Chase Geiser On The Race For Congress In GA-10 With Mike Collins | OAP #49
Chase Geiser is joined by Mike Collins.
Mike was born and raised in Jackson, Georgia. He credits his first job at age 12, sweeping floors in his dad’s shop, for instilling in him the value of hard work and an appreciation for the American Dream. That strong foundation and his entrepreneurial spirit spurred him to found his first business at age 25.
For the past 31 years since, Mike has successfully owned and operated several small businesses. Since then, he’s grown his trucking business from just one semi-truck to a fleet of 115. Collins Trucking hauls millions of metric tons of freight throughout the nation each year and employs more than 100 hard-working Georgians.
Mike graduated with a business degree from Georgia State University and married his high school sweetheart, Leigh Ann. They have three children and three grandchildren and still reside in Jackson, where they are actively involved in their community. They attend Rocksprings Church.
When you think about it, a truck driver, you can't start that career until you're 21.
Now, you graduate from high school at 18.
You go to tech school at 18, get out at 19, but you're still not able to drive a truck until you're 21.
So it kind of puts us at a very bad disadvantage.
And then, you know, you take last year especially when COVID hit.
The Motoring Public was fantastic, but the shippers and the Constantines, you might take a load 1,100, 1,200 miles and the shipper or the Constantine's closed because somebody had COVID, but they didn't call anybody.
So you've got a driver that's sitting there.
You don't know how long.
So, you know, it got to where it was a frustration factor.
And a lot of our drivers are older.
A lot of your older drivers, 65 plus, they drive because they love it.
It's who they are.
And when the frustration set in, they thought, well, I've got a wife, kids, grandkids at home.
I'll go home.
And then you throw into the mix the fact they closed the truck driving schools.
And so you've just got a perfect storm.
We can't hire you without two years' experience.
Even though I run, operate 115 trucks, we just can't hire you because of insurance.
So we're in kind of a holding pattern.
You know, I've got 20 trucks sitting out there on the fence.
What do you think about some of the work that Elon Musk has been doing in terms of the electronic cyber truck that he sort of brought out a couple of years ago?
So we run solar panels with an electric APU or auxiliary power unit to run the truck at nighttime.
And that's great.
It works out great.
So, you know, anything that makes it more technologically advanced, safer, more efficient, better for our drivers, for all of us to make more money, then certainly I'll take a look at it.
Well, I'm all about the green energy approach, but it seems to me that if we're still making electricity with fossil fuels, then if you have an electric car, you're not exactly saving the environment.
You're just burning coal to make the electricity, right?
You've got the EPA, and this is through all bureaucracies.
I just know the trucking side of it, but you could pull me out and you could put a plumber in, an electrician in, even a painter.
It doesn't matter.
They don't really know the industry, but yet they're able to regulate you and demand that you put everything on the equipment that they think that needs to be so that if, Chase, if you want to go up there and put your mouth on the muffler and breathe in the exhaust tomorrow, you'll be okay.
Now, I don't recommend it, but you'll be okay.
But it doesn't make any sense at the expense that we did to get to that point.
You know, you take, we had trucks that used to get eight, eight and a half miles to the gallon.
When they got through with us, we're back down to five, five and six miles to the gallon.
You know, and the oil change intervals are so much more.
So we got through a lot more oil and diesel to do what they want you to do, but they really don't understand the total cost of what they're putting you through.
You get a truck.
Most of the trucks you see sitting on the side of the interstate, they're derated.
And that means that the truck has shut itself down.
And most time it's because of some sensor instead of letting you be able to limp to the next truck stop or something.
So just there's just a lot of stuff.
It's called federal government interference.
And it's one of the biggest pet peeves I have, regulations.
And a federal government that is way too big, way too intrusive.
Yeah, it would have been a lot easier to prevent the expansion than it is to reverse it, I imagine.
That's one of the concerns that I have.
And I'm an optimistic person, just generally speaking, but it's alarming how, like, how do you, how do you untangle the unchecked nature of the intelligence community, right?
Sometimes on my Twitter account, I call the intelligence community the unchecked fourth branch of government.
And that, you know, they're not really accountable to anybody if, you know, if the FBI or the CIA breaks any law, they do an internal investigation, right?
