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 No. 5, 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

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