In this HEP-isode, Mike and Jo talk about California's looming EV requirements, noise regulations, and Americans' need to "have their cake and eat it, too." Volvo CE's Vice President of Product Management and Productivity, Dr. Ray Gallant, makes an appearance, and the boys explore the heavy equipment industry's ever-present need for drivers and operators. Also: the Illuminati and Hai Karate!
In this HEP-isode, Mike and Jo talk about California's looming EV requirements, noise regulations, and Americans' need to "have their cake and eat it, too." Volvo CE's Vice President of Product Management and Productivity, Dr. Ray Gallant, makes an appearance, and the boys explore the heavy equipment industry's ever-present need for drivers and operators. Also: the Illuminati and Hai Karate!
Whether we're exploring the latest in trucking technology, talking about the trends that propel the industry forward, or uncovering stories about the dedicated individuals who keep the wheels of America turning, this is where the roar of the engines and the pulse of progress come together. It's sublime, it's surreal. It's the heavy equipment podcast with Mike and Joe.
Speaker 2:Welcome to episode. What are we up to now Is this episode nine Episode 604. Yeah, 694 Joe, episode 1767.
Speaker 4:All 686 of them. No one's heard.
Speaker 2:That's not true. According to this little handy dandy email I got from our stats company, we are in the top 100 business themed podcasts?
Speaker 4:Well, yeah, because we talk about real stuff and that's what we're talking about Real stuff, Exactly so.
Speaker 2:We do like to pretend that we're a new show, even though it gets off the rails quickly, but we do start off with a script. So let's give it that and see where we're at. California signed that bill into law. They've been talking about it for a long time. They want to get 50% of heavy equipment sold in the state of California to be zero emission by 2035. I don't think that's that crazy. That's 12 years from now. That's plenty of time to come up with stuff. They're not saying it has to be electric, they're saying zero emission and they kind of wiggle that a little bit. So you know you're running what they call green natural gas. You're running hydrogen. Whether that's hydrogen combustion, like we're seeing from Cummins and from Toyota Hino, or whether that is hydrogen fuel cell, like we've seen from some other companies, I think that's doable. You think 12 years is aggressive or you think that's a good number?
Speaker 4:No, I mean, look how far we've come with the whole tier platform and we've been talking about tier five for how long. Tier five is already in Europe. They're working on ceramic coated, titanium lined, all kinds of components to go with tier five. I think we're going to be right there. I mean, and everybody's talking about electric excavators and all that stuff to help narrow our footprint with a lot of that stuff as far as emissions is concerned. I think we're going to get there without any problem. I mean, we'll put it this way we need to, we just have to. This is where we're going.
Speaker 2:I think it's common one way or the other. We talked about Cummins and Daimler and I believe it was Packard that were coming together to do a common battery architecture on the semi truck side. Volvo was not in that mix. They've been developing their own batteries on the truck side that they're going to be sharing with a couple other groups and now we have on the equipment side. You're starting to see some commonality with the controllers, with the batteries, with the telematics. They've announced this as well with Volvo and Husqvarna and Atlas over in Europe. So they're going to have excavators and wheel loaders and things like that that are all going to run similar batteries. I think it's common and I think the real neat thing about this is the way that some of these other companies have come together to try to make this a reality.
Speaker 4:I think they have to because we're, you know, years and years ago, when we first started down the tier platform and people were like I don't know what's going on with that. There was so much customer awareness that needed to be had. They had to do so much training, they had to do all these knowledge chats, they had all these key terms for all this stuff. And I remember when we were doing a lot of that with Caterpillar and they would come around and explain what tier two and tier three and tier four interim was. It's just another step. We've already been through it and now we're on the internet and we have all these chat group forums. You got the younger operators out there now chatting it up on Facebook groups and they have Instagram groups and I follow a bunch of this stuff on TikTok and Twitter and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:Well, now X, sorry, I'm sorry, I'm just blown away by this concept of a whole bunch of operators getting together on a TikTok.
