In this special Christmas HEP-isode of the Heavy Equipment Podcast, Mike and Jo unwrap President Biden's gift to labor, discuss ways to get more women into the industry, go round and round about the fate of America's middle class, and talk about the EPA's role in Cummins' record diesel emissions fine. All this and the Caddyshack theme song, too – enjoy!
In this special Christmas HEP-isode of the Heavy Equipment Podcast, Mike and Jo unwrap President Biden's gift to labor, discuss ways to get more women into the industry, go round and round about the fate of America's middle class, and talk about the EPA's role in Cummins' record diesel emissions fine. All this and the Caddyshack theme song, too – enjoy!
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 pulse of progress come together. It's sublime, it's surreal. It's the Heavy Equipment Podcast with Mike and Joe.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to a special Christmas episode of the Heavy Equipment Podcast Mike and Joe here, and we've been warming up for a good 20, 25 minutes here.
Speaker 1:I dare say has it been that long, I did ask actually.
Speaker 2:And flies when you're doing whatever it is we do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. We get wound up and we start going off and the guy and the guy behind us in the booth at least on my end he's got that key card. He just tears it up, he's just done with it, shreds it, walks away. He comes back with Starbucks, he's good.
Speaker 2:You gotta be careful with Starbucks. These days. They're in the in the crosshairs with all this Israel bull that's going down and everybody in TikTok and Instagram and everybody else saying you got a. Boycott the Starbucks. I mean I could do that, but like nobody else knows how to make a crème brûlée latte, I don't know what to tell you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you got to get a tread Like that.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of people that like Starbucks yeah we get a tread lately Starbucks Listen, you don't want to piss those guys off that's Seattle mafia, you know. So you this much though they're not union, they're not union. And that leads us very nicely into the first item on our to do list. This is a very Merry Christmas kind of gift here for anybody who's in the construction work and who's in a, you know, kind of a union trade kind of job.
Speaker 2:The Biden administration has announced action to support what they're calling economic and efficient construction projects while creating good, paying union jobs. And this is a new rule that's going to require the use of PLAs, which is a collective bargaining agreement that's unique to construction, and it's going to require a PLA for any large construction project where the estimated cost to the federal government is more than $35 million. So that is huge. That's going to be highways, that's going to be interstates, that's going to be defense contracts, and that means that you're going to have a lot better paying jobs, a lot better benefits for the workers who are in those jobs. And you know, just in time for Christmas so you can put that one under the tree.
Speaker 3:That's amazing because, like you said, 35 million and more it's going to. You know, the big thing it's going to add to that is it's going to be competitive. Yes, you know, a bunch of people have been on a lot of federal work and you don't have to worry about the prevailing wage and you don't have to, like they're saying in part of their backing of this and in their rationalization for it is they don't want to have labor unrest because what you don't want to have is prevailing wage guys working next to union subcontractors. You know some of the prevailing wage guys get different benefits, they get different wage structures. You know, regardless of the private deal that you make as a contractor with any employee, you have an even playing field.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you know, when more people who are prevailing wage guys really get a sense of what the union means for them and start to take advantage of those paychecks that come in and can really taste what that is, I think you're going to have a lot more of these guys start to join their local unions.
Speaker 3:Oh, I agree. See, the the thing about that is is, you know, when you have prevailing wage people and you're making deals with everybody, it's gonna put everybody on an even playing field. And there's a big thing where guys say, well, I got to deal with the, you know business agents, I got to deal with the different labor halls. A lot of companies do it every day. They're there to help. All you have to do is build a report with those guys. They're gonna help you staff your job and if they can't, they're gonna work with you to find Other union halls or other trades that can backfill some of those roles. It happens every day.
Speaker 3:I this is. This is huge and I want to say it's gonna put more people to work. But what it's going to do is it's gonna create a consistency in bidding in federal projects, how they're funded, what labor force is going to work with it and ultimately it will end up with more jobs, because if it's competitive and you can bid bid to federal projects without any craziness going on, you end up with more work. Well, I attainable work, I work.
