Global Trade This Week – Episode 239
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Keenan Brugh 0:00
You're watching global trade this week with Pete mento and Doug Draper,
Doug Draper 0:08
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of global trade this week. My name is Doug Draper, I am one of your hosts for the show. The other one is on the 16th floor in a hotel in the Windy City, downtown Chicago. Mr. Pete Minto, what's up?
Pete Mento 0:26
Brother, Ruby, buddy, it's been a crap day. It's been a crappy day. Cape drop today, and lo and behold, it didn't work how it was supposed to for most people. But we'll talk more about that later.
Doug Draper 0:39
Yes, that will be good. That is definitely one of our topics. So that's cool. Hey, I wanted to give a quick shout out. So Pete, I think, I guess I owe you an apology or reset your comments about the halftime where some guy had 10,000 hours of boot like videos or something. I have a college friend that's in the industry in LA. And he said, Hey, he sent me a text message. He's like, don't be a dick. That was, like, a pretty cool thing that Pete found, and I'm very interested in it. And he then reminded me when we were at the University of Kansas in 1992 spring my senior year, and there was this band called Day on the Hill. They used to do concerts. Maybe they still do them, I don't know Anyway, Day on the Hill. And they had this band that nobody had ever heard of, and they started playing, and it was on the stage. I won't go into all the details, but this big stage with this band, and it was one of those deals where you just stopped and you're just like, What the hell am I listening to? And there were no cell phones back then. So then a big group of my friends were running back to the to our fraternity house to say, you guys got to get down here and look at this band. It was crazy. It was Pearl Jam. And the student union activities booked Pearl Jam for $2,500 and their album 10 had not yet been dropped yet, but it was all the songs from 10. And over the course of probably 30 minutes, there was about 15,000 people that came down there, and it was going crazy. And I was it was one of those things like, Who is this band? This is something I've never heard of before. You know, kind of like rock and roll, and in the 50s it was, it was pretty cool. And I want to thank my buddy for bringing that up, because that brings back some good memories. But anyway, that's my story. But I also wanted to send an apology for you for bad mouthing your halftime lesson.
Pete Mento 2:39
What was the name of the band. What do they go by, Pearl Jam? No, no. What was their pseudonym that they had before they played? Oh, I don't know. I don't know. Do you know I thought so they were Pearl Jam when they
Doug Draper 2:50
played, yeah, they were Pearl Jam when they played, okay, but nobody, but their album hadn't dropped yet, or if it did, it like, literally within weeks. And so it was still, you know, fast forward six months that that, yeah, that wouldn't have happened.
Pete Mento 3:07
Doug, you were in the cultural capital of the north of North America, there in Kansas. Yeah, Where's, where's UK?
Doug Draper 3:15
Lawrence, Kansas was going off. It was probably about this time April, ish, probably on a Saturday. Great experience, and I want to thank Eric for giving me those memories again. That was great.
Pete Mento 3:27
See you do like live music, Doug, that makes me so happy. Yeah, oh, man. Like, I'll listen to anything live. Like, one of my favorite things about being in New Orleans is I can just get out of dinner. And there's two dozen places I know that if I walk in, there'll be something playing that I want to listen Bluegrass or jazz or rock or trip hop or, you know, we're really big on bounce music in New Orleans, which is funny to hear from a 55 year old fat white man, but it's I love it like I one of my favorite acts. So Jazz Fest starts this weekend is big Frida, which, for those who've never listened to big Frida, if you like dance music, give big free to shout out, absolutely, positively, unabashedly raw. And I think I think big fried is maybe 6667, trans, trans woman, and the beats are very aggressive, like, if you want to dance, throw some big Frida on. Positively incredible. When big Frida gets up on the stage at Jazz Fest, the world stops because local, local talent. Man, yeah, see now, now I want to go see a show with you. Doug, yeah. Now I want to find an excuse for us to go see a band you love and
Doug Draper 4:40
go see him together. Yeah? Well, I guess there's a couple, but anyway, great memories. I'm glad that he shunned me on a text message earlier this week. But, yeah, yeah, nice, cool. Well, this show is called global trade this week, so I guess we need to start talking about some global trade. My friends, yeah, why don't you go? So I know we're
Pete Mento 4:59