Speaker 4:They do and they, they, they post all these videos about like you know, like are we dug today? And that's the whole point of it. The whole point of it is there is a lot more awareness to everything today as the younger generation is becoming the main point of the operators Right, and we went through a rough period of time where they had to do so much education on everything that was changing and, to be bluntly honest, a lot of the business owners, a lot of the fleet owners, did not understand what was happening. We were in this weird generational gap and now that you have the younger people that are coming along and their parents on the business or the principals of the company, now the younger people that have come up to the management, they're like we've seen this, this isn't going anywhere. Just like my immediate reaction to that, like it's going to happen, it will happen, it will happen.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think the younger cats too, they get into the HEP cats. That's what we got to get going now. But the younger HEP cats that are out there, they're down with all this stuff. You know, tesla's been the go-to cool guy car for them since they became aware of cars 10, 12 years ago, so it's not some new hot thing that we have to explain to them. No, no, no, this is actually fast. This is not a girl man's white hat, 426 Dodge, but it's a different animal and I think they're going to be a lot more accepting of it. I want to weasel this in here because earlier in the week I got a chance to talk to the president of Volvo North America, volvo CE, ray Galant, and he's actually Dr Ray Galant, but I have no idea what he's a doctor of.
Speaker 4:I'm assuming I was going to say Ray, has he been knighted? This is what we need now.
Speaker 2:Has he been knighted? No, I was going to.
Speaker 4:He might be knighted by the heavy equipment podcast. Let's talk about that, oh that'd be amazing.
Speaker 2:We get a sword going, we get like a whole ceremony and we had Dr Ray Galant. We were able to talk to him a little bit about electrification and some of that stuff. I'll splice that in here. We'll try not to make it too obvious, even though we just hung a lantern on it. How much of a change, how much of an improvement can we expect to see by converting a lot of this diesel equipment to electric? And the reason I ask that is because so much of the conversation has been focused on electric cars, on Tesla, on Polestar, that there's a whole other sort of land of emissions generating diesels, whether it's generators or excavators, everything like that that really could be changed over to electric for the better.
Speaker 3:I think when you look at the effect of decarbonizing the off-road sector, you have to put it in the context of where we come from. So you're absolutely right. Our emissions compared to automotive a few years ago or trucking a few years ago, or industrial basis, all those our emissions footprint is fairly small. But as those industries clean up and as they transform to a greener footprint, the effect of off-road becomes more prominent because we become a larger part of the issue than a larger proportion of the greenhouse gases.
Speaker 2:Right, we become a bigger slice of a smaller pie.
Speaker 3:Exactly so. Right now, the transportation is running about 30% of the emissions overall in the US, so it's an important sector to take a look at, but it is in the evolution of decarbonizing all industries and making more sustainable industries across the board that you have to look at this.
Speaker 2:He talked about a lot of this kind of stuff, and the one thing that he was saying was that you don't have to sacrifice anything by going electric, and that the point of what they're trying to do is give you a tool that's going to do more, that's going to create more opportunities for the fleet managers, whether that is in getting around noise regulations, in being able to do indoor excavation or indoor demolition, where in the past maybe you couldn't do it without respirators and things like that. So it's real interesting. We'll put that in here and we'll see what you think of that.
Speaker 3:As we spoke earlier, we have to look for where these machines have advantages beyond just being emission free. It's not enough to just say these machines have less emissions. Therefore everybody should pay a lot more money for that benefit we have to make the benefit to the customer.
Speaker 3:Well, we have to make the benefit to the customer in relation to his job and his economic realities. We have to make that equation work. So what these demonstration projects do is find applications where not only the emission free is very valuable like working indoors or working around livestock or applications like that but that all the other features of an electric machine can shine.
Speaker 4:It's funny you talk about noise regulations. That is going to be the silent job site killer to come, as we have developments and we have all these new infrastructure coming in and we don't have enough housing as it is. But the biggest problem that we have right now is that we're building houses at an enormous rate. Anywhere you go, if there's a sliver of land, they're going to put a street down, if they're going to subdivide it. The thing that's killing all that is noise, because people are buying these homes and home prices are more than they've ever been. People are paying more than they've ever paid for a house and they get the same thing coming up all the time. I didn't buy this to listen to this.
Speaker 2:That's been the joke in the street racing circles forever, where people race their cars down the street and then they say, take it to the track. So people do go to the racetrack and start doing that. That becomes a place to be a cool area. They start building houses near the track and the people who bought a house knowing it was next to the racetrack start complaining about all the noise from the track and have the track shut down. And then you got nothing to do but racing the streets. Again. You're seeing this with construction. People want new homes, people want new development, people want more amenities and new gyms and they want all that in their neighborhood, but they don't want to hear it, see it, smell it or be inconvenienced by it in any way.