There's not like an external branch of government that really checks on them.
I mean, technically, Congress could do investigations, but with the top secret nature of these intelligence communities, they can't even tell politicians secret information unless they have need to know or they specifically ask.
And so I'm really concerned long term about how some of these, the way that we've allowed our government to get so big, but particularly with the intelligence community, I'm concerned long term with how that's going to play out in terms of the tyranny versus liberty kind of dynamic.
I was trying to just trying to correct it there on my side.
But, you know, it's not just the law enforcement or the CIA or the FBI.
Yeah, a lot of that needs to be looked at.
You take a look at what's happened to Trump over the past four years.
Now, if people don't think that we need to really look to see what's going on in our federal government just from that standpoint, then they're not really paying attention.
But it's in all bureaucracy.
And the problem is that they're not accountable.
You take a lot of the, and this is not with the CIA or the FBI, but you take with the regulations and the bureaucrats.
And the fact that they've been trying to pass this Reigns Act, and it's still in Congress today, just so that Congress has the power to either say yay or nay over a regulation that's over a certain cost.
And the fact that they should be able to bring those regulations in every so often and say, hey, do we still need this regulation?
Because without that, there is absolutely no check and balance on those people up there.
Yeah, well, I think that the original intention of the structure of government was that the states would kind of hash out the specifics and the federal government was sort of provide for the common defense, make sure no states are violating individual rights like we see in the bill of rights.
And so, you know, it's just one of those things where over time, it seems that the federal government has garnered more and more power.
And I think a lot of it has to do with how dependent the states are financially on contracts and grants from the federal government.
You know, you go back as far as any social program you can think of, even the social net programs that were basically set up as a safety net, be it Social Security or Medicaid, and how over the years the government has gotten you into a dependency, whether you're older.
And every time something happens with Social Security, man, they're right there on top of it.
And they paid into the system.
Don't get me wrong.
They deserve their money.
But that's part of the dependency that the government has systematically processed and put us through to where you take your faith and everything that guides you off of God and then you move it right over to government.
And you can go right on down the line.
You take the middle class or middle-aged people and there's Obamacare, healthcare.
Let the government take care of it for you.
And now we are on the children with CRT, the mask mandates to make you conform.
To where everything that they're going to start doing, these children, they want them to say, what does the government think that I need to do?
And if you look at the numbers of children without COVID who died of pneumonia, it's over double that.
So if you're advocating for masking children to save them from COVID, then you should have already been mandating before COVID to protect them from pneumonia.
I think that I don't even think they care about the mask.
I think that it is just a point to where, and people get to that point to where they just say, man, okay, hands up, forget it, whatever, whatever you want me to do, just leave me alone.
Just tell me what you want and then leave me alone.
And that's where they want you.
To me, it really doesn't have anything to do about mask.
I am totally against these mask mandates.
I'm totally against the vaccine mandate.
If it helps you, go see your doctor.
Y'all discuss it.
Not the government.
That's just another part of this, this whole process.
There was probably two or three days that were a little bit, I know I made some phone calls that I don't remember.
And I was drive my V. No, I never had a fever.
I knew I had it when I lost my sense of smell and taste, but I would drive my truck to my office and sit out in the parking lot and make all my phone calls and watch what's going on and see what was going on.
But it was, I was fortunate.
I didn't have anything bad happen.
But I feel like I still got the antibodies.
So, you know, I haven't even checked out on getting the vaccine.
You know, it is kind of it is kind of strange, but you know, and I, in all honesty, I had a good friend of mine, he had he got COVID probably two weeks before I did, and so he went and got the vaccine back in March or April.
But he has had tremendous headaches, and that's what I had while I had COVID.
Man, I had headaches like you wouldn't believe.
And so he's he had headaches so bad after he took the vaccine that they have they have not figured out yet why he cannot get rid of them.
And so there's that's the reluctance that I've had.
Uh, just thinking that, well, maybe he still had the antibodies.
I don't know.
I'm not a doctor.
But when I decide to really take a hard look at it, then I'll go to my doctor and see what see what we need to do.
It was, well, I lost about 4,500 votes at the end of the day in the runoff.
The primary, we were pretty much tied.