not supposed to time. Stamp episodes, we say that like, I don't know, two dozen times a year, then we do it anyway. So today, CBP opened the cape portal. And I think most people expected this to happen. They got overrun. So all the people who were ready to go, who had their CSV file ready, who were confident in their data, or maybe not even confident their data, they were just confident they wanted the money, started uploading information, and at first I was getting all these messages from people like it worked. It worked, accepted my file, and then it was, What do you mean? Traffic's too high and and why does it keep kicking me out? And every time it kicks me out, I have to do my two form, two factor authentication. And damn it, I've been working on this for an hour. Why isn't this working? And I'm like, I gave a speech today. I'm walking into the venue while I'm talking on the phone like I don't know why it doesn't work. I don't work for customs. I'm not a programmer. I'm the wrong person to talk to. But I bet if you wait till later on tonight, it'll probably work just fine when the East Coast has gone to bed and, you know, going at like 10 o'clock tonight, it'll work just fine, right? Just chill out. But everyone's got a big thirst to go in there and start, start going after their, their their money. I had a meltdown last week because of all the brokers that were charging, you know, 10, 15% to just upload a spreadsheet, those people should be like putting stocks at icpa, and we should all get to throw rotten fruit at them for taking such a run at people. My fees, okay, my fees are a fraction of that. And we do audits. We audit all the entries. We correct everything. We bring tax into it, for, for for transfer pricing, we have a Tax Group look at other areas of tax where you can go get refunds once this is done. If I, I mean, like, we do a lot of work, and I even I felt like maybe we're charging too much, we're not if these pirates think they're going to get away with that, because the way the rules work, Doug only the customs house broker that did it can upload it, or the importer of record, I can get on the phone with an importer of record and show them how to do it in 10 minutes and they're done. That is not worth seven figures of recovery. And a couple of these folks had the audacity to bill you up front. So like, all right, you're getting a million dollars back. We want $100,000 we'll bill you when we do it. It's due at the end of the month. I mean, just shameless. And I've said this a bunch of times this week, and it's farm talks, you'll love it, right? Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered, yeah? And if someone had done that to me, and I was an importer, I never would have forgotten it done ever.
Doug Draper 7:33
Yeah, it's, it's interesting. You know, there's been so many analogies on LinkedIn and everything else, you know, Taylor Swift, concert tickets and all that kind of stuff. But the to your point, it's not going away, right? Push the button tomorrow. I think everything will work out, right, but I'll give I was kind of like, okay, I see you, Uncle Sam, doing some stuff here, right? I don't know if there's been a couple of LinkedIn posts where there's, I don't know who the person was, but they're doing a video explaining it, and they had a couple of webinars. I attended one of them last week. There was like, I don't know, 4000 people on this webinar. So if you're in the industry, it's a hot, hot topic. But to your point, just it's easy for me to say, because I'm not getting any money back. But wait 24 hours, 48 hours to push the button, and I'm sure everything will be be right with the world, but yeah, it's kind of funny.
Pete Mento 8:30
Yeah, people are rightfully excited. They paid a lot of money in tariffs, and they want to see it come back. I just keep warning everyone, there will be reviews like we do drawback all the time. I don't know how many billions of dollars of drawback I've been connected with in one form or another. Been doing this crap forever, dude. And when you do anything with drawback, if you hit a certain threshold, as a portfolio of total refunds, or individually, as an entry of refunds, customers like, yeah, we get it. It's your money. We're gonna give it back to you. We have responsibility to make sure we're supposed to. So that's where this idea of offsets come in, where they'll give you the money, but they're going to review this after the fact. They may ask for part of it back, or they might withhold part of the refund until they're absolutely certain about something people are going to be in for a hell of a surprise. A lot of them, as a lot of importers that have a smaller volume probably don't have big, massive ones, they might go under the radar and good for them, you know, but it doesn't relieve you of the responsibility of being compliant. I'm just I'm waiting. I'm either gonna have to eat a lot of Crow, which I've done before, and I don't mind doing I long. I long since lost any shame, or I get to do the superior dance like the church lady on SNL. When I when it turns out I was right, we're going to find out one way or the other. But this is a historic and majestic day for the import community. I'm very happy for all of them, if we're doing a form of someone else doing it for me, if they're doing it for themselves, this is justice, man, and we're getting our justice. So I know there's a lot of people out there that are thinking about not even pursuing these refunds because me. Be it's not a lot of money, or they're worried about that scrutiny. Well, then fix it, man, and then go get the money. And I don't care if it's $7 they owe you that $7 plus interest, go get your money. It was unfair to begin with. It wrecked our industry. It's, it's about time that we got some some justice for what happened to us.