Speaker 4:Now, and you're- always going to have a group of people that have no idea how any of this stuff comes to be man in that the truth. We just moved into our house. They have no idea what it took to build that thing. They have no idea what the equipment down the street. All they do is complain about it. Oh, we got snow removal. All I hear is this guy beeping all the time in the morning when he's trying to clear my driveway. But they have no idea why any of that exists, and that's OK. But I'm listening to this podcast and we'll explain it. We'll go through backup alarms and everything else for you.
Speaker 2:That's OK.
Speaker 4:That's OK.
Speaker 2:We've talked about this in the past. You know, not on the show, but just you and I. Every time I turn on the toaster in the morning it's like a miracle, like the electrical is generated somewhere off, a thousand miles away. It gets transferred through a switching station, goes into a grid, the load demand is sent over to the house into a substation, it comes up through the coil, the switch is connected, the circuit is closed, the thing heats up and I got toast and like 10,000 things have to go exactly right for me to get toast in the morning.
Speaker 4:The humming, the humming. I can't stand the humming. That was another thing that I heard recently. They were complaining they had to increase a substation due to infrastructure demand for electric Right and they are starting to hear humming from the noise from that and people are complaining about it. And this was something that got brought up at a community, not in Ohio but in not anywhere around we were at, but we caught our radar through First Energy and I was like what did they think was going to happen?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it is. It is a whole thing. When I was talking to Ray from Volvo, he said something really interesting was they like it? At the Toronto Zoo? They have some wheel loaders over there that they used to get the big animals into the vet, you know, into the back of the ambulance and stuff. They drank them and they put them in and they like the electric because it doesn't flip out the animals. Oh yeah, exactly, it's not a rumbly and everything else going on Right.
Speaker 4:Maybe they needed that in Jurassic Park and the velociraptors would have ate all those people. That's what I'm kind of thinking. I just I just thought about this. They have the whole team and then the silent machines move the crates. There would have been no movie because everyone went slowly. Think about this.
Speaker 2:Like what if you know when that Ford Explorer is parked in front of the Tyrannosaurus tent and it's just rumbling and idling, the T-Rex is like that thing's growling at me. I got to destroy it Exactly. But, if it had just been humming along, maybe who'd have been like hey guys, I can hum too. Did you see that I was looking?
Speaker 4:for it and then it just walks away. That's it. You can't even have a casual conversation. The dinosaur cannot communicate because it's looking at that thing going. That's piercing my ears. I'm going to destroy you.
Speaker 2:Right See, see it's visual IQ.
Speaker 4:It is not that's not its whole thing, no, it's whole thing is like it's hearing its movement.
Speaker 2:You've got a thing that's making all it. Don't know what that's about, absolutely.
Speaker 4:It's going to get angry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, we see, we've solved this problem.
Speaker 4:So. So then we move into electric semi trucks and I'm going to tell you right now they're going to wake up in a century that they're not sure where they're at.
Speaker 2:That's right, it's going to be real quiet. Well, think about that too. Like real quiet, it's going to be real quiet. I mean, this happens to me, man. I'm going to die in the alley because we have an electric garbage truck that comes through my neighborhood. Oh, I don't hear it. And I just walk right out and I look up and that SOB is like right there, it's 16,000 pounds of steel and trash and poop. That's going to crush me.
Speaker 4:Well, it's funny because I was. You made me think about this because I was talking to my dad and you know my dad drove trucks in the military in the mid sixties. When he got out of the military he drove off and on and you know when stuff was really crude, yeah, and went up through Canada and all that stuff where it was really cold. And I was laughing because I was telling him that Mac came out with this. You know the MH model, that's all electric and the very. It's funny where people from before and they're not wrong, they're based based off of experience. So he immediately goes into a story because my grandfather worked on the railroad and he goes. This reminds me of the electric era when the little girl crossed the track because she couldn't hear the train coming and I was like damn, that's a very good point.
