my God, what a disaster this was and the spin that followed it would make a grown man dizzy. Walk me through what happened there. Yeah, so this was during COVID. the Longshoremen's Union anticipating upcoming contract negotiations began an unofficial work slowdown. They kept denying they were slowing down the work, but in fact, they were, we'll just say it.

And the result was that cargo ships were stacking up outside the port of Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Francisco, Oakland. The lineup outside of Long Beach and L.A. was historic. Nobody had ever seen this. I lived down in Southern California. I could walk out to the cliffs on the ocean here in Orange County. and look out toward Catalina and see this line. It looked like small cities on the sea, just stretching out through the Catalina channel, it's called.

And there were several hundred ships at one point, just locked up. And so the Biden administration sent representatives out here to try to negotiate deals, to open it up, to make it go faster. But one thing it's important to know is that the Longshoremen's Union has long opposed any kind of technology that would help speed up the unloading and loading of these ships because it would produce job loss. Any technology that produces a loss of jobs is clearly hostile to the workers, clearly hostile to the unions and bad for America. So we can't have technology. Leave it to these guys and we'd still have horses and carts

pulling stuff out of the port of L.A. So this lineup was really disastrous. You know, never mind that consumer prices started going up already and you could sort of see the inflation building. This is two years ago. And economists were saying, this is going to be bad. That's when you first started hearing supply chain. So long story short, they have this lineup over the Catalina Channel. Well, the Catalina Channel is, it's crisscrossed by pipes that come from offshore oil rigs onto the coast. They bring oil from California rigs that produce oil. And one of these ships anchored out there during a storm was pushed so hard that its anchor caught and pulled and then tore one of these pipes.

pipelines. Now, as soon as the oil spill occurred, and it took a while, but the oil spill emerged, and it turned out to be quite small, but it was an oil spill. Nobody likes oil spills. They're bad. They're bad for people. They're bad for the ocean environment. They're bad for little marine animals. So as soon as this happened, you had California officials who had helped work with the port of Los Angeles, as is run by the city of L.A., and which is unionized, you had them all point to the shipping company, to the carrier, and say, we're going to hunt them down for doing this terrible, terrible thing. So the people who ordered that ship to stay anchored out in a place where they knew their oil pipelines and wouldn't unload their cargo in a timely fashion,

turned around and blamed the carrier. The second person they blamed was, well, not a person, an entity, oil. If we didn't have oil, this would never have happened. Governor Newsom came out and said, this tears it, this just proves it. We can no longer rely on oil. It's filthy and dirty and stupid. Look what happened here. This was inevitable. Well, it was only inevitable because government couldn't get it right in the port of Los Angeles. So there was this massive hunt for the ship that did it. And we used to say, I used to be a lefty, Mike. And we had this self-parodying joke that after any loss, we would hunt for the guilty and punish the innocent. So go after the ship guys, go after the oil companies, raise the price of gasoline in California because you're going after

the oil companies again. It was just, if you're paying attention, Mike, it's just, I mean, Chuck, you live right in this same neighborhood, really. I mean, you saw those ships lined up out there. When you know that it's the government doing that and then blaming the carriers and blaming oil, it's just a little hard to take. You can only laugh. I mean, either that or you just kind of lose your mind. Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work, skilled labor. That foundation is called MicroWorks, and today I'm proud to tell you that we've

helped thousands of people get the training they need to begin a career in the skilled trades. We'd love to help you. You can apply for a work ethic scholarship right now at microwworks.org. We've set aside $10 million for this year's applicants. Thanks to a number of very effective fundraisers, including the one with my grandfather's name on the label. I refer, of course, to Noble, Tennessee Whiskey, K-N-O-B-E-L, which is now available in a variety of delicious mash bills, all of which you can peruse at Noble Spirits.com. In fact, if you spend $100 and use code Carl, C-A-R-L, you'll get one tube of orange bitter-infused sugar cubes for free. That's code Carl with a C to get nine sugar cubes, ingeniously engineered to make nine perfect old-fashioned every time.

