Gord Magill is a third-generation trucker from Hamilton, Ontario, who has spent 25 years behind the wheel across four continents: ice roads in Canada’s Northwest Territories, log trucks on New Zealand volcanoes, road trains in the Australian outback, and long-haul freight on American interstates. His writing on the trucking industry has appeared in Newsweek, the American Conservative, and American Affairs. He lives in Ithaca, New York, where he is in the process of becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. His newsletter Autonomous Truck(er)s and podcast Voice of GO(r)D cover the trucking industry with the kind of detail and anger that the trade press won’t touch. You can find him on Twitter.
His first book, End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers, is out March 24 from Creed & Culture Books. The audiobook, which Magill recorded himself in a friend’s converted-barn studio in Ithaca, drops the same day. Matthew Crawford, the academic-turned-work-doer wrote the excellent books Why We Drive and Shop Class as Soulcraft, blurbed the back cover. Lewie Pugh of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and Oren Cass of American Compass also endorsed it. Magill was one of my first guests on the old What’s Left? podcast in 2020 (I still enjoy interviewing people about their work!), and he’s had me on his show too. We go back.
Our conversation covered deregulation, the driver shortage myth, electronic logging devices, autonomous trucks, insourced labor, the Teamsters, the Freedom Convoy, In-N-Out Burger’s trucking fleet, Walmart’s supply chain origins, Matthew Crawford’s philosophy of agency, Canada’s MAiD program, and why the American trucker as cultural archetype is being systematically dismantled.
On the Motor Carrier Act and the Birth of the Churn
The book opens with the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, the deregulatory legislation that restructured the trucking industry and set the template for everything that followed.
“One of the consequences was that the intense competition brought about having to cut costs. And one of those costs is wages. Drivers start quitting, but instead of doing the free market thing to figure that out — let’s figure out time, efficiency gains, let’s do something to give people a reason to stay, somehow pay them better — instead of doing that, by crying about a shortage, they were able to unlock taxpayer money to subsidize the training end of it.”
“A lot of very large trucking companies in America are kind of wards of the state. Welfare queens.”
“That welfare system has undergirded a churn system and it’s been doing it for so long, most of these companies build their whole operating schedule around it. They just shrug their shoulders — yep, every year we’re going to lose 100 of our drivers and it doesn’t matter because the state or the students themselves will pay us for their training.”
On Insourced Labor and CDL Mills
The issue Magill returns to more than any other: the mass influx of undertrained, non-English-speaking drivers into the U.S. trucking industry, which accelerated sharply after 2021. In February 2026, a Kyrgyzstani driver who entered the U.S. through the Biden-era CBP One app killed four Amish men in Jay County, Indiana — the kind of incident Magill has been warning about for years.
“The government basically just handed out CDLs like candy. Can you speak English? Can you drive? Doesn’t matter. You have a pulse. We let you in here, we need to give you something to do.”
“If these guys came to America and were trained and as competent as me and spoke English, the whole system wouldn’t work. Because then those guys would understand that they have some value and they can command more money. And then the gangsters they’re working for would be out of luck. The whole point is to flood the market with people that don’t know what they’re doing.”
“The entire electronic logging device system is totally compromised. All of these foreign guys, the ELD operates in their language. And if they run out of hours, their boss will just say, hey, we backdoored into your ELD from our office in Belgrade or Bishkek or wherever. And now the driver who’s already worked 10 or 11 or 12 hours can go work another 10.”
“They are a completely separated, hermetically sealed unit within the United States. They’re not actually engaging. There’s no assimilation. There’s no joining our culture. There’s no learning the language. You arrive in the United States and drive a truck owned by one of your co-ethnics. You do everything through your boss and everything in the truck is in your own language.”
On Who Owns the Trucks
“Most of these trucks are owned by little small companies and they subcontract to the fat cats. Walmart, Amazon, FedEx, USPS. And the trucks themselves are often owned by gangsters from Serbia, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan.”
“The companies are being directed and orchestrated from overseas. They only employ foreign drivers. They actively discriminate against American and Canadian truckers.”
“Progressive and Geico are issuing these instant-issue insurance policies to trucking companies with no vetting, no actuarial anything. Just give us your motor carrier number, the VINs for the truck, pay us, and we’ll give you insurance.”
On English Language Enforcement and Out-of-Service Orders
The Trump administration tightened enforcement of an English language proficiency regulation that has been on the books since 1937. Magill is pleased that some efforts are being made to rein things in but skeptical it changes anything.
“Giving somebody an out-of-service ticket doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to get out of the business. There’s been plenty of documented cases of a driver being busted for not being able to speak English one day and getting the same ticket the next day in the same truck.”
“The out-of-service order assumes that the person getting it can read the order. Assumes the person reading it will obey the order. Assumes the person reading it or handing it to their boss, that their boss doesn’t just tell them, who cares what the gringos tell you? Just keep going.”
“The only way to put these guys out of service is to seize the trucks and shut down the motor carrier registration numbers of the guys that own the trucks.”
On the Electronic Logging Device Mandate
The ELD mandate took effect in 2017. Magill got fired from his only trucking job for hacking one to keep driving home on a Friday night. The data, as he reports it, shows the mandate made things worse.