Doug Draper 10:19
Yeah, yeah. On the on the webinar last week, that was a question that was brought up. It's like, is there a minimum that you have to be receiving, or you can submit? And the individual on there was like, I don't think she used $7 but it was pretty darn close. Money. Is money, whether it's a nickel, a dime or 10, you know, 10 million. So it's very valid. Is the juice worth the squeeze? And there's plenty of importers out there like I don't want to deal with it. I've, I've absorbed this hit in 2025 whatever I can get back is better than nothing. I'll pay you the fee and just get it done. So I would imagine there's a significant amount of people out there in that mindset.
Pete Mento 11:00
Well, I'm going to give two shout outs, right? So the first shout out is to the many brokers that have made the decision to prepare the file for free for their client, or like it is literally a one column Excel spreadsheet. One column, okay, if you're confident in your data, you're not worried about what's behind it. Here you go, and we're not going to charge you for it, because we think that's something nice that we can do for our clients. If I were still at DSV, if I were at expediters, if I were at ch Robinson, that's what I would have said we ought to do, because importers aren't going to forget that we've made plenty of money doing other things, like plenty of money down the road, this is about doing what's right? The second shout out may come as a surprise to people. Shout out to CBP about two months ago, this was an abstract reality, right? It wasn't, it wasn't something that even existed, and they managed to find a way to operationalize this, I think, for a government agency, they did a they did an exceptional job at putting out education for the import community. They were very honest about where they were. They're very honest about what they could do up front. Some of this stuff was going to take longer, and they were honest with us, and then they were doing what they said that they would do. So we'll see whether or not they can refund it as quickly as they want to. But I think they deserve a lot of credit for operationalize something that was just in the ether eight weeks ago.
Doug Draper 12:26
Yeah, valid, valid, yeah. Anyway, I just lost my train of thought listening to your siren and your
Pete Mento 12:34
backdrop there. It's Chicago dude, lots of sirens.
Doug Draper 12:39
Yeah, it was the column that was one thing, because I was expecting on the call to say, All right, here's a 15 column spreadsheet. And this goes there, and they're like, Nope, just put the entry number, and then what about the dash? I gotta put the dash in. They're like, doesn't matter. All digits you want the dash. Don't do the dash whatever. Just make one column and upload it, which I thought, to your point was pretty cool, you know?
Pete Mento 13:05
Yeah, they've been fair. Yeah, let's see if they stay fair, and let's see if we can get our stuff up in the system. I'm sure tonight I'll get more stuff from people. I mean, I've probably gotten 30 or so messages so far, good and bad about what's going on with it, but I think it's going to be just fine, man. And the simplicity of it, I think a part of that is they don't want to overload the system be too much crap. So just having one in there, I still believe there's going to be a review. But man, it is. It is what it is, and people should be prepared for it. Anytime you're dealing with a federal law enforcement agency about money, don't be a, don't be a Don't be a punk. Have your stuff ready. Make sure that it's right before it goes in. One more thing I'll say about, you know, the IEEPA and the cape and the refunds, there's a there's a group of people who have been buying these recoveries. So folks want their money now, like the JG Wentworth commercials when I'm watching Dr Phil at three in the morning and I can't sleep and they're selling their refunds, which could be a good decision for a company that's cash poor. Understand, but remember, you still have the responsibility if something goes wrong, and you still have to do the work. So if something goes wrong and you end up giving that money back, these guys don't care. They want their money, so you're going to end up doing that work. So to really bake that into your decisions while you're thinking this
Doug Draper 14:26
stuff through, yeah, that's valid, valid point, and it speaks to my second topic that we'll hit after halftime. So I don't think that was even planned. I think you just mentioned nothing, and we'll just dive right into mine. But first we have half time brought to us by CAP logistics. Appreciate all they do for us every single week. Check out cap logistics.com. All right, Pete, what
Pete Mento 14:49