But I was running against, I was running against a second-time candidate.
Congressman Heiss had run before.
He's the pastor of a fairly large church, probably 3,000 to 4,000 people.
And so, you know, I had a, I knew I had a little bit of a hill to climb, but anybody that's ever worked around me or worked on our team knows that, man, we run night and day.
We run wide open.
And so we, we, I really thought that I was going to take that election last time, but, you know, it didn't.
It turned out it's probably the right decision that I didn't win.
You know, you look back hindsight and it's always 2020.
I got to, you know, I got to spend five good years with my dad before he passed away.
And I probably wouldn't have got to be able to do that.
So, you know, he was, he was, he was one of my biggest mentors and I learned a lot from him, you know, and that's okay.
We'll see him again one day.
But this time around, I am telling you, Chase, I'm not coming in second place again.
We'll do what it takes to win.
We've got the right message.
And especially after Donald Trump four years showing that a business person, an outsider, and what he was able to do.
And the whole time, just think the whole time, four years, they had his head underwater trying to drown him to death.
And look at what he was able to accomplish.
Man, if he'd have had, if we wouldn't have had Paul Ryan as the speaker of the house, just think of what we could have done.
So this time around, I think people, Chase, everywhere we go, and I would say for the last two weeks, everywhere I've spoken, we've had standing room only.
30% of the people in these meetings, especially these monthly meetings we go to, are brand new.
They've never participated.
They've never been to a meeting.
They may have started in January, February, or they may have just came in that night.
And every one of them had the same meshes.
I have no idea what to do.
I've never been here before, but I'm here because we got to do something.
What do you think about the state of the Republican Party?
I've been a Republican voter for my entire adult life.
I'm 30 now, but I'm feeling somewhat disenfranchised with the party, not because my views on policy have changed, but because I feel like a lot of the existing leadership within the party is sort of coasting.
And I don't know if that's a sentiment that you share or if that's something that you hear, but I feel concerned that there's not the hustle that is needed in order to beat the Democrats because as much as I despise them, they know how to win.
You know, you're right on, you're right on the money.
And the reason is, is that most of these people up here go up there for a career.
But there's a good group now.
The Freedom Caucus guys and ladies, they're hustling.
You know, you've got those political prisoners from January 6th.
You've seen them there.
They're trying to get them to a trial.
They're out there pushing, trying to make sure everybody understands how we're getting messed over with this budget resolution and this infrastructure bill.
But you're right, you've got a number of them up there.
You've got a lot of Republicans that like spending your money just like Democrats.
Sure.
And you're going to, if you go to Washington today, you better be willing to fight the people on the left, the wacko liberal leftists.
But you better be willing to fight those rhinos and those establishment people.
So with this government spending thing, you know, I used to get bothered about it because I'm a big capitalist guy.
I read a lot of Milton Friedman growing up, a lot of Ayn Rand.
And, you know, I used to be concerned because it's like, hey, they're spending my money.
But, you know, as I've looked into it, and I could be misguided, but as I've looked into it, it's not even really the spending that's the problem.
It's the fact that they have to sell bonds in order to pay for it.
And it seems like the inflation that comes from the spending is what's really hurting poor and middle-class people disproportionately and sort of kind of making the political class richer.
Because if you have your money in the market, inflation, you know, grows your portfolio value.
But if you're too poor to put money in the market because you're a paycheck to paycheck person, then inflation is really detrimental because every dollar you have loses value.
And I think one of the things that people don't understand about China is that it's a communist dictatorship.
And yes, they use capitalism in order to gain revenue and profit, but it's really a communism at its heart.
And what that means is none of the officials in leadership are accountable to constituents.
They're only accountable to who's a top-down system, not a bottom-up system like democracy.
And so when you see things like what happened in between 1958 and 1962 in China, that was the great leap forward when Mao tried to move all the agricultural workers into the cities to industrialize China and make it this tech hub.
And what ended up happening was they had tremendous famine for four years because nobody was farming and harvesting food.
And they, you know, there's some studies that say that up to 100 million people starved to death in that four-year period.
And so people don't understand that, you know, something like that would never happen in the United States because there's bottom-up accountability and the people, everyone would lose the power.
But in China, they don't care about the pain that the people feel.