Speaker 4:And when you talked about that getting hit in the alley, I mean, as sarcastic as it is, you know this goes along with everything. Change brings upon more change. You affect one thing, you've affected 10. So there's going to be more understanding of everything. There's going to be more. You know signs. We went from the Harley era, where loud pipes save lives. Now we're going to this quiet. You know we want people to be quiet, we want these communities to be quiet. I don't know it's set. You know I want my cake and eat it too, mentality and we're just going to have to figure out how we have this. Bridges into the industrial realm.
Speaker 2:I think that's right. You know, I think that's the key thing that we've been talking about. Everybody wants their cake and they want to eat it too. We want to have sustainable business. We don't want any interruption to the fleet or transportation of goods and services, but we don't want to smell the dirty diesel. We want it to be electric, but we don't want to hear the electric hum, we don't want to have to charge it and there's people solving for this. You know and I think a lot of this does come down generationally and technologically that the younger guys now, that the young operators, the young cats that are getting out of college and getting into these engineering programs and building stuff, they don't operate under the idea that stuff is impossible the way that we did. I mean, you know we we saw lightsabers on Star Wars and we're like, oh, what a fun, neat concept That'll never happen. All these dudes are trying to build that stuff.
Speaker 1:I mean you gotta, that's common.
Speaker 2:I mean you know, but that is I know we would walk Star Trek and they would just like flip open the thing and talk to the spaceship and we were like, wow, wouldn't that be wild.
Speaker 4:If you were a Razor phone that's it.
Speaker 2:That's exactly it. All of that stuff is coming to be. I mean, look at that, we already have rockets that do the flash Gordon, that go up into space and come back down and land vertical. That's something that we have now.
Speaker 4:Imagine that in the fifties they were talking about that and they were like you know, we're going to land on the moon, and then they land the rocket vertically and everybody was like, yeah, that's so fake, Right, yeah here we are.
Speaker 2:I was showing my youngest son. He's seven. Right, my oldest is in college, he's 20. That's a whole lost cause, but the seven year old we can still. We can still obtain him. I was showing him Bugs Bunny cartoons and it's the one where Donald Duck goes to Planet X and he flies the rocket. And this is like from 1949 or whatever, and that's how the rocket lands vertical right on Planet X.
Speaker 4:So we got to wonder if Elon Musk and that whole team over at SpaceX, if they? You know, a lot of times we may not be wrong because things are. We may not be wrong. We've been right before. Yes, scary as that is, it has to happen. And then, so here's what happens right, sitting on your couch at home, you're watching TV. You got the whole sound system on, just like on the dislike. On that We'll help me out. The THX is that. Was that the sound commercial with a guy?
Speaker 4:that's blown back into the chair.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, yeah, it was like whoa.
Speaker 5:The usual, sir, please. And after 500 plays, our high fidelity tape still delivers high fidelity.
Speaker 4:He's sitting there and he's watching this. He's got some Chuck Jones cartoons on. Who doesn't like to get high and watch Chuck Jones? That?
Speaker 2:guy was a directing Marvel, yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, I mean, he did the Grinch and he had. You know, boris Karloff on there is the voice of the Grinch he come up with all these people.
Speaker 2:Think about this Boris Karloff was the voice of the Grinch Whoa, whoa, we're going back.
Speaker 4:Yes, look it up, google it. So Elon looks at this and he's like oh yeah, we're going to. You know, marvin the Martian is like me me, where are my face? And cabulator. He's like dude, we could, we could do that. I got enough money. I'll find. He's a. He's a modern name Howard Hughes.
Speaker 2:He's a modern day Howard Hughes. He's sitting there and he's looking at that. On turbo and cabulator, I could build one of those for South Africa and put it in my Emerald Mine Exactly, and then you know you built a spruce goose and he made it all on tool money.
Speaker 4:I Elon's, elon's got something going on. They're doing mining and they got all their crap. It's the same thing. How many billions have been made and how many fortunes have been created by those who dig things out of the ground?
Speaker 4:I ask you now I guess a lot Silence, long pause, yeah, okay, yeah, think about that. Howard Hughes oil tool money. You want to talk about equipment? They invented it. They invented how to bore into the ground. Okay, elon, digging up rhinestones, gems and anything else. They can pull it off and sell. That's right. They're making it on.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:Sparkly rocks. And let's talk about the news baron, of which Citizen Kane was based on His family. Yeah, his family made their entire fortune off of mining. Wow, you may have. You may have unlocked this one. No, because now everything's been dug up, everything's left. There's nothing there. No, but that's when you like Planet X.