Speaker 3:I think the big thing is. The big thing is when you have a project, joe, and then they put out an engineering estimate and then they throw out the contractors throughout their bids and you blow that estimate out of the water. They put it back in for us for engineering review or whatever they want to do to it. Whatever review they want to do. Then they put it back out to bid. That could take. That could take a year plus. So here you've stalled a whole job Because they get all this labor back to engineering estimates way off.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of things that can go on and then ultimately, like they're saying, the bidding process is gonna go smoother. It's just a better way of doing. It protects the working man. We talk about this all the time. You know, all of this is an effort to keep moving forward with the middle class and keep putting people to work and keep people that want to work working at a fair wage, exactly and Ultimately, it can help control inflation. I mean, you get a watch because you know you get into the whole government controlled wage Discussion. But my point being is is that all of these things help control inflation? You know my parents dollar is not the dollar that you and I view no, so it all helps with that and that's always a good thing.
Speaker 2:That's absolutely right. And I want to kind of take a point with something that you said. You said I don't know if this would create more jobs. I think it absolutely will create more jobs, because work is a funny thing. When you start and this is true whether you're talking about working on a car, working on your house or working on the country Once you start improving it, you start finding other things that need to improve Absolutely.
Speaker 2:You put in a new thermostat, you know. You put in new furnace, rather, and you realize what you need a new digital thermostat. Well, that digital thermostat makes it so that you're spending less energy. And then you go, okay, well, I want to get, you know, high efficiency lighting, and then you can control the warmth or coolness of light and you go out of the house looks so much better in this light and you start finding other projects to do. And when you start doing those things, you're improving things for everyone. You're improving things for the people that experience those services, the people that build those services.
Speaker 2:And I think that what we'll start to see with stuff like this is Kind of the reverse of what we saw in the 80s, where people were leaving factory jobs and union jobs and construction jobs and getting into, like wall street or offices or whatever it was.
Speaker 2:You know, now you've got these people graduating with business degrees and finance degrees and all this other stuff, but they don't know what to do with themselves and they don't realize that they're competing for 50, 60 thousand dollar a year jobs with a quarter of a million dollars in student debt behind them, when they could go get a cdl and, you know, make 170 thousand dollars a year. Or go and be an operator and make six figures and have a pension set up and have, you know, benefits that they're not going to get in the corporate world. Because that supply and demand has shifted and now we have an oversupply of people willing to work in offices and we have a extreme demand for people who want to For lack of a better word work work with their hands and work with their minds on a job site or on the road.
Speaker 3:Well, I can tell you there's a tremendous amount of respect If you're going to go get a business degree out of school and you're going to go to college and go down that route, and you can by all means 100, that's great.
Speaker 3:But. But there's a lot of respect For people that get that degree. They go work, physical Operating, whatever you want to do. They go work in a trade and then what ultimately happens is you end up with some people that have worked in the field. They've worked on a project, multiple projects, over so many years. Then you bring them into the office, they start helping estimate or they start helping project manage. Then the business degree stuff starts kicking in, because they've taken the classes, they've gone out and worked in the field, or they've taken the classes while they're working in the field to help pay for it and not have all that student debt that you're trying to drag around.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of people doing that now, and I those two definitely is. You know education and work go hand in hand. You're absolutely going to apply that as you get older and as you gain more experience. And then somebody's going to say, hey, you know that's what he's doing. Let's bring them in here and help us get through a jam or work on this project. You know, ultimately that's your way up. And then there's people that you know there's nothing wrong with being an operator for 30, 40 years, collecting your pension and getting out.
Speaker 2:That's it. And and you know that's the thing is that there's a lot of different paths and, especially in this industry, there's a ton of different ways to get through it right. You can be an operator, you can be on the admin side, you can be in sales, you can be in engineering. There's a hundred different ways to get through in this industry and there's no one path that is the right path. It's all kind of there for what you want to do and we have options.
Speaker 2:You know there was a couple shows ago you were talking about a friend of yours that you know his son had gone through the trade program at his high school and kind of came to him and said, hey, where do I go now? And it's like, well, you can go anywhere you want. You want to do aircraft, you want to do Electrical, you want to do construction like there's kind of a need for that Anywhere. And and you can really write your own ticket Especially if you have the ability to get that paper education, get those book smarts, get those Kind of 30,000 foot view concepts in your head While you understand and learn what it looks like on the ground to put these ideas into practice, there's really nothing stopping you at that point.