“They had four years of data and they crunched all of it before and after, and it showed that all the things that the ELD mandate claimed it was going to improve — crashes, highway safety, aggressive driving — all went up. Crashes went up, speeding went up, aggressive driving went up.”
“Truckers are often paid by the mile or by the load. Everything in the entire system is set up to get in your way and slow you down. But you are only paid when the truck is moving. The electronic logging device made it impossible to massage that. So it just incentivized a new, different set of behaviors, which were even worse.”
On the Teamsters
The Teamsters recently started a Substack and published a piece on deregulation and the driver shortage. Magill read it the day we recorded.
“Not once do they mention the migrants and trucking problem. Not once do they mention Biden. Not once do they mention that there’s between 600 and 850,000 of these guys here. We have an entire — like one third of the industry is now scab labor. And the Teamsters have never said anything about it.”
“If Sean O’Brien expects non-union truckers to sign up to be Teamsters, and the Teamsters are saying nothing about the biggest problem in the industry right now because their Democrat paymasters might get mad they said something bad about immigration — I don’t get it.”
On In-N-Out Burger and Walmart
Magill lit up talking about In-N-Out Burger, which maintains its own fleet of chrome-polished Peterbilt 379 tractors and treats its drivers well. The company is privately held, owns 70% of its buildings, and pays store managers $150–250K a year.
“In-N-Out Burger maintain a fleet of beautiful Peterbilt 379 tractors. Chrome, polished aluminum. Their trailers are super sparkly. They resisted the aerodynamic blob look of trucks. They actually look like trucks. They treat their drivers well.”
“Sam Walton wasn’t necessarily a great retail mastermind. Sam Walton was good at trucking. Sam Walton understood the limitations of trucks and how far they could deliver. He understood that if he didn’t have his own trucks to deliver to the stores and he was relying on contractors, that was a problem.”
“Amazon copied Walmart. Amazon’s whole system is built on copying Walmart. It’s all about trucking. Everything successful in our economy is built on trucking.”
On the Politics of Trucking
Magill resists categorization. He agrees with the Teamsters on some points, with libertarians on corporate welfare, and with conservatives on immigration enforcement. The book reflects that.
“If you’re listening to me and Oliver talk and you want to read my book and you want to look at the political angle — it sounds like I’m a conservative at times. It sounds like I’m a pro-labor leftist at times. I agree with the Teamsters at some points. I also agree with libertarians because I spend an entire chapter showing that there’s a corporate welfare program going on here that we should not have.”
“Everybody is a capitalist until the price of labor is bid up.”
“Because three or four of my chapters touch on immigration, this third rail, and because I supported my friends back home in Canada in the Freedom Convoy, they’re going to assume I’m some lunatic right winger. That’s on them.”
On Matthew Crawford, Agency, and What’s Being Lost
Crawford’s Why We Drive is one of Magill’s favorite books (and mine as well!), and its themes of agency and embodied skill run through End of the Road. Crawford wrote the book’s back-cover blurb.
“Crawford tries to show that something as basic as driving actually has a whole lot of imbued human qualities in it that are not to be trifled with. You have agency on the road. You are navigating reality. The vehicle is an extension of yourself as an agent in the world.”
“People derive value from work. People have skills. You pass that to your kids. You can teach somebody. It produces good in the world. We dismiss this at our peril. We subcontract out everything to machines at our peril.”
Crawford’s blurb: “If you want to understand the subterranean forces driving the economy of North America, you can do no better than reading Gord McGill’s End of the Road. This may be the most enraging book you have ever read. It will certainly be one of the most illuminating.”
On Being Written Off by the Industry
Magill got laid off from his last trucking job in 2023 and has been writing and doing construction since. Despite 25 years of experience, no collisions, and no speeding tickets in 21 years, most American carriers consider him unhireable because he’s been out for two years.
“If you try to get a job as a truck driver at Walmart, directly for Walmart, and you have taken two years off the business — even though I have 25 years before that, that 25 years is gone. There’s a clock ticking on your experience in the American trucking industry.”
“Even though I’ve driven road trains in Australia, even though I’ve never been in a collision, I haven’t got a speeding ticket in 21 years — I am one of the safest drivers you’re ever going to meet. I drive slow. My wife complains about how slow I drive. But because I’ve been writing and working construction and doing other things for the last two years, most companies in America effectively write me off.”
“The insurance companies are trying to say that guys like me are at more of a risk. We will get in less incidents. We won’t play bumper cars in the truck stop parking lot. But when we screw up, it’ll be the big one.”
On the Trucking Media Bubble
Magill’s friend Long Haul Paul Marhoefer hosted Over the Road, a polished, NPR-level podcast series about the American truck driver that was a hit with general podcast audiences during COVID. Almost no truck drivers listened to it.
“It made almost zero penetration in the trucking business. Like, almost no truck drivers listened to it.”
“The trucking media, they know I’m around. They all know about me. They don’t talk about me or to me very often because either I’m a competitor or a threat or too crazy.”
On What’s Left for Truckers
“What’s left? Will there be anything left for me when I go back on the road?”
“It’s not fun being angry. I don’t like being angry about it. But what else am I supposed to do?”
