The Cypress Truck Lines Podcast

Diesel costs have been rising at a pace that nobody saw coming and if you are behind the wheel of a flatbed right now you are feeling every penny of it. In Episode 40 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast, Cypress owner Thad Penland joins Marcus to talk about the unprecedented rise in diesel costs over the last several weeks and what Cypress drivers can actually do about it. Thad walks through a new...

Kevin Barritt has been behind the wheel for 30 years. He knows what a truck is supposed to look like rolling down the interstate. So when he spotted something on I-10 in West Texas covered in cameras and sensors and looking nothing like everything else around it, he knew immediately what he was looking at. His first thought was that he was glad he was going in the opposite direction. In Episode 39...

Imagine waking up in your truck and discovering someone else's bumper attached to your trailer. What do you do? Apparently you call Pam Keaton. After nearly two decades at Cypress Truck Lines, that is probably not even the strangest problem Pam has been asked to solve. In Episode 38 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast, Marcus sits down with Pam Keaton, safety assistant and HR specialist, for an emp...

What separates the driver who simply gets through training from the driver who turns that training into a career? It probably starts with being willing to admit you do not know everything. Being willing to ask the same question five or six times until the answer finally sticks. And then when somebody gives you that knowledge, actually doing something with it. Ariyel Vanterpool had a pretty incredi...

Driver Appreciation Week is something every trucking company talks about. Not every company makes it a week-long feast. In Episode 36 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast Marcus sits down with Thad Penland and Matt Penland to talk about how Cypress has approached driver appreciation over the years, what the effort actually means to the leadership of the company, and how they continue to build and st...

Football season is here, and the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast is celebrating it the right way. In Episode 35, Marcus brings together two Penlands and two of the show's most beloved drivers for a two-part episode that starts with genuine leadership insight and ends with the kind of trash talk that only happens when everyone in the room loves the game. Aaron Penland from operations and David Penland...

Before the diesel engine. Before the interstate highway system. Before the automobile itself. The story of flatbedding goes back further than most people in trucking have ever thought to look, and in Episode 34 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast Marcus takes you all the way back to the beginning. This is a different kind of episode. No guests. No interviews. Just Marcus and a comprehensive look at...

Nobody on the other end of your delivery is waiting for a kidney. That is the Cypress Truck Lines philosophy in one sentence, and it changes everything about how safety and operations work together at this company. In Episode 33 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast, Marcus sits down with Dave Penland Jr from Cypress ownership, Director of Safety Sharee DeHart, and dispatcher Blayze Padgett to break...

You made it through CTC. You earned your CDL. You trusted the process. Now comes the part nobody fully explains before you get there, what actually happens next. In Episode 32 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast, Marcus brings together the head of the Cypress Training Center Ken Codere and orientation supervisor Randy Wells to walk new CDL holders through exactly what the transition from CTC studen...

Becoming a driver trainer is one of the most meaningful career moves an experienced flatbed driver can make at Cypress Truck Lines. But it is also one of the least understood. What does it actually take to qualify? What responsibilities come with the role? What does your day-to-day look like with a new CDL holder in the seat next to you? And what do you personally get out of it beyond the extra pa...

Most drivers know their base pay. Far fewer know every bonus, incentive, and atta-boy sitting on the table, waiting to be claimed. In Episode 30 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast, three experienced drivers break down exactly how Cypress and Sun Belt drivers can maximize their earnings from every angle available to them. Tony Miller, Kevin Barritt, and retired driver Adolf Metzer have between them...

Every driver has thought about it. The other company is paying a little more. The home time sounds a little better. The equipment looks a little newer. It is hard not to wonder if the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. In Episode 29 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast, Dean Kreigsman and Simon Barnett stopped wondering and actually went to find out. Both drivers left Cypress for oppor...

Nuclear verdicts. The Reptile Theory. Lawsuit abuse that has turned routine trucking accidents into multi-million dollar litigation nightmares. This is not a future problem for the trucking industry. It is happening right now, and it is getting worse every year. In Episode 28 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast, Marcus sits down with Clay Hamblen from Cypress risk management and safety to break dow...