Speaker 3:No, absolutely not, not at all, and you got to have the ambition to do it. But I also feel that if you, like you're saying, and you and you go through this and you start working, it kind of builds its own momentum. Like what you're like what you're saying, you start, start building a career, you get your own momentum going and if you know you're sick and twisted, like people that are in the construction industry that you know are immensely successful, Are you implying that sick and twisted people listen to our show?
Speaker 2:They tune in every week, okay, Every week, guy in, a guy from the audience.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you guys. Guys waving at me from the booth. He's all upset because I called all of our listeners. I can twist it.
Speaker 2:But we got two or three guys just listening to us suspended from the ceiling.
Speaker 3:But no, I this is the basis of where, okay, you can edit some of this out, but my point is get on that high horse, let's do it.
Speaker 2:We're not editing nothing.
Speaker 3:This. This is the basis of where the working force came from. You come out, you work, you gain experience, you work your way up and, if you want to, you progress. You don't. This is where we're back to and, like you said, in the 80s, and everybody was leaving the working places, leaving the factories, going to work at a cubicle, going to work on the 30th floor of some office building because that looked cool and that seemed easier. Everything goes in cycles and when we've been through these cycles before is a major problem. That's where everybody's trying to go. Collective bargaining we enforce that, reinforce the fact you're going to get a fair wage for a fair day's work. That's the, that's the root of everything. You know that we talk about heavy equipment and everything that we're around. Yeah, that's where it starts from.
Speaker 2:That's it it starts about. It's about fairness. It's not nobody's looking for a handout, nobody's looking for any kind of you know leg up on their fellow man here we're all just looking for look we, we work hard, we expect to get paid right, and if the company you're working for had record profits this year and then laid off a bunch of people, that ain't right. If you have record profits, you should be putting out record paychecks and I think that's that's right. Fairly easy concept to put your brain around Now. And it's important that we talk about this too, because when you talk about heavy equipment, you talk about truck drivers, you talk about operators, you talk about all of this stuff. There's an emphasis, there's this idea that we're only talking about men, and that couldn't be further from the truck. There's plenty of women now who are getting into this, and there's programs now that are working to get girls that are in junior high and high school to get them into the trade and into the industry as well, so that we can get more women in here.
Speaker 2:And there's a couple stories that I want to talk about. There's one called that. This is on CCJ that was put out last week. It's called put Barbie in a truck, barbies in trucking. This is a project with Freightliner that they're reaching out to young women, young ladies they're 15% of the workforce now in this industry and trying to get that number up a little bit higher from better representation. And then here's another one this is a great story from DHL that they're actually working with local Girl Scout troops to show them how some of the skills that they're learning in Girl Scouts can apply to supply chain and logistical careers with DHL, and I think that is phenomenal.
Speaker 3:It is phenomenal. I brought this up not too long ago in an apprenticeship meeting. We need to approach the Girl Scouts and we need to approach a few other organizations that help bring apprentice operators in. So that's a guy's thing? No, it's not. Come out and work on those. Go run a dozer, run an excavator, run a roller. There is plenty of opportunity for anybody, especially as all the equipment takes on a new technological role and everything becomes more tech savvy. It's leveling the playing field because the older guys that know how to run equipment right off the seat and how they feel there's always a place for that. But there's also a place for anybody women, men, whatever that can look at a drawing, look at a GPS location of your bucket and dig a trench. You know that excavator does not know if you're a man or a woman. It knows that you're pulling a stick.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly right, and I think it should. I think we should also point out here that the excavator doesn't know if you're a man or a woman. The truck doesn't know if you're a man or a woman and it don't care. No, like it doesn't care. It only cares about how good of a job you're doing and how knowledgeable you are. And we are far, far removed from the days where you didn't have power steering, from the days where needed that upper body strength or whatever different kind of thing excuse it used to be. That's just not a case anymore. We need a good hand on your shoulders and they're gone.
Speaker 3:They're gone and this is going back. See, this is exciting too because, ok, we put millions of women to work during World War Two. That's right, fully capable. You build them, we fly them. They were building them, the guys flew them, we were building tanks. We were doing all that in the country state side with women. We need a female workforce. We need the female workforce to come in massive quantities. There isn't enough seats. And here's another thing If you're, like you said, the Girl Scouts, there's a career for you and you can go. Like I said before, you can go to school at night. You can get as many credits as you want to obtain at night. You can do it during the day. If you're working at night, the ambition is what you need, and if you have that, your opportunities are endless and well, and a lot of these companies too, and this is really worth bringing up.