Speaker 2:No, but that's when you invent some new battery or something that needs like phosphate or some nonsense, and now you own 78% of America's phosphate production. In the Florida Panhandling. There's always new stuff to dig up.
Speaker 4:We were in a meeting the other day and we were talking about many reactors and I talked to him about the sodium reactors. I said the sodium reactor is the wave of the future. Yeah, the sodium reactor is the reactor that you can use the spent energy that is no longer cost prohibitive in a normal reactor environment. Put it in a sodium reactor and then when that baby melts down, the sodium takes over and it's done.
Speaker 2:Right, you don't have Chernobyl, you don't have Fukushima, you just have a pile of glow in the dark salt.
Speaker 4:We need to eventually do the utopian dream of I don't know what you want to call it. I don't know what Star Trek used for terminology on this, but you want to get to full on utopian clean energy. We have to come up with some kind of plasma crap or whatever that has like some thousand year lifespan and put it in every machine and we just use it and it works. When you go out there every day, you don't have to worry about snow being on it because it just melted it all off. We use that. That's what we need to get to.
Speaker 2:We're going to get there. We are going to get there. I mean, I'll be honest with you, man. We take on some heavy stuff here and I agree with everything that you're saying.
Speaker 4:It's called the heavy equipment podcast. It's the heavy equipment podcast, all the hep cats listening today, better take heed to our messages.
Speaker 2:I thought we were going to get to the point where we're taking out our equipment for the cameras, that's a different. That's half after dark.
Speaker 4:Heavy equipment after dark.
Speaker 2:After dark, right, right. I think that there is a tremendous effort on behalf of a lot of wealthy people and the people that are employed by them. I'm not talking about a conspiracy. I'm just talking about a concerted effort to maintain the status quo. What I mean by that is there's an old saying that says understanding something is very difficult when your paycheck depends on not understanding it.
Speaker 4:That's very true. I mean, okay, let's talk about this. You got trillionaires that are deciding this stuff. Maybe that is the underlying goal of the top 20 people because let's think about that that decide ultimately and swirl the fate of the world. Mm the Illuminatus this is not where.
Speaker 2:I thought this was going to go. We got to get Neil on here.
Speaker 4:No, we don't need Neil because the 10,000 things that you were talking about to make toast. That happens in this house. Because he doesn't know how to have a simple life, he creates himself into this trapezoidal problems that he can't even dig his way out of.
Speaker 2:So, yes, he needs to be on his own. He's got to go on coil winding around the magnet.
Speaker 5:That's right.
Speaker 2:Every time I tell you about the time I blew his mind. I was like what are the ingredients of toast? And he's sitting there like what do you mean? I was like bread, bread and heat, and he's just quiet for a second. He goes bread is the primary ingredient of toast.
Speaker 5:Yeah, it is.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's a primary ingredient of his brain, so let's keep moving. We're going to use a common term used in our industry have you quit an industry? And we're going to apply this to my brother. It's called value engineering. Neil is the godfather of value engineering.
Speaker 2:He's the residential life.
Speaker 4:He's the best. I love Neil. That's right. Yeah, value engineering your residential life. He needs to write a book on this. Oh yeah, actually, he found a book and I have it right here in my little study. It's called the appliance service library.
Speaker 3:And I'm going to tell you, yes.
Speaker 4:So I'm going to tell you this, this book, as quirky as it is. Anybody that's listening to this podcast find it, download it, go get it out of a garage sale.
Speaker 2:It's a service library.
Speaker 4:Because what it does is it breaks down in the simplistic form the most basic of basic things how a drill electric drill motor works, yeah, how a toaster works. The basics of a refrigerator I'm not talking about the LSD screen built into your TV door.
Speaker 2:No, we're not talking about the smart scanner that tells you you're out of milk and sends you a text.
Speaker 4:I'm saying the basics behind everything all the way down, yeah, okay, which is which goes right back to what we were talking about the very beginning of this. We were talking about all the 10,000 things that have to line up so you can make toast within all those 10,000 things that have to line up. You also have to have a lot of very basic things that work. Yeah, and what's funny is we talk about a lot of things on this podcast. This is where I'm getting with this is that we talk about.