you got? So my daughter really surprised me recently, probably about six months ago, she really got into 3d printing. So my daughter will find files. Online for free, stuff like free, free design files. And then she'll go to the 3d printing lab at her school, and she'll 3d print everything from, you know, trophies to little figurines, whatever. And she's gotten quite good at it. If you've seen the movie Hail Mary, that one of the characters Rocky, she threed printed a rocky, you know that, like a fully, like a full statue of Rocky, a little figurine. It's awesome, right? And I don't know how it happened, but somehow in my x feed, I have a lot of threed printing stuff, probably because I've just looked at things because of her. And this weekend, there was a new story where a college kid, I don't know where this college kid is, I should have looked a little harder, but he threed printed a guided rocket launcher. So this kid, there's video like, so he he figured out how to make a rocket launcher, a guided one, like he tells you all the telemetrics and all the stuff you need. It costs around $79 to make it, and it works. Now, he doesn't have explosives in it or anything. But the point was, this college kid, I can just imagine, like, he's hanging out with his friends, you know, they're they're smoking weed and, like, reading comic books. He's like, Hey, man, we should threed print like a rocket launcher. No way. Colby, you never shut up. Chad, watch me do it. And then, like, you know, they put this thing together, and they go down to the lab, and the next thing, you know, they built this thing. What really got my attention is they put it up for free on GitHub, and they've said, make it better, make it cheaper, make it more effective. And because it's just a projectile, and there's nothing in it to hurt anybody. So far, it's legal. So we've had a pretty wild week with regards to warfare. Zelensky came out last week and said that a group of Russian soldiers surrendered to an autonomous robot that they put out in the field. So I guess it's like, like a mini tank that that runs as a drone with machine gun on it. And, like, you know, there's all these Russians with their hands up surrendering to it. And now we got, you know, we got what kind of wacky Sawyer and Fletcher and all their boys hanging out their dorm rooms making rocket launchers. I don't know. Man, Are we cool with this? Like, Are we cool with this? Or any? It's cool. What are we cool with the fact that a bunch of stoned up college kids came up with building a rocket launcher and said, Hey, how about everyone makes it better and cheaper?
Doug Draper 17:29
Well, you don't know they were stoned up, true, you know, I can't, can't speak to that. But college kids, for sure, there was probably some interesting comments. I like it. I like it, you know, like you said, if creativity right, I love it. And you hear stories like this where some kid does something amazing, puts it up for the world to engage with. But yeah, bring it on. I have no problem with it at all. All I got to
Pete Mento 17:55
say, Doug is, is if, if, like Raytheon or miter or the Defense Department hasn't called this kid and offered him a job already. They need to be to get on that phone, because anybody comes up with this ought to be working for the war machine. You know what I mean, like Elon Musk, this kid on retainer.
Doug Draper 18:11
Yeah? Valid, valid, good, good. All right. Well, mine is a little bit not quite like that. But I saw something pop up this weekend Pete, that there was a half marathon that was run in Beijing over the weekend, and some of the participants were robots. One of them was a completely autonomous robot by the name of lightning, that ran the half marathon in 50 minutes, five zero, and the closest human was 57 minutes, right? So that's not, that's not close, that's a that's a long, long time there. So anyway, I thought it was interesting that, you know, here's this freaking robot and a couple of the robots. So this was not just one in there. There was quite a few. Some of them were controlled remotely. But lightning was 100% autonomous, and he crushed the field. So I don't know why it was only a half marathon versus a full marathon, or a 10k or whatever, but it struck my attention, and I actually chat GPT like was every give me the top 10 who were the top 10 winners? And they didn't have it, but they confirmed that the top three on the podium were all all robots. So I don't know. Man, you know, I don't know if is this saying that any feats of strength that robots can do anything better than a human.
Pete Mento 19:43
Tell you something. First of all, Doug, if I had been either running in that race or a spectator, I would have kicked old lightning right over on his ass. I would have tripped him. I would have bumped into him. I would have gotten three or four friends and knocked him down and ripped his head off. This is have you not? Seen Terminator? Have you not seen AI or Ex Machina? Have you not seen these movies? Okay, we are building our destruction so that. That's my first, my first one second of all old lightning wasn't tired, I bet, I bet, when lightning, you know, got past its its 13 point whatever miles, it was like, Yeah, I'll do 900 more. Let's party, right? But the human beings were like, Dude, I could use a six pack and a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. What does that mean? That means that machine is going to run you down, baby. So it's been all over, all over the podcast, first this week, this ghost murmur. Have you been reading about this? So the US is claiming through the use of something called Quantum magnometers, whatever the hell those are, they have built a machine that can identify an individual heartbeat, so within 40 kilometers, so you they've got your heartbeat, and your 40 kilometers out there, they can identify Doug Draper's actual Heartbeat.