It's my favorite way to support Microworks and my favorite whiskey to sip responsibly after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast. Pick up a bottle at noblespirits.com, K-N-O-B-E-L-Spirits.com. Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. I was trying to launch a line of whiskey, and I had bottles coming in, not even from overseas,

from just some other part of the country coming around the, you know, through this port. I mean, boo-hoo. Mike can't get his whiskey out there, but I mean, it did impact everybody, and it's so interesting how all of a sudden supply chain became a thing that we're talking about at cocktail parties and so forth.

But what I took from that part of your story was that the union really has to have a long walk with itself and look at itself in the mirror and say, look, man, are we for or against progress? Because you're right. If you're going to stand in the way of decisions that would get those ships, unloaded, then what else are you standing in the way of? Is that true? No, they're opposed as a de facto

position to any advancement in technology that would impact jobs? Yeah, their way of putting it is that if there is a technological innovation applied to the port and its work, then no jobs can be lost. You have to find work for the people whose jobs would be displaced. It is literally make work. So, you know, and again, I can't emphasize this enough. This is government working with these unions. In California, many of your listeners, of course, don't live here. But in California, our government is run by government unions. That's the people who work for government, as well as private sector unions,

people like the Teamsters or the port workers that we're talking about. They give more than a billion and a half to politics every year, billion and a half dollars, every year. And then talk about the smaller amount of money that comes from, say, you know, corporations or whatever. So we have a problem in California that our legislature and our local governments, like the city of Los Angeles, are really insulated from any kind of, what's the word I'm looking for, any kind of alternative way of resolving problems?

Like, hey, try freedom, try liberty, try letting people do a thing for themselves occasionally, and maybe you don't have to even be involved here. They just don't think that way. What do you mean you were a lefty? What happened to you? I was raised a nice Catholic boy in South Orange County, went to the old mission school in San Juan, you know, where the swallows come back to Capistrana. Sure, Capistrana, yeah.

And I wanted to be a priest, and I, my parents said, please, dear God, don't go right into the seminary. If you're going to tell people how to live their lives, maybe you should go to a major university for just a year. And I said, absolutely not. Our Irish Catholic priest said, honor your father and mother. And so I went for what I thought would be one year studying theology. USC. Well, while I was there at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, while I was there studying theology, I fell in with a group of people who studied something called liberation theology. This was the idea very, very posh, very cultural, very of the moment in the third world, especially

in Latin America. The idea that Jesus came primarily to help the poor in their war against the rich. and it really was the adaptation of Marxism to the gospel. And I used to famously say the gospel led me to Marx because, I shouldn't say famously like I, like anybody knows who the heck I am. Like people are quoting you now. Well, they will now. In my tiny circle of friends, about five people. Yeah, I would say, the gospel led me, you know, Jesus led me to Marx. And I had a little, I played in a punk band and I had a little crucifix that I wore that was made out of a tiny, AK-47s, because that's how hardcore I was.

And, but I really, you know, I just ultimately just kind of dumped the theology, met a girl, and that was incompatible with the priestly lifehood. You get it. And I joined the Communist Party for a time. I studied Marxist theory at the University of California and really took it quite seriously. I look back on it now, and it really does seem like something out of the Middle Ages when you study Marxism, like angels dancing on head. heads of pins, pounding square pegs into round holes. But it really introduced me to the power of

unions because a lot of my activism was in helping unions get political power. So, you know, in one quick example of this as I started to work more with the Democrats than with the commies. After a while, the lack of personal hygiene among my confreras in the Communist Party had me move on. And also just their kind of theatrical violence. So I introduced. politicians to labor unions and sat in on many meetings where the labor union basically said, look, we got a contract coming up. If you support that contract, we're going to back you. So when you're talking to cops or firefighters and you're running for local city council and they say, hey, just give us a raise. You say, well, no skin off my nose. That's, you know, I'll be

