Tristan joins the show for a wide-ranging conversation about entrepreneurship, confidence, and the mindset behind sustained optimism. We dig into what the logistics industry gets wrong about relationships, take a skeptical look at the AI and innovation narratives dominating freight tech, and explore how Amazon reshaped customer expectations and market creation. Tristan shares hard-won lessons from building brokerage and trucking businesses, the thinking behind fr8topia's focus on natural CPG brands in Southern California, and his vision for evolving from a freight provider into an ecosystem builder for growing brands. We close on authenticity, becoming who you want to be, and who Tristan is hoping to connect with next.

The industry doesn't need another voice. It needs somewhere quiet enough to hear the ones already worth hearing.

Peace and Love.

Shannon Breen didn't leave a stable executive seat at a public trucking company to build another commodity brokerage — he built FreightVana to invert the whole model: own the trailers, drop the commission, bet that alignment beats margin. That bet is being tested from three directions at once right now — a capacity crunch reshaping who's even legally allowed to hold a CDL, a Supreme Court ruling that just stripped brokers of the legal shield they've leaned on for decades, and a household of five kids while he runs a business that just took on an acquisition and a new Chairman to scale further. He didn't build this to survive one storm. He built it to survive all three.

The industry doesn't need another voice. It needs somewhere quiet enough to hear the ones already worth hearing.

Peace and Love.

Michael Caney is the Chief Commercial Officer at Highway, the freight industry’s leading carrier identity and fraud prevention platform, where he leads marketing, sales, sales engineering, customer success, and partnerships. He is based in Chattanooga, Tennessee “Freight Alley” — and has spent more than 20 years as an operator in freight, starting with his first job out of college as a freight broker with two phones on his desk.

Freight fraud is no longer a back-office nuisance. It is organized crime. Identity theft, double brokering, and cargo theft as a criminal enterprise are costing the industry hundreds of millions annually — and most carriers have no idea their DOT number can be cloned and used against them before they ever know it happened. Michael Caney has spent three years building the identity infrastructure the industry should have had a decade ago.

Carriers are not just bystanders in the fraud conversation. Their identities are being stolen. Their reputations are being used by bad actors. And the brokers who are protecting themselves from fraud are increasingly requiring carrier identity verification before they book. The carrier that is not verified is becoming the carrier that does not get the call.

The industry doesn't need another voice. It needs somewhere quiet enough to hear the ones already worth hearing.

Peace and Love.