So they're willing to do things like, you know, make people suffer financially or make people get sick, you know, because of like a bioweapon.
You know, I'm not saying that COVID's a bioweapon for sure, but my point still stands that they don't care how much it hurts their people to hurt us.
Like we sort of kind of had this like, hey, you know, they're never going to do anything to us because they need us just as much as we need them.
But that's not really true because they don't care about the pain that the people feel from economic strife.
You know, Newt Gingrich said it best, and he said this over 10 years ago.
He said that the Chinese are beating our socks off in math and science.
And if the United States doesn't get their act together, we're going to be in a world of hurt.
Wouldn't that fast forward?
What has been going on with these H1 visas?
They've been bringing the Chinese in because corporations can't find anybody to help them produce their products.
So they bring these people in, and then, what, six months, a year later, all of a sudden, boom, they're gone.
They're back in China.
They're not just back in China.
They're back in China producing your product.
And then you're sitting over here producing your product with all these regulations that are, some of them are not worth paper they're written on, but you're having a, you're at a disadvantage already.
And now you have people that say, well, I just want to buy the cheap stuff.
And there is a national security there.
Well, just look at it.
Look at what's going on today with China and the fact that they've got those container ships over there sitting there and they're not loading them.
And then, what, two days ago, they closed down the airport there at Shanghai with the air cargo.
So you think you've got a few empty shelves now and you think inflation's bad now.
Brett Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist and he came to prominence because he was involved in that Evergreen State University controversy where a number of years ago they had a day on campus where they said, listen, if you're white, don't come on campus.
This is like a solidarity day for minorities.
And he showed up anyway because he's like, that's racist.
And so there's a video of him that went viral and that's how he kind of came to prominence.
His brother, Eric, works for Teal Capital in a very high capacity, brilliant physicist, brilliant mathematician.
And he believes that what really happened with the H1 visas is that not that the corporations actually needed the engineers.
He believes that those needs were exaggerated so that the universities could get the free labor from the foreign students coming over.
And so I don't know if it's true or not, but he can frame it in a much more sophisticated manner than I. But if you're an ambitious head of an engineering department at MIT and you're trying to accomplish these studies and you're trying to kind of be groundbreaking and you can have a whole team of 10 foreign students helping you with the research and doing all the work for free that maybe Americans wouldn't just because of the cultural differences or whatever,
he claims that that was actually an effort for us to import free labor for research and then we just sent it back and it ended up being a national security crisis.
But I mean, think about it.
How many engineers graduate and can't find a job?
You know, it's like, is there really a shortage of engineers in the United States?
It's so much happening at one time that you find yourself talking in four and five different directions, just trying to keep up with what's going on up there during the day.
These last two bills that just got passed through the House, boy, I tell you, we need to, I encourage everybody, I encourage all you listeners, they need to be on the Senate.
You need to be calling a senator.
I don't care if it's your senator or any senator.
They need to understand that the American people are awake.
We're not woke.
We are awake.
And the day of reckoning is coming soon.
I believe, Chase, I'm telling you, I believe that there is going to be such a huge red wave coming in this midterm elections.
Now, y'all are going to pick up two seats in Congress because California is giving them to you.
So, that's going to be net there.
That's going to, and then, and then you pull one out of New York, put it in Florida.
We can, we will take the house.
It's just a matter of how much we're going to take.
I think it's going to be huge.
And there's going to be a day of reckoning coming.
And the Republicans and the Senate need to understand that because we've got some over there, they need to be looked at.
I used to use Binance when it was in Korea until we got forced out by the United States.
So the funny thing is, you look at a lot of what the Fed say about cryptocurrency and they really don't understand it, but yet they're wanting to regulate it, but they don't know what to do or how to do that.
But to me, it's a group of people that do software and they don't want to be paid in any monetary system that's out there in anybody's currency.
And so that's why they use the digital currency that they use.
Sorry, you can't pick it up.
And for all those people that think that hackers are able to ransom you with the Bitcoins and all that, transactions are public.
You can see it out there.
It's what's called the blockchain.
What you can't see is the password to get it out of there.
And so it's not a complicated system.
It's just people that do software work and are building these programs and they just want to get paid in a different form.