Speaker 4:Yeah, this is. I will come to a point, sir. Where I'm getting with all this stuff in this and in this story is that we forget about the basics of stuff. You still need grease, you still need lubricants, you still need particular metals to work with other metals, and that stuff is getting lost in the shuffle. I was just talking to a bunch of young operators the other day and I'm like you're skipping over the basics.
Speaker 4:The basic is that, yes, this is made out of plastic and yes, this is made out of bronze and this is made out of steel, but you still have to grease it. You still have to put some fuel in it. I don't care how efficient it is, it's still running on fuel. It still has a battery which is an electrical discharge to start it. Let's worry about those things and let's check those things out when they don't work. So we have all these things that are creature comforts and all the new equipment. We talk about all that stuff and these new electric trucks and the new electric vehicles and the new electric equipment. Everybody's like over and on over this and they're telling us it's not going to work. 90% of that thing is the same as it always has been.
Speaker 3:When we talk about electric technologies, first of all, they aren't new. We've had batteries, we've had electric motors, we've had switches, we've had control systems for going on a century. So that this is not new technology by any means it's not new technology.
Speaker 2:This is just the first time it's been applied in this way. But it's not like we don't know how to make electric motors. It's not like we don't know how to make gears. There are robots that have been running at GM factories nonstop for 30 years, with basic maintenance. They're all electric. They're all electric motors and servos and everything else. We know how to do this.
Speaker 4:Exactly. Think about the first electric vehicles, because they weren't too sure that a combustion engine was going to make it. Then, when Standard Oil and everybody else got together and said listen, we finally have an outlet for all of the stuff that we're drilling out of the ground, no, let's steer the whole automotive industry into combustion based engines. We had maintenanceable or that's not the right word serviceable battery technology and very basic forms with capacitors, diodes and resistors and all of that. If you look that up today, was it 1909?
Speaker 2:Yes, Well, Porsche, yeah, 1909. That's exactly what it was. The first Porsche hybrid was out there, built by Ferry Porsche well before he built the Volkswagen. He had a diesel generator to power the batteries on the go and it used the electric motor to propel itself. If you ran out of juice, you fired up the diesel and it was just like a diesel locomotive, which, again, has been around for decades and decades and nobody knows how it works.
Speaker 2:You get a lot of it. I think a lot of that comes from and I'm going to get on my soapbox here I think a lot of that comes from certainly my generation. We were always told you got to go to college, College, college, college. This is the way. Nobody went into the trades. Nobody learned any of that stuff Nobody really. Until YouTube came around, nobody had any idea how to find that information. That's why I really like to see things like this. This is something that was on our script.
Speaker 2:Now that we're actually getting back to that, there's a company called NextGen Trucking and they're launching a high school CDL curriculum companion. This is a great idea. They're going to young kids, teaching them another path. It's not to say that college is bad. College is great for a lot of people, but there's a lot of people that college is not for them. That's not the way they want to go in life. They don't want to have a quarter of a million dollars in debt so that they can learn about Sartre and Camus and any of that. They want to just get to work and start providing for their family. That's not the path that they want to go.
Speaker 2:So often we are told, as kids or our kids are told that the only path for them is college or the military. To show them that, no, here is a good, six-figure paying job with a future that's in high demand. We're going to get you going out of high school. We're going to get you placement at one of these programs. We're going to get you into a high paying position. You'll be 20, 22 years old by the time. These other guys that you went to high school with are graduating college again. Quarter million dollars in debt to get a job at Starbucks. You're going to be driving and making $150 grand a year. I think it's a great program.
Speaker 4:I think it is too. I mean, we all know there's a huge driver shortage. We don't need to harp on that anymore. We all know there's a huge infrastructure shortage related around the trucking industry. We have to start at the very beginning. That's right, the very beginning, because you can make all the trucks you want, you can do autonomous vehicles, you can do all that stuff. There is still always going to be a place for people that can work on things, that can drive things, can operate things. You have to have that. I mean, like you said, the GM plants that have had robots in the 80s. The UAW needs more people than ever. Trucking companies need more people than ever, that's right. Mechanics we need more mechanics than ever. We struggle with that every day of the week. Whether you're a union or not, companies need mechanics. We need operators. We can't get enough people that they get it. They get the common sense behind it. You've got to start at the beginning.