Doug Draper 20:59
Wow. Okay, not a heartbeat, but a specific or
Pete Mento 21:03
individual heartbeat. Now, the CIA apparently built this, of course, they did, right? And they gave it to the Department of War defense, or whatever they're calling themselves these days, the war pigs. And then those guys use this to find the down fighter pilot that was in Iran. So they're saying they knew that individually when they got them. And what's been all over the podcast verse this week. Of all, like the, you know, all the Kooks like me, all the tin foil hat wearing weirdos, is, if you've seen, like, black mirror, where they had the robot dogs that chase people down for four days, put ghost murmur in a robot dog. We're done. Dude, we're done. They're gonna find us wherever we are and take us down. Now give a lightning ghost murmur and an AR 15, and let's see how well we do. Did no one see these movies other than me? Doug, I mean, I know you're not a movie guy, but they all end the same way, poorly. They end poorly for the people. So I'm freaked out by it. Yeah? Ghost murmur, dude, check that out. That's crazy.
Doug Draper 22:04
Yeah, I will. But your point, you stick that into an autonomous robot like lightning, yeah, you're out in a matter of minutes, and you got t2
Pete Mento 22:16
Well, I saw this real this week, and I disagree it was true. The idea for Star Wars, the ad ATS, those big walking things that were that were originally based on Hannibal's elephants, those were from a CIA concept that they built back in the 1960s so they built a walking robot tank that could walk up things and like you could get up of an angles that a tank couldn't. And that's where they actually they they, they operationalize the concept. So okay, let's put old ghost murmur in in a four legged animal that's the size of an f1 50, and let's play tag with it with dire consequences. You tell me who's going to win? It ain't going to be me and Doug because I'm too fat and slow telling you right now lightning is going to whip my ass. It's not going to end well for Team Pete. Yeah.
Doug Draper 23:02
Oh, wow. That's called a wormhole that we just went down. My friend Doug,
Pete Mento 23:07
my daughter, has those cute, those cute little robots that deliver her Chick fil A, you know, to her dormant stuff. I have a dream that I get out of my car one day and I just kick it over. Kick it over, put it on its top, like a turtle, so it can't move anymore, like I'll see you when the war starts, you little punk, like I hate them. I really do, and I know I shouldn't, because I love technology, but I'm getting a little concerned now, dude.
Doug Draper 23:32
All right, well, that's it. We're gonna shift gears back to local trade. People like one of these jokers, talk about global trade, is that that's the title of the show, and all they talked about is concerts, robots and figurines.
Pete Mento 23:48
So it has to do with trade. It's American technology, and that American technology is going to have export controls. We're gonna end up exporting this stuff all over the world. We're slowly in the speech I gave today, someone's like, do you think AI is going to take all of our jobs? It's like, hell yeah, having worked in this industry for a long time, if anyone with a with a share price has the ability to cut out half their workforce, you don't think they're going to do it out of the kindness of their heart. Come on, right? We're offering our own extinction, both financially and apparently, maybe as a species. I don't know, man, I'll stop. I'll stop. Doug, I'll stop. Alright, go to Topic number two.
Doug Draper 24:25
Topic two, thank you.
Pete Mento 24:26
Topic two, I think Doug has somewhere to be. So topic two, I don't I'm just going to answer emails about Cape until three in the morning. That's all I'm going to do. So my second one is transportation focused. So I've learned from a couple of conversations with people that do a lot of work in the ocean industry that not a lot of contracts are getting signed. Dude. So the the the instability with oil prices coming out of the Gulf right now has everybody worried. So what's my bunker going to be? You know, what are that? Where the seasonal effects for bunker? Going to be we should work that out right now. Well, I don't think you know these they're throwing out crazy numbers, because right now they're basing it on the current conditions and what happens down the road? What if the streets aren't open? What if they stay closed? And I guess it's also starting to bleed into air freight, because here's a fun fact, everybody, almost all the jet fuel, I'm talking like 80 90% in Europe comes from the Middle East, and it takes 90 days to replace it, and there's none common. So how are we going to move air freight? No, no, go, go. Juice in the fly, fly. How are we going to get stuff wherever we want it to be? They're starting to think about that too. I mean, America is doing all we can to replace it, but it's only going to increase the price. It's going to be wild, dude. So we're having, we're in contract season, and people are hesitant to side contracts because of the displaced amounts of energy through the Straits of Hormuz. I think Doug, remember when we talked about TPM and how rates were crap and nothing was moving. Somehow the carries are going to come out smelling like a rose baby.