gone in four years or eight years. I'll be up in the assembly or in Congress or something like that. That'll be somebody else's financial problem to deal with. Meantime, I get my picture taken with the cops and who doesn't love cops and firefighters, or at least firefighters. I mean, no disrespect to the cops. I'm just saying, you know, the current... No, it's tough time to be a cop. Yeah, yeah, it is. So you could see how the system worked, or at least I could, because I was there helping facilitate this stuff. I was there helping politicians cut deals with the unions that would then get these guys elected by canvassing their neighborhoods and handing out flyers and getting money from membership dues, et cetera. And then once in office, these politicians would turn around and rubber

stamped the contract. That's how we get a port of Los Angeles, by the way, that is a totally owned operation of the International Longshoreman Warehouse Union, because the city of L.A. is a very union city city. And if you want to get elected to the city council and become mayor, and the mayor gets to appoint the members of the board that runs the port, and the port gets to approve the contract, you're going to make sure that the unions are happy with you. I hope I haven't gone too far into the weeds on that. No, I'm just, I mean, I think it's important for people to know, at least some of your biography because, you know, it's a binary world and people are going to put you in a box real fast. It happens to me every day. It's very difficult to be pro-work as my foundation is, but not knee-jerkie

pro-union. Nothing against the unions. My foundation helps a lot of people who are in the unions. But talk about the head of a pin. You know, that's where we are with this right now, and that's where I'm coming from. We got 7 million people, men, able-bodied, prime working age, sitting out of the market right now. And your article led me to ask, what's more likely for them? If you talk about somebody 18 to 24, 25 years old, do we really think those people who aren't looking for work right now are going to join a union in the next year? Or do we think they might be able to find a way to provide for themselves with a gajillion opportunities, the 11 million open jobs right now, for instance. So it's difficult not to piss somebody off when you talk

about this, regardless of what you say, but the fact that you went from a communist to a guy who's running, is it a think tank? Is it a, what is it exactly? Well, we call California Policy Center an activist think tank. That is to say that, yeah, we work on policy. We have all kinds of great ideas, but the problem in California isn't great ideas, or specifically the one idea, try liberty. It's implementing it in a political system that is absolutely bulletproof against reform. It's just like the port workers that Chuck asked about, you know, and you asked about Mike. The port workers, they own this operation. There is no way to reform this operation so long as they also own the political apparatus, the government.

So if you wanted to reform schools in California, you would find yourself very quickly up against the California Teachers Association, which is the most powerful, largest teachers union in the United States. $300 million a year they bring in $300 million for politics. So if you tried to fix your local school because its academic performance was terrible or they were shut down too long during COVID or for any of the other number of reasons, you might not like what's going on at your local school. You're going to run up against the teachers union. Guess what? They own the school board. Why? because they were paying attention, 365 days a year, and they had $300 million statewide to make sure that their ideas, their notions of how the world ought to work are implemented in government policy.

The best thing in my view about your article was that you ask your readers to remember Tom Odom on Christmas. And these are macro ideas we're taught. It's only the biggest idea, right, work, the definition of a good job, policy and so forth. But in the end, as you said, it's giving a voice, right, to an individual. Give me the short, short version on Tom Odom. And Chuck, if you've got his number, we should see if we can get him on the phone. Because the guy deserves a voice. You gave him one, and I'd love to help as well.

What's his story? Well, Tom is a guy who was raised in really tough circumstances in East Los Angeles. He's about, I think he's late 50s, if I recall. So he would have been raised in this, you know, really in his formative years in the 70s. in East L.A., not a nice neighborhood. And when he graduated from high school, finally, he went into the military, bounced around there a little bit,

and then came out and was unsure what to do as he said, you know, I wasn't going to get a job on a major corporation. That's just not who I was, and I didn't have a college education, and I just kind of had no aptitude for it. And he more or less fell into truck driving. By the age of 21, you can get your license.