Speaker 2:No, but you put in a marketing job, you put in a social media manager job. Indeed, you get 160 applicants.
Speaker 4:Well, and here's the scary part Anytime HR throws something up on the use an old term here the wire, and they want to hit everybody up and they're like hey, we're looking for a project manager and we're willing to train them. We're looking for somebody that understands cost control, we're looking for somebody that understands procurement. There are a ton of people that throw their name in the ring and says you know what? I've been doing this marketing gig for quite some time. It's not working out. I missed my calling. I grew up on a farm, I went to college and I realized all that I've spent the last 20 years chasing something that wasn't for me. They're coming full circle. Yeah, not enough, just not enough. So anything we can do to propel this and get more people involved at a younger age we got to do it. I don't think anybody that's listening to this or any other podcasts about trucking or heavy equipment would disagree with that.
Speaker 2:No, and they wouldn't. And I think, honestly, if you are a parent right now and you've got young kids that are going up through the school system and they're looking at college, and you're looking at this and you're looking at a $300,000 to $400,000 commitment over the course of four to six years, it's a home, it's always been a home, it's always been a home. But you look at it and you got to think to yourself is this something that I want little Billy to grow up with and come out and have this kind of debt? And I think for a lot of people, that's not the right answer, especially and this is where it gets controversial Especially if you don't know what you're going to college for.
Speaker 4:Here's what I think, and I was just in a whole focus group study about this. I've been called about it since I've been in this focus group study long before we started this podcast, and it was this get through high school, let's get through the basics, let's get through the knowledge base that you need to cultivate your common sense once you get out in the workplace. Get yourself out in the workplace, put a few years out there, go to school, see things, then decide you know what I need to continue my education. This is what I'm involved in. A lot of countries do this.
Speaker 2:Yes, they're not a radical take.
Speaker 4:No, a lot of countries they do what. They force you into the military why they're not going to ship you all over the globe and stir up stuff. No, they want to go out, see things, see people work on stuff or stand guard somewhere and understand that that is not always the thing that you want to do or maybe it is and when you get done with your service and you come back into the normal population, you know what I liked when I was doing that over there and I want to go and I want to learn more about that.
Speaker 2:I didn't want to talk about this on the show, because I think we've talked about and by we I mean I think the automotive journalists and the clean tech and climate tech media has talked about Tesla just to death. But it's worth bringing up that. You know the guy who came out and said we are going to build self-driving cars and we're going to have everything's going to be self-driving and self-driving semi trucks and everything. He was on an earnings call last night sounding like someone just ran over his dog saying, yeah, it don't work. We've been working on it for seven years and it don't work. And the more places we try it, the less places it seems to work.
Speaker 2:Right, like it's not like putting it out there into more cars is making it better. The more input they get, the worse it gets, and the reality is, and has always been, people are really good at driving, and well trained truck drivers with hundreds of thousands of miles into their belt are actually really good drivers. Yep or? Maybe not the hare-legged Ukrainians, but they're going through a tough time. We got to be nice to them.
Speaker 4:Listen, listen, the the road is an equal opportunity. The rainbow of always chasing the sunshine. Think about that.
Speaker 2:That is the most nonsensical thing I've ever heard come out of.
Speaker 4:And I didn't even go to any kind of philosophy or philosophical high end degree school like you did in upstate New York watching the Lebes fall upon you. So let's keep moving on. You know something we were talking about in the background. People can't see this, but the background that you have on your screen right now made me think of this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, you know what that is right.
Speaker 4:It is the inner cab of a.
Speaker 2:Mac, that's right. The bulldog yes.
Speaker 4:We need to talk about this. Where are we at with sleepers? What are we doing? I see companies getting away from them. I see companies that need to get to them. I think what used to be, you know, a no brainer was like no, we just need, whether you need a smaller one or a larger sleep or whatever. It's like no, every truck had one.
Speaker 4:Now you're seeing more and more daycaps. People are scheduling themselves, they're going into hotels and it's funny because we just got into a whole situation and I was talking to some other people at other companies about the same thing. We're starting to see plants be built in more rural areas and all of a sudden, there is nowhere to stay. Right, there are no hotels available. We, you know, like I was just talking to another company because we were having the same issue they're leasing apartments and they're doing that because they're there full time. That's great. And so the guys that are bringing goods in and out of the site, there's nowhere for them to stay.