It's almost a form of bartering.
And sure, I mean, I love it.
I enjoy it.
I've got, you know, I've been invested in it for a while.
You know, it's either we're running wide open or we're sleeping, you know, and then we're ready to get up and go again the next day.
And so whether there's nine months, which there actually is left in this election or there was two weeks, we're going to run it the same way.
And that's, we're going to do everything we can to get our message out, to let people know whether you're in this district, what we stand for, if you're not in a district, the opportunities that we have in this country to set this country on the right path in a midterm election and be ready for Trump when he comes back in 2024.
Could you imagine the success and the way we could get this country back on path with him in the White House and with a true Republican majority in the House and the Senate of good, true Republicans?
She may get mad at me about this, but a lot of people compared my comments and the way I talk to Marjorie Taylor Greene.
You know, I'm not going to vote for Kevin McCarthy.
And if that costs me a committee assignment, so be it.
You know, I'll put it this way.
I honestly believe that the fundamental process of Congress will be changed because so many people looked at it from a got to have this committee, got to have that committee.
You know, I want to be on the subcommittee of the dinosaur bones or whatever, you know.
And I think people like Congressman Marjorie Taylor Green are showing that no, that's not really the way you have to do this.
And you can be more effective.
But, you know, you take a number of them, Andy Biggs or Banks or Jordan or Gates, you know, they all have different roles.
I had breakfast with Congressman Cat Kmack last week.
They all have their different roles, but they're all good at what they do.
And any number of those people would be good people to follow and latch on to.
You know, well, your first thing you do is going to vote for Speaker to House.
But what I tell people is you take a look at this crazy budget resolution that just came out today.
Everything was increased from your personal income tax all the way up to a state tax.
And what we're going to have to do is take a hard look at everything that they have done and then start passing bills to get rid of that and push this stuff back down.
That's going to be your major thing.
The other thing you've got to be able to pass and get through Congress things like this Keystone Pipeline to where it's just not things that Trump was only able to executive order, we've got to make sure that we put into law.
And then we've got to start limiting the federal government.
We've got to start lowering, getting rid of some of these old regulations.
And then we've got to just make people look and be responsible for themselves.
It's just an individual responsibility.
Now, yeah, I've got a few pet things that I'd like to see done too.
Until you get some true tort reform, I mean, and this is getting way in the weeds, but until you get true tort reform, you're going to continue to see these runaway verdicts.
And you're going to see insurance be a very tough issue for small businesses.
And that needs to be addressed.
That was on Trump's hit list.
He just didn't have the people or the time to do that.
I think you need to go to private funding for colleges.
Yeah.
The other thing you need to do is get out of this mentality that everybody deserves to go to college.
Not deserve.
What is deserves to go to college?
It should be an option, an option along with technical school.
My goodness, look at the shortages and the needs in technical school.
And just because you go learn a technical school trade, man, I got plenty of buddies earned a whole lot of money.
They've done well.
And it doesn't mean you don't own your own business and you're not an entrepreneur.
It's just a different route.
But, you know, this theory that everybody's got to go to college and then you've got all these liberal arts degrees that won't get you anything.
It certainly won't get you a job.
You're just putting people through four years of something.
And then when they get out there at the end, they don't really know what they're going to do anyway.
That to me has been a bigger problem.
The federal government getting into the loan business is a problem.
But we just need to encourage people to get back into the high school side of the economics or the shop class and see if that might be an avenue for them.
Well, maybe one solution is, and I'd be interested to hear what you think about this, but maybe one solution is that federal funding or lending for education is variable based on what major you pursue, right?
So if the United States, for some reason, needs engineers, then, hey, if you study engineering, then we'll help you out more than if you study basket weaving, right?
And so I don't know if that's practical or not.
I'm just a layman here.
But it seems to me that there's creative ways to solve it.
So I want to ask you a little bit because I started, I started, I have an advertising business and I started my business in 2016.
And I remember in the beginning, there were months where it was like terrifying.
Did you ever have that experience as a small business owner where you're just like laying awake at night, like, how the hell am I going to make this work?
Well, when people talk about, you know, raising corporate tax rates, I think everybody in their head imagines like taxes on Amazon or Google or Facebook or one of these giant companies that's just, you know, very, very cash rich.