He had his license at 21. He went to work in a little family business as a truck driver, an independent trucking firm. And long story, short, in a few years he was able to save enough money to buy his own truck. And as he put it, over the years was able to buy a couple of trucks and then earn, you know, north of a hundred grand per year. That was a pretty great income for a kid with a limited formal education and no ambition to work for a major corporation. He's a working guy. Like I said, grew up in a tough

neighborhood and now is a fairly affluent participating member of society because he's willing to do this really hard work. So when I heard his story, I got to tell you, it was, it's one of those moments where you know you're on the right track because I was actually tearing up, listening to how a single legislative act by a bunch of people you wouldn't trust with your hair dryer suddenly destroys this man's business. He said at one point in the story, I said, you know, what's so bad? What do you like about California? What's so bad about leaving it? And he said that same thing we all hear. because you, Chuck and you, Mike, we live here. He said something like, hey, dude, I can be at the snow in Yosemite in the morning

and watch the sunset over the beach in the afternoon. Yeah. This is the most beautiful place I've ever been. This guy's traveled all over North America. His home is here. He's built a home with his family. And this is not happening in the third world, guys. This is happening right here, where the government is telling him,

you can't work like that. We won't let you. So my feeling is how do you create a business over the course of many years through hard work and sacrifice? There was a lot of sacrifice here. Anybody who works at one of these really difficult jobs has made a tremendous sacrifice. He's on the road most of the time, right? He's gone. And he's gone to provide for his family to produce a business that he can perhaps leave to somebody else.

So when you crush that, when you treat that guy like a Kulak under Stalin, that's a tragedy. Even Stalin himself said, eh, you kill a million people and it's a headline. You kill one person, it's a tragedy. So it's a tragedy. Yeah, it is. Chuck, I see you dialing frantically. Any luck? Yeah, he's right here. So say hi to Tom Odom. Tom, can you hear me? Hi, Mike. Hey, man. How are you?

I'm great. How are you today? We are living the dream, my friend, where whatever this is, Chuck has put his phone on a box of Kleenex and jammed a microphone near the speaker, so welcome to high tech. Where in the United States are you? Jacksonville, Florida today. And are you driving as we speak, or have you pulled into a rest stop? What's the situation? I stopped for the phone call today. Good, because I'm sure there's some sort of liability involved if you run off the road while you're being interviewed by the dirty jobs guy. That would just be a bad look. You know, we talk on the phone a lot. I do use a headset, so I'm totally hands-free.

When I'm going to have an in-depth conversation, I try to stop and make sure that I'm paying attention. Well, I don't know how in-depth this is going to be, but I read Will's article and what he said about you, your story, really hit a nerve, and I think it hit a nerve with a lot of other people. So I just ask Will if he would come on this podcast and then said, well, if he's got your number, I would love to reach out just so people can hear it from you directly. You had a rough start.

You paid your dues. You built a company. You're making well over six figures a year. And it looks like you need to leave the state. So just speak to that, if you wouldn't mind. And tell me about the court case that's coming up. And what ultimately is at stake for you and your family? Well, yeah, you can say I had a rough start growing up in East L.A.

Building my company did take a lot of sacrifice. I mean, when I first started driving truck in 1985, I drove team with my father-in-law. I drove, he slept, he drove, I slept. We would go from Los Angeles to Seattle in 24 hours, you know, and then turn around and come right back. And through the years, building up my little company, I miss plenty of my kids' birthdays. I miss plenty of my anniversaries. You miss a lot when you're a truck driver. You put in the hard work.

When I bought my own truck and started building a company, people do this, you don't really know what you're getting into until you get into it. And then you put everything you have into it, you know, because growing up the way I did, you know, poor and sometimes on welfare, to all of a sudden making more money than anybody in your family's ever made, it puts a little bit more of a fire under you, you know, because there's no way a poor kid from East L.A. with no education is going to make, you know, a six-figure income. And I'm not talking about a gross six-figure income.

I'm talking about a take-home six-figure income. Yep. That, you know, there's just no way it's not going to happen. But trucking allowed me to do it. Owning my own business allowed me to do it. I've done the traditional owner-operator where I have my own authority. I'm my own company. I did that.

and there's a lot of regulation, there's a lot of compliance stuff that you have to do. But when you're an independent contractor, you can set all of that office stuff off on the carrier. And that frees you up. I trade making a little bit more money as a carrier with my own authority for being an independent contractor and leaving all the office stuff to the carrier. It must be so frustrating, Tom, to have that, to have earned it, and then just to have it removed. I can hear the anguish in your voice. I want to make sure, you know, Will or Chuck has a chance to ask you a quick question,

but I want to invite you back onto the podcast for an hour or so sometime between now and this trial. and I really would like to hear your story from start to finish, and I really do hope people can understand the enormity of what's happening here. What are you going to do at this point to provide for your family? Turkey's been good to us, okay? My wife is a super saver. She's a wonderful woman.