Speaker 4:And I think, as we get into some of this stuff, you're going to see more need for an industrialized sleeper which is like I'm not living out of the truck, but one night or two nights out of the week while I'm doing heavy haul and I'm, and I'm, you know, I'm trying to get this thing on chain, that I'm putting it literally, assembling it when it gets to the other end. I need a cleanable, workable sleeper that, when we get everything in there, you can actually like you know, I got mud on the floor, I can clean it out. There's no carpet in there. You know, there's all these things. That that's. That's a whole new era and I think we need to talk about that with some of the truck people, because we're getting in really good point because you're getting out there and even nowhere you are nowhere.
Speaker 2:But I think even the more traditional sleeper cabs. It's real hard to maintain a level of hygiene, a level of cleanliness inside the vehicle. I mean, this is obviously a press photo, because no trucker in their right mind would have 11 pillows on their sleeper bed. You know it's worth bringing up that anything you can do to make the cabs of these trucks, the sleeper cabs, easier to clean is going to pay huge dividends in the life of the truck driver. And it doesn't have to be some expensive, you know super new polymer. You can just put down some fake little pergofloors and that'll be something that can be easily wiped down, easily cleaned out. You know you don't need to have these nice fancy sheets, you can just have a kind of rubberized mattress pad that you can throw a blanket over or throw a sleeping bag on, and again, for a day or two, for a night or two, and just get going and have someplace safe and secure to be.
Speaker 2:And you know the parking situation, all of this, it just gets worse and worse. And the more difficult you make it for a truck driver to rest in the cab, to stretch out in the cab, to feel clean and secure in the cab, then that leaches in to all aspects of the drive. It means that you don't have a good place to sit and eat Means. You don't have a comfortable place to sleep. It means you're more fatigued. When you get on the road the next morning, You're more likely to have an accident. You're more likely to cause disruptions to the schedule. There is no downside to spending money on the quality of life of your drivers.
Speaker 4:No, absolutely not, and I was talking about this with our drivers and again I talked to some other people about it to talk to their drivers. And there's a whole segment of the market where we need an industrial sleeper, which is very purpose-based. I think it's going to take you back in a remembrance to the primitive sleepers that came a long way in the early 70s.
Speaker 2:Oh, it was like a board with a chain on the wall. You just take it down.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that goes back even further. That's in the 30s and the 40s. When you get done driving or the guy's driving, the guy flips it down and he's sleeping above you and you're going down some cow path. But we're going to need that because I was just telling one of our drivers today. I said I can get you a truck with a sleeper and the next truck you get we'll put one in there. But I said we've got to figure out a sleeper that you can keep clean.
Speaker 4:Again, the guy is not pigsty. But when you're in and out of the truck and you got dirt and you're doing this and you're assembling a crane on the other end, you need a place where it's like okay, I've brought minimal mess into the cab. I got to leave it up front, I got to lay down, I got to get up in the morning, I got to change into some new clothes, throw something on so I smell decent, and then I'm going to go find a place where I can go take a shower. That in between and again, just a couple of nights, because what you don't want to do is like I finally got somewhere. Man, this thing is all dusty, it's dirty back here. I don't have enough cabin filtration for the sleeper, and the HVAC system in the sleeper is a whole other can of worms. You need filtration back there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the cabin filters are real thing. Yes, the idea of cleanliness being next to godliness is never not a religious podcast. Well, you know.
Speaker 4:No, but I'm kidding.
Speaker 2:Some people have God, I have Godzilla.
Speaker 4:Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:Godzilla.
Speaker 4:I love.
Speaker 2:There's this one comic strip that I saw where God comes down and goes I call myself God, and then the next scene is Godzilla and he goes I'm Godzilla, and then the cartoon character he's like oh yeah, that is better. You know, think back to the first episode we did. We were talking about guys putting gasoline in their diesel trucks or guys putting the wrong hydraulic oil, and even though there's labels and stickers everywhere, by the time they're covered in an inch of mud and clay, it don't matter Exactly. If that thing was kept clean, you wouldn't have those issues. So I think that you know we're on to something here with the industrial cab. We'll probably call that a show for today and I think it's a nice time to say that. You know, you always smell nice Michael.
Speaker 4:We try, we try.
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