And I don't think they realize that the vast majority of corporations are LLCs or incorporated just small inks, you know, sole proprietors.
And the amount of discomfort or risk you have to put yourself in in order to start something new is another level of stress beyond the sort of typical stress that you have as an employee.
And I've been an employee and I've been, I've worked for myself and I've had employees and that it's, it's another level of stress.
I wouldn't trade it for the world because I value the freedom that comes with it.
I always say that I, you know, I get to choose which 20 hours a day I work.
Right.
And that's why I like it.
So so, you know, I wouldn't trade it for the world.
I'm just kind of built that way.
I have that disposition.
But I really wish that as a culture, we still had an understanding and an appreciation for that the blue-collar man, you know, that that's that's a small business owner and that these corporate income, these corporate tax hikes impact that person because these major corporations find the loopholes, they don't care, they work around it, they offshore their money.
But when you, you know, when you're a small business owner and you're just trying to find a way to bring home 10 grand in a month or something, it's like and you're getting hit with 36, 30% tax.
That's a big deal.
You know, I always tell my wife, you know, it's like, if you, if you want to buy something for five grand, you got to make 10.
And then when you raise that tax rate, like what they did today, and now they're talking about going back and making it retroactive to April, you really don't have that cash sitting there.
Okay, so now you don't have the cash.
So what's your options?
You're going to go to the bank to get a loan, right?
So I need an asset-based loan.
I need a line of credit.
Today's world with everything from Dodd Frank, what's left of it.
And God, I wish I hadn't said that because the Democrats want to put it back in force, full force.
Even back to Sarbanes Oxy.
You look at the amount of paperwork you have to fill out.
Now, if you're a small business person and you're out there working hard every day, in and out, every day, you don't have time.
You don't have that army of accountants like you were talking about with the large corporations.
That's all they do.
You've got to do that at night.
And then you've got to figure out what it is they want.
And then by the time you turn that in, it's over 90 days.
And oh, guess what?
We got to start over again because now your paperwork's all.
That's the type of mess that is hampering and just squeezing on these small businesses.
And that's the type of mess that I'm going to go up there and I'm going to fix because you're right.
This country was built on small business.
And do you realize in the trucking industry what the average trucking company is truck-wise?
If you're an employee and your taxes are automatically withheld, it's a much different feeling than writing quarterly checks.
You know, because you've been looking at that money in your bank and you have it in the savings account because you know it's taxes, you know, if you're doing, if you're being responsible, but it's, you know, it's painful.
I mean, I wrote a check and this is this is not much money to many people, but to me, it was a lot.
I wrote a check for $30,000 in income tax.
And that's, you know, that's like writing that kind of a check is like, that's a, that's a new beamer, man.
So I like how we talked about, you know, running into 2014, running again in 2020 here, what it was like to be, you know, a small business owner in struggle.
I really want to touch on that because I don't think, you know, people realize that the heart and soul that goes into it.
What do you think our country is going to look like in 10 years?
I think that a lot of the midterm elections will change the focus of this country because right now, if we stay on course of what we're doing, then I think you're going to have a true federal intrusion into every part of your life.
But with the amount of people that I see waking up today and wanting to help and move the needle, I think, and then we get Trump or somebody in that position that understands how much we need this thing run like a business.
I think in 10 years from now, we could be blowing and going.
We could be just wide open again.
The other big thing that I like to tell people is, Chase, it's so hard to put the genie back in the bottle.
And you can use MikeCollinsGA and you can go all across all the social platforms from Rumble to YouTube to Facebook and Twitter.
And we post stuff all the time.
We put videos out there.
Today was a twofer video.
I did two videos today.
I was dead blame, fed up with some things that I saw.
But yeah, I'd love for them to go check us out because I encourage people, no matter where you're at in this country and no matter what you do, look to see who is running for everything.
I don't even care if it's your homeowners association, because if you think about your homeowners association, they're the people that won't let you fly your flag.
So you need to be looking at homeowners association, city council, board of education, mayors, state races, all the way up to the president of the United States.
And if you don't have partisan elections, I encourage you.
You need to go back to partisan politics in elections because these beauty contests, they're not working.