She's a super saver. And we've been able to save enough money to buy a house in Texas. of course we'll have another mortgage on it and we're going to move to Texas we would love to stay in California and you know we're both from California that's our home we've been there you know I've been there I'm 59 years old

I've been there for 54 years you know and I don't want to leave but to work the way I want to work I got to leave the state dude you're absolutely I'm breaking my heart. I know you can't see what I'm looking at, but I'm looking at two men also about your age. And it is just beyond the pale that this is happening right in front of us and to think that there's 70,000 other people in your basic position. If it doesn't make you angry, then I don't know

what to say. Chuck, can we get Tom on the books like sooner than later for this? Sure. Absolutely. Tom, do you know when your injunction and You told me that you're going to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Is that correct? No. We went to the Southern District of California, the Federal Court, Southern District of California, and we got an injunction. That went to the Ninth Circuit.

The Ninth Circuit overturned the injunction. We petitioned the Supreme Court for Satori, for them to hear it. They are on a state's rights kick, so they kicked it back to the district court in San Diego. So we go back to court. We actually are going to go back to court in May and actually have a trial for the case. But we are petitioning in the next week or so for a second temporary injunction to stop them from enforcing AB5 on the transportation industry. I have a friend that lives in Southern California, and he's an independent contractor for a major. your carrier. I don't know if you guys want me to tell you which one. Sure. But Landstar.

He's an independent contractor for Landstar. And he doesn't want to go through the process of becoming a carrier and getting his own authority because he's happy what he's doing. But because of AB5, when he's ready to come off the road, he can bring a load into California. But Landstar won't allow him to pick up a load in California. So for his next load, he has to go empty, either to Arizona or Nevada, to get his next load. That doesn't make any sense. Dude, imagine telling United Airlines that they had to fly half their routes empty? Yeah.

The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode.

Join the skilled trades movement, support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself and see, too, how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable.

I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skills usa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S.S.S. U.S.S.S. USA. USA. That's what this is. Yeah. All right. Look, I don't want to keep you from what obviously, you're right in the middle of your workday, but I just wanted to hear your voice and say hello and let you know that people are going to be talking. about this and I know Will's on the case and we're going to do what we can here, but we want to follow the court proceedings. I'll leave it to Chuck to reach out to you later and set up a time we can come down and we can really talk through this in detail from your perspective. Because I think it's important, brother. I really appreciate what you're doing out there. And our thoughts are with you.

I can speak on the transportation part of it. but AB5 is not just affecting the transportation industry. AB5, according to California, is a generally applicable law. I'm sure that you deal with it just trying to hire an editor. Or my contractor can't hire a subcontractor to do the finish work. I have to pay a subcontractor to do the finish work because we're looking at selling our house in California. and after living there for 30 years,

you've got to do some upgrades, you know, before you sell it. But my guy can't even hire a subcontractor. I have to do a deal with a subcontractor, the finish guy. Will, if there's a bigger story in the wide world of work, honestly, right now, I don't know what it is. Well, you know, stay tuned. California's AB257. We could talk about fast food workers.

There's a similar initiative aimed right at those guys. Tom and I talked about a few of these other, these bills, which are just crushing the California economy. We've mentioned a few of them. But this one is urgent. This is going to, if the Biden administration is successful, AB5 goes national. If it goes national, you know, where does a guy like Tom Odom go? You can't go to Texas to get away from a federal law anymore. So this creates chaos in the supply chain. And I think more important, as Tom just said, This is crushing his family's income, his family's life. This is what he's built over 30 years. That's just not right. Okay. I was in before we had this conversation, and I'm all in.