Most drivers know what happens on their end of the load. But what happens on the other side of that phone call? Who is planning the freight, building the routes, and making sure everything comes together before a driver ever climbs into the cab? In Episode 27 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast, Marcus sits down with Wes Mitchell, a Cypress logistics expert who has built his career from the inside...

Two hundred and fifty years. America has been doing this for 250 years, and we are celebrating it the only way we know how on the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast. In Episode 26, Marcus brings back two of the show's most beloved guests, Tony Miller and Kevin Barritt, for a Fourth of July special that is exactly as fun as it sounds from start to finish. Firework stories. Childhood shenanigans. Eye-poppi...

Hurricane Helene left a trail of destruction across inland North Carolina and Tennessee in 2024 that claimed 250 lives and cut off entire communities from the resources they desperately needed. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis responded by sending 7,500 feet of temporary bridge infrastructure to help reconnect those communities including a saline and isopropyl factory critical to the medical relief e...

Every driver who has ever applied to a trucking company has wondered the same thing. Will my record disqualify me? Will they find out about that accident? What happens if I am honest about my drug-screen history? In Episode 24 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast, Marcus sits down with Angela Barfield, Ciara Watson, and Sharon Stoltmann, the team that recruits, screens, and processes every driver wh...

Your truck gets towed and you did not see it coming. The bill is outrageous, the situation is stressful, and you are hundreds of miles from home trying to figure out what just happened. Predatory towing schemes, cargo theft, and parking scams are targeting commercial drivers at an alarming rate and most drivers do not find out about them until it is too late. In Episode 23 of the Cypress Truck Lin...

Some people find trucking because they love the road. Some find it because they need the money. And some find it because everything else fell apart at the same time, and the road was the only thing left that made sense. Stephen Henderson is that third kind of driver. In Episode 22 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast, Stephen sits down with Marcus to tell his story from start to finish. A career in...

Summer is coming, and the road is about to get a whole lot more crowded. Motorcycles are coming out of hibernation. RVs the size of small houses are pulling into your lane. Teenagers who just got their licenses and have no idea that you need 400 feet to stop. Construction zones are popping up on every highway from here to the state line. More pedestrians. More vacationers. More people have no idea...

The miles are logged. The load is delivered. The 10-hour break has started. So what does an OTR driver actually do with that time? In Episode 20 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast, Marcus gets three Cypress OTR drivers together for one of the most laid-back and genuinely fun conversations the show has ever had. Parris McLeod, Greg Boyd, and Jeramy Richard talk about everything they get into while...

Most trucking companies will tell you that home time is a priority. Cypress Truck Lines built a system that actually proves it. Five hundred drivers. Fifteen hundred trailers. That ratio is not an accident. It is the foundation of a philosophy that lets Cypress drivers get home at the drop of a hat when something important comes up without asking permission or filing paperwork or waiting on a load...

Every driver who comes through Cypress orientation has one job: prove they are ready. Randy Wells and Blaine Carver have seen hundreds of drivers walk through that door, and they can tell almost immediately who will succeed and who will not. In Episode 18 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast, Marcus sits down with the two men who built Cypress's orientation program into one of the most respected dri...

The Life360 app started as a simple way for OTR drivers to keep tabs on each other out on the road. What it became for Tony Miller, Kevin Barritt, and Adolf Metzer is something a lot bigger than that. In Episode 17 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast, Kevin reached out after Tony mentioned the app in a previous episode because he wanted the world to know just how much it has meant to him and the dr...

Living out of a car. Down to your last $100. Borrowing money from friends and family just to get through the week. For some people, that's rock bottom. For three Cypress Truck Lines drivers, it was the beginning of something they never saw coming. In Episode 16 of the Cypress Truck Lines Podcast, Trevis Gary, Mateo Van Holten, and James Yoder share the kind of stories that don't get told enough in...