Speaker 2:Even if that's your goal and you want to go through college and this and that, like it's a quarter of a million, it's a house. It's always been a house. Yes, you know, to go to college it costs you a home.
Speaker 3:It's always been a house. But the prices of houses go up. The prices of college goes up, Exactly the prices of cars go up.
Speaker 2:Listen, these jobs, these truck driving jobs, these equipment operator jobs, not only will they pay for you to live while you're learning, In many cases they'll do tuition reimbursement. They'll pay off that quarter million dollar house for you.
Speaker 3:Yep, absolutely that's. I just keep saying it over and over again the opportunities are endless and we can't look over anything and I think anybody that overlooks anyone that has ambition and willing to work, they're just shooting themselves in the foot. Not today, and not in five years, in 20 years, yeah, that's what we have to be looking for 20 years from now.
Speaker 3:We need a workforce that is sustaining where we need to be, you know. Another thing that is a big deal is robotics. We were just talking to a factory the other day and they're working on, you know, some robotic quality control. Okay, well, that's great, and I am absolutely sure that a robotic arm can take something, mic it and tell you, yes, the run out on that is exactly what I want it to be and drop it, but you still need people to work on that stuff. You still need people to run automation to make that work with the machines.
Speaker 3:That's also heavy equipment. That doesn't matter. No, if you're a man or woman, it just knows that you need to tell it what to do. That's it. It just keeps going round and around, and I think all of this is amazing. It supports the entire heavy industry, which is always lacking, but I think it's catching up. We used to joke that heavy industry, not just heavy equipment, heavy industry period was 10 years behind everything. It's not anymore. It's fine and it's going to yeah, it's going to eventually surpass a lot of industry because of the rate that we need infrastructure. The really thing holding it back is workforce, if you want to be bluntly honest about it the workforce is holding back the industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, and I think you know we are going to get sort of stuck into a loop here, because all of these things do feed into each other, so we start to sound a little repetitive. There's nuance and the changes, but ultimately is the same thing. So I think this is going to be a good time to put in a clip from Groundhog Day Don't drive angry. Don't drive angry. He might be okay.
Speaker 1:No, probably not now Dead, dead Rires.
Speaker 2:Groundhog Day. You know Bill Murray and his brother have a restaurant here in Chicago. Well, they do. Yeah, it's called Eat, Drink and Be Murray and it's spelled M.
Speaker 3:U R A Y.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's all golf themed and caddy shack themed and you can go in there and hang out and drink some beers. It's right up in Rosemont. It's a nice place actually. Oh yeah, that's awesome. We should go there next time you're in town.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:All right. So we gave them a nice little plug. Maybe they have a commercial. We'll put the clips back to back here. We'll do something about the gopher.
Speaker 3:It'll be great, yeah, there you go yeah, because you do the Groundhog Day and then go right into the caddy shack theme song.
Speaker 2:That was a long way to go for this one. But speaking of things that seem to be repetitive in the news all the time, we've got another record fine for diesel emissions. This time it's Cummins paying for it. It's a $1.7 billion fine for Cummins and supposedly Cummins allegedly installed defeat devices to bypass or disable emissions controls, such as emission sensors and onboard computers, for the 2013 to 2019 Ram 25,000 3500 trucks and an undisclosed number of 2019 to 2023 Ram 2500 pickups.