So I want to do what I can to help. We've been talking for over an hour. So, Tom, I'm going to let you go. And I think it's probably a good place for us to land the plane, will. You probably have a life, too. You know, I know you probably want to put on a new sweater after staring it, you know. Nothing wrong with this color, Mike. Tom, you can't see this, but these two guys, basically, they look like a couple of geran animals.

I mean, I don't know what happened, but they each wore the same plum-colored sweater. It's kind of terrifying. Tom's wearing one, too, right, Tom? I'm sure he is. Yeah. Tom sounds like the kind of guy that wears plum. Yeah, I've got my shirt-choo sweater on. Yeah.

Hey, let me ask one more question real quick while I still have everybody here. Is there something the average person can do? Will, who's listening? Who do you call? How do you register your outrage? The only thing that California, really, AB5 is a California deal. So if you're in California and you have access to your local state lawmaker, we have two chambers of our Congress, if you will, of our state legislature.

One is called the Assembly. One is called the Senate. Look up your representative. And let him or her know that you think AB5 is a disaster. There have been so many amendments to AB5. All of them, they call them repair bills as other powerful entities gain traction. The first one you'll love this, Mike, was that newspapers were given an exemption from AB5 so they could continue to hire freelance photographers, writers, editors, carriers of their

newspaper, write the delivery guys. So why do you suppose the newspaper industry was given an exemption from AB5? So they would write nice articles. Right, nice articles about AB5. Yeah, I could go on. But that's what we need to do for the likes of people like Tom Odom. And ultimately, if we don't do it for Tom, there's going to be nobody left to do it for us. They will come for us. So let your state lawmaker know that it's time for repair bill that really just eliminates AB5 for everybody. Shortly after the bill passed, remember I told you, the bill was aimed. AB5 was aimed at the gig economy, Uber, Lyft and DoorDash. Silicon Valley, basically, right? Yes. Well, a year after the bill is signed into law in Proposition 22 in the year 2020, Uber Lyft and DoorDash spend $200 million to successfully buy statewide ballot initiative, eliminate themselves, but nobody else from AB5.

So the people they went after, as our primary target in AB5, the gig industry, they're out. They're not covered by this thing anymore. Tom is, because Tom's group doesn't have 200 million bucks. to spend on a statewide ballot initiative. All we can do is Californians is this one exercise. It takes you less than 10 minutes. You go online, you figure out who your assembly person is, you find out who your state senator is,

and you give them, you dial it up to 11, and you let them know, this stops here, that I will be watching you. And then you make common cause with your neighbors. Let other people know that this is happening. You know, maybe you guys can help us spread the word on Tom's story. You know, I'm happy to share the link with everybody. But this is a story that I think everybody,

in California needs to be up in arms about. We're not Uber, we're not Lyft, we're not DoorDash. California is not just the Silicon Valley. We're 40 million Tom Otems, really, you know, just trying to get by every day doing the best we can to create our version of the American dream. Is there anything people can do who aren't in California? That's a great question. Maybe Tom has an idea, but I would say that you could certainly let your Congress person know that AB5 is not acceptable in your... congressional district. So you've got this bill that I mentioned. It's called the Pro Act. Pro is an acronym that talks about organizing rights, et cetera. But the bill is now in the, stalled in the Senate,

and God forbid it should get out of the Senate because Joe Biden will instantly sign off on it. Let your congressperson know that you think this bill is an overreach, that it will destroy the economy, destroy small business, and you won't stand for it. Let them know. Tom, you still there? Yes, sir. Final thoughts? I have, I'm going to open this up. If you're in the transportation industry,

please send an email with your story about AB5 to my AB5 story at gmail.com. The emails I get from truckers at that email address will go to Judge Benitez when we go to court in May or if we have enough they may go with the petition for another

injunction. What's the time frame on that? About another week for the injunction and about well I think it's in May that we actually have to go to court unless California tries to get it set off

again. Okay. All right, well here's what I I'm going to do. I'm going to share Will's article with 6 million people on Facebook. I'm going to include this email address and invite people who are like-minded to voice their disapproval. And then I'm going to ask Chuck to coordinate with you and come back sometime between now and May to give us the whole story and the state of the union whenever you can do it. I know you're on the road all the time, but I'm sure we can find a hole to get this done. I think it's important.

