View from the broker, Part 1. East Coast Transport's logistics VP Paul Berman has been around trucking, and particularly the food-freight side of things, since the 1970s and also happens to be a former owner-operator himself. He sat down with Overdrive Radio for an expansive talk on the history of brokerage in trucking and the evolution of the spot market into a sort of market-within-a-market, with plenty of downsides when pursued to the exclusion of tried-and-true strategies toward business relationships built on mutual trust, fairness and need. As the current crisis has done so much to expose bad actors among brokerages and spur a push for greater fairness, Berman emphasizes that there are plenty good guys out there among brokers, and owner-operators would do well to spend personal capital on setting up for the long haul. It's the regular partners who will sustain you through the next downturn, no doubt. In Part 2 next week, we'll talk with Berman about how current transparency regs have been exercised at East Coast and what he thinks about the push for more required transaction records disclosure, among other subjects.