Doug Draper 26:03
Yeah, yeah. I think I can't remember if it was in his 6040 split. As far as my thoughts on it was to put 40% in in contract rates, and this play the market for the other 60% but, you know, there's two wars going on. There's two canals that are kind of open and closed and open. That's making fuel crazy. Tariffs. We talk about that all the time. Yep, cargo theft is up. Insurance costs are up, money and lending still kind of tight. And I said it last week, we're in a hunker down mode, man. The world is really kind of chaotic right now, and it's just like, let's just see. Let's wait and see, right? And I think that the more that this goes on, the more things are going to sew. And it's going to affect my business and the warehousing. It's going to affect it's going to have a trickle effect, even if things get fixed and wars are over. Canals are open. The wave that's called a supply chain, right? Like the hose. When you're a kid, you whip the hose there outside. It's got, you know, a wave that goes through it. And so just because it ends on one side of the supply chain doesn't mean it automatically ends at the other side. So I think it's going to be a real interesting year. Last year is because of tariffs. Everybody was kind of waiting. I think this year there's some other external forces where people are just going to this could be the hunker down season, for sure, but it's, you know, what's that? Riddle me?
Pete Mento 27:34
This riddle me, this Batman, what if you came out of TPM with just sick rates and you say to your carriers, I got a contract. You're like, contract. What contract? What are you crazy? Haven't you heard of force majeure, all these concepts about, like, What are you talking about? Weren't you around during covid? Kid? Like, is this your first rodeo? I just have a feeling there's going to be a whole lot of anger swelling up from our friends on the on the buying side.
Doug Draper 27:59
Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, if one of the biggest cost components is fuel, and that's volatile, and everybody's agreed that, okay, we'll separate that from the contract itself. Yeah, is that really even a contract, right?
Pete Mento 28:12
Bro, diesel was 645 in Virginia this morning when I drove to the airport. Wow, $6.45 in Virginia. We it's usually like, 370 you know, 380 a gallon. It's not that bad. And I'm just thinking, if I'm a trucker, or if I'm a tugboat company, anybody that's using diesel bunker C, any of that, this is going to make everything so much more expensive. And how do you do the math on that? Like, okay, the price will be a if the streets of Hormuz open up again because a bunch of irrational actors decide to let it happen. Or it could be B, if it doesn't, or C, if we're escalating the war like this, could just get worse. Again, going back to my favorite Doug analogy, there's 500 people in a basement with visor hats on and old accounting machines doing one of these, just figuring out, trying to figure out, Where is this thing going to end up. And they're a lot smarter than I smarter than I am. But you know, as a as I guess, a mediocre economist, I can tell you all signs point to suck.
Doug Draper 29:14
I love it all right. Well, I'll wind my mind. I'll use my topic, and we will wind down this week's show. And it's a term Pete that I heard on one of my newsletter pop ups this morning that caught my attention litigation funding right so now I'm talking about insurance, and specific to litigations that it was referenced into what's referred to as nuclear verdicts, with big trucks domestically, hitting and killing individuals on the road, and then all the things that come with it. Some of it is related to cargo theft, most of is related to injury. And basically, I didn't even know this was a thing, but they have outside investors, banks. Bank rolling lawsuits in exchange for a cut of the profit. And it's an investment strategy, and some of these companies that are big are not even in the US, right? So then you got a plaintiff, a defendant, and then an investment arm that needs to get their money right. And so is that jacking up, you know, the results of these, of these lawsuits. And so it's pretty crazy it's been going on. So I'm like, okay, is this, first of all, is it legal? The answer is yes. The second thing is, does the jury and judge know about it? And the answer is, juries generally don't. Judges are sort of, because it's a contract between the plaintiff and the company, right? So it's kind of like, I can't think of the right term, but, you know, Parent or Parent, but client, Attorney privilege, you know, for lack of a better term, right? So it's not illegal. There's some gray area on who knows what's going on. These companies kind of look at once a lawsuit gets filed, sometimes people will go shop. There's like, four or five really big players in the world that do this. They only take about 3% of the cases that get pitched to them, then it goes through a normal trial, um, and then they sign a contract in advance, I should say, before the trial, and they say, here's what we get if you win, here's what you don't, if you don't. And they just go after the big money makers, and it's an investment strategy, and it's, it's crazy, right? I didn't even know that thing was going on. So it speaks to your comment a few minutes ago at the first half of the show that, anyway, maybe I'm maybe I'm naive, but I never even heard about so it's like the, you know, the ambulance chasers in your in your in your hometown, just on steroids.