We'll figure it out for sure. I'd be happy to. I mean, I really appreciate you guys bringing light to this. I know the Will's story did a bunch of good. I'm just hoping that, you know, we can start some kind of grassroots effort to maybe influence the court, maybe influence some Congress people. I call them Congress critters in Washington to make sure that the Pro Act does not get passed. Got it. Great.

All right. Drive safe. Stay safe. You don't really put your hands at 10. two anymore, do you? That was an old thing. Nah, you know, when the old trucks didn't have power steering and the steering wheel was two feet across, you know, you might put both hands on it at once because, you know, you had to really work it.

But now my steering wheel is like the steering wheel in your car. And I sit here with one hand on it and the other hand on the stick shift. I don't know why I keep my hand on a stick shift. Once I get the top gear, I mean, I go for hours and hours without touching. it without shifting, but I still put my hand on it. You've got to put your hand somewhere. You're up there alone in the cab. You wouldn't want to get weird.

That's why the stick shift is there. You don't want it to get weird, but somehow it does. But somehow it did. Thanks again, Tom. We'll be in touch. No problem. Thank you very much for having me. You bet.

See you. Bye-bye. So, Will, you've done a good thing, man. It's an important policy, and it's a great mission. the one thing I'm sure of, the one thing I've seen work again and again and again, the bigger the issue, the bigger the problem, the smaller the solution. It's one guy at a time. If this thing turns the corner as a result of Tom Odom being Tom Odom, hell, mission accomplished. Yeah, it reminds me of the old kind of folk country song, The Ballad of Tom Jodd, you know, based on grapes of wrath. Got the ballot of Tom Odom. the 70,000 other California men and women who look and act just like him. Thank you guys so much for helping get the word out. As Chuck knows and has seen happen countless times,

the title for these episodes normally doesn't happen until the very, very end when the guest usually says something prescient. The Ballad of Tom Odom sounds like a pretty good title for this one. That's the winner. And before we go, I just want to let everybody know that your organization can be reached at California Policy Center.org. You also host National Reviews Radio Free California Podcast, which we have listened to. And your people can reach you at Twitter at Will Swame, S-W-A-I-M.

Thanks, Chuck. I am now finished with the shameless pluggery. Good man. All right. Seriously, you're doing important work. Say hey to the gang over there. let's see what happens. As are you. Hey, I told Chuck this.

I am a longtime fan. My wife is in the other room hoping she can get 30 seconds to tell you what a genius you are. Oh man. Really? Seriously? Yes. I'll be right back. With all due speed.

I'm going to hang up right now before he gets back. So, no, just kidding. Would that be funny if he came back? It would be terrible. I would never do that. It's Mr. Mike Roe. Hi, Mr. Micro. I feel so professional.

I'm on the podcast. Hmm. What's your name? My name is Emma Swam. I'm Will's daughter, not a young wife. I see. I didn't want to assume anything, but... Okay. But you are literally my hero. My mom and I would always watch you when I was young, and I now work at the coroner's office. And I always say it's a dirty job, but someone has to do it. There's a sentence I didn't think I was going to hear today.

There you know. So thank you for your inspiration. Here's the thing. Thank you. Mom. Did you think you would hear, here's the thing? That I thought it was 50-50, yeah. Nice to meet you. It's nice to meet you as well.

Get in on the microphone and tell us your name, please. Just like that, Emma's out. Emma out, Heather, and I'm the wife. So nice to meet you guys. I love the podcast. Well, thanks. We're a big fan of your husband's writing, and it was really great to meet,

and chat and were you, do you actually read his stuff? Okay, full disclosure, not entirely. He has a podcast and I don't listen because I hear it all day. So I don't need to. I know. It's so weird.

I don't listen to this one either because I do it. Chuck has to listen to it like two or three times. Poor Chuck. Which is why he's so sick of me now. He can barely. and look at me. You guys are like a married couple.

Well, there are some things that are really not like that at all, Heather. But yes. Very much. Not like that. But yes, we've known each other for a while. 40 plus years. Well, like 20 years or something, no? 40 plus.

40? 40, really? Oh, wow. We sang in a barbershop quartet in high school in 1980. In 1980, the hits of the 80s and barbershop style? No, no, no, no, no. It was the hits of the 30s. Yes.

I think we have a thing. I think you need to go back to it, put a spin on new music in the barbershop style. Well, let's see what happens. I mean, anything could happen. You know, we kind of do that. I was telling Will, we write jingles for the sponsors, unauthorized, record him in four,

part harmony and then just air them. And I can't believe we haven't gotten a cease and desist yet, but we're going until we do. Yeah, they should reuse them. You need to record those. All right. We got like 30 of them. In fact, I'm going to do one as soon as we hang up now. Anyway, where exactly are you now? Where's home? Irvine, California. It's by Newport Beach. Yeah. Awesome. And where are you guys? I'm a little north of San Francisco, just, kind of in the Republic of Marin. In fact, I'm looking at the bridge right now through my window across the water.

Very pretty. That's pretty. I'm a little north of Hollywood. Oh, okay. So you've seen what has become of L.A.? Sadly, yes, I have. I see it every day, particularly Santa Monica where our office is.

Yeah. I'm about to go there right now. Yeah, she's choosing to go. I have a friend visiting now from Spain and so I'm required to show her like all of Los Angeles and I keep saying like all right, just like lower your expectations

a tiny bit. Yeah, a little bit more, a little lower. And then same for San Francisco, right? Oh my God. Not pretty. It's such a shame. From here, it's never looked better

but I'm eight miles away but I've lost the water at it. I mean, it's great if you like the scent of human feces. That is on your show. My husband's favorite game is name that smell. Name that smell.

Oh, well, I jokingly said on an episode of some show a long time ago, I called it the crap app, and I thought it'd really be useful, you know, for, I don't really know what it was. It was just an idea of putting public restrooms on some sort of app that people could have access to.

It's a thing, though. Someone took the name, and now in San Francisco, they're using it to identify the most recent pile of human scat. Oh, my gosh. So they're like literally keeping track of all the human defecate through San Francisco on the crap app. And there's another crap app in which you can find the nearest toilet.

Right. Which maybe it could be used for the people who are making the feces on the sidewalk. And then there's like there's a special circle and like an explanation point around the dumps that have needles in them. as well. It's like a bonus. Have you ever been to Catalina Island, Mr. Roe? Sure. I have. And they put like a stick in the bison poo.

Yes. It's like that needle. I forgot about the sticks in the bison poo because I took one of those golf carts one night and rolled that over and that's a whole situation. That's great. This conversation's really gone to shit. It has quickly.

And this is my better half. I didn't bring it up. And the offspring. Yeah. You know what? It might have been my fault. Apologies, everyone, but this is what happens. I think it was me.

You guys are family now. So much. I will leave you to it. But thank you so much, guys. It was really great to meet you, Emma, and you too, Heather. Thank you. I look forward to listening to this one. It will be weird having my...

We will listen to this one. My husband in it. Well, I listen to them. Oh, sorry. Anyway, this will be interesting. Yeah. That will for sure. Thanks.

All right. Yeah, bring your husband back in so we can say goodbye officially. Thanks for your time, guys. Thank you. Thank you very much. That's brownie points right there. Thanks. Excellent.

Good deal. Well, thank you guys, really, for promoting the story. That's... No, it's a good one. I'm so grateful. I haven't gotten an assist like that ever. Thank you. Well, now, look, it touched me.

It's really dirty jobs 101. When in doubt, find one. tell the story. Yeah. And see what sticks. We'll see what we can do. But I'm glad we did it. Thank you.

Thank you for asking the question at the end that got about what people in other states could do. I haven't thought about that. My world is so cloistered. And I'll get working on that too. Thanks. You got it. Thank you so much. Adios.

This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry it went on so long. But if it made you smile Then share your satisfaction In the way that people do Take some time to go on and leave us a rink I hate to ask, I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge

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