Pete Mento 31:56
Well, this topic is very close to me. My mother died in an 18 wheeler accident. It was a vehicular, vehicular death, right? So my mom was probably partially, if not all, at fault for the accident. And it's funny, I was working for Robinson at the time when it happened, and they could not have been more accommodating and kind to me when it happened, but I had phone calls from attorneys all over South Carolina. You know, you can be do compensation. Would you like to go after this truck driver and all this other stuff? And, you know, for for someone who works in that in the world of recovery and all that stuff, is very strange for me to say, there's already been enough pain and, you know, enough anguish and all this. I don't see the point in chasing after this. I doubt that that poor female truck driver that took my mother's life wants to relive this for the rest of her life and ruin a small owner operator's life. I don't think that that's the right thing to do. And I had a lot of friends who were attorneys who were calling me crazy when they found out that I'd said no to all of this. Yesterday, I spent most of my day yesterday driving my daughter home from Massachusett, from Massachusetts, and I got home, left real early, got home around one o'clock, and I had an afternoon to myself, so I did some work. Went on acts, and I started seeing all of these all of these posts about how CBS news yesterday apparently did a story about a lot of these death cases that have happened, and Robinson's name was all over those stories. That was the only one that anyone mentioned. I don't know why. And then I started going on x and, you know, noticing that there were, there were rebuttals from Robinson in their PR department. There were in all of them, all the comments were just trade. Attorneys like, not trade, pardon me, litigation attorneys like, what about this? What about this? And saying all sorts of things. I don't really have an opinion one way or the other about what both of these parties are doing, but I just think that this is such a sad, sad situation as someone who lived through it. You know that they're they're monetizing pain on both sides of this, and I just hope that whatever comes out of it is equitable, and I hope that that over the road safety is what we're always focused on. And having worked for Robinson, at least back then, and I'm sure it hasn't changed, that was something deeply important to them. They're a Midwestern company, you know, deeply important. So the fact that people would so honestly point the finger, but being the victim, being the child of a victim that this happened to. I can tell you that, you know, it's easy to lay the blame on other people, but it's, I think it's a lot smarter to just try to move past it. Least in my experience, it was, I can't speak to other people.
Doug Draper 34:35
That's a it's a lightning rod topic, for sure.
Pete Mento 34:39
Well, I forget what the number was, but it seemed shockingly low to me, the number of over the road deaths that happened from 18 wheeler it wasn't, wasn't nearly a number. I imagine that it would be. I think it says a lot about the people that are driving on the roads these days and delivering things. You know what, the amount of volume that we're talking about, but it does. Surprise me at all. Doug, that there are very large pools of money looking for ways to make even bigger, large pool of money by using trade attorneys in these kind of cases to do that. Nothing shocks me anymore. I'm way past shock, buddy. Yeah, yeah. Well, hey, this might have been our best show ever. Doug, yeah, you think I think it might have been our best show ever. We've run the gauntlet of human emotion. We've spoken about the end of our society. We spoke about live music. I mean, what else could we possibly have
Doug Draper 35:31
we missed movies. It was referenced, but we didn't really take it over on that show.
Pete Mento 35:36
That's true. We came pretty darn close, but great show as always. Doug, thanks for being you and my ride or die every week on Monday afternoon. And thanks to all of our listeners. Thank you so much to keep cape. Thank you so much, Kate. I can't believe I just said that out loud. Cap logistics for all that you do to keep the show running and making it available to our listeners and giving us a platform to say these crazy things, week in and week out, and like we say every week, what's happening in global trade talking about it on global trade this week, take it
Doug Draper 36:08
easy, buddy. All righty. Travel safe. My friend. You.