Speaker 2:So I'm actually, I'm actually torn on this, because I genuinely believe my yeah, I mean you and I think come from the same place on this. Like, I genuinely believe that it's a good thing to have emissions controls in place. I believe that it's a good thing to preserve the air quality, especially where people are working, kids are working and living and people are trying to just live their lives. You know there's there's no two ways about it. When you see emissions controls put in place, when you see people switch from diesel or company switch from diesel to EVs, the number of respiratory illness goes down, the number of sick days go down. There's no question that this stuff is bad for your health. But at the same time, I just you can't build a system that is completely dependent on something like add blue, where, when there's a shortage of this, you now have a scenario where the entire country stops moving.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, I'm going to tell you so that, yes, you're absolutely right. You know you run out of death. You don't get a lot of runtime without death. It's not like you just keep the truck running right. Oh, it's enough to get it off the road, that's it. That's it. Okay. Now I have a very hard time, and this is where you know I've been to the 6.7 liter plant, I've been to the Columbus Indiana office. I have a very hard time believing. I mean, I get it like you know. Okay, they're going to pay a fine and they're getting slapped around with this billion dollar settlement. But, okay, first of all, my question is is are they for sure, like this, this is going to happen, they're going to pay it? Or is this one of those things where we're going through the media and not you and I? But there's a lot of hyped up articles about this. I've seen several different numbers.
Speaker 2:Well, the original number was 2.4 billion and they settled at 1.675. So they're paying this.
Speaker 3:Okay. Now the other thing is is the you know the EPA. They work with them hand in hand, that's right. They work with Detroit. They work with you know Cummins and Detroit and everybody else that is building engines packer. They're there. You mean to tell me that for all this time? I'm going through the article right now and I'm looking. There's a timeframe here, yeah, and it says undisclosed auxiliary emissions control devices on 330,000, 2019 to 2023, 2,500, 3,500 pickup truck engines to cheat emissions control requirements. You mean to tell me that the EPA, which is all over them about everything? How now is this actually coming about? That's what I'm wondering. They're there all the time. They have to randomly pull stuff, do tests on it, show them their software. Come on, I get that. They're paying it, which means that there's something going on, but I can't help but feel like there's also some blame to be shared on the people that are regulating this and watching Cummins and working with them to make sure they're compliant 100%.
Speaker 3:I would be mad Okay, listen, if I had to prosecute them, I would be pulling the people in that were all over Cummins' account and I'd be like, really, really, you were supposed to be helping us with this and now we're gonna take them to court with one of the biggest EPA settlements in history. What are you doing over there? Yeah, there's blame all the way around. That's what I'm getting at.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree with that 100%. I think that's exactly the right angle to take here. It's like look, I am sure that they did some things to I don't wanna say cheat. I feel like cheat implies militia center.
Speaker 3:That's a strong word.
Speaker 2:Cheat's a strong word. I think they did some things to pass the tests that were allowed by the EPA and that the people who were on the ground, working hand in hand with these companies to get them their certifications, probably knew about and were okay with. And what I will say to that is this 100% there needs to be a better scrutinering. That's how'd you like that word use?
Speaker 3:There needs to be that was good.
Speaker 2:That was good right. There needs to be a better scrutinering of the people that are the EPA reps, who are in there putting the rubber stamp on these things only for them to come back later and get hit like this. There's no reason for this. This should never have happened. Now, that said, it's important to realize that when you're talking about a company like Cummins, you're talking about a company like PAKAR. 1.9 billion is not that much money.
Speaker 3:No, it's not and that's okay. Then we're gonna talk about that, because I cannot stand anymore sensationalism. We're talking about I mean, this news story's been all over and of course we were gonna talk about it but one thing I was just waiting to get to is look at their gross revenue. They're gonna pay this over so many years. There's gonna be some kind of payment program or some kind of stuff that they have to do and we're gonna move on, but it's in a very small segment of their marketplace. First of all, let's look at that. You're talking about 2019 to 2023 and 2013 to 2019, and it's only in the RAM 2,500, 3,500 pickups. They put engines all over the world.
Speaker 3:I think they're doing pretty good over there. That's all I'm saying. I think they're doing really good over there. It's very hard to believe that this just came out of the blue, so I'd be interested to read some more notes on that. I was looking for them today and I couldn't bring anything up on it, but hey, whatever. It seems like a lot of that stuff they build a good product, they build a good product.
Speaker 2:It seems like a lot of that stuff is sealed and, honestly, if you look at what happened, there was another big case about a guy who was selling basically diesel engine tuners like OPD Puck tuners on eBay. They were fined millions and millions of dollars for it because it was defeating the emissions regulations. But so many of their sales especially in 2020 and 2021, when we had supply shortages and we had shipping blockages and we had lockdown orders that made everything difficult to do so many of those Puck tuners were being sold not because people wanted to like roll coal and all over the environment or anything. People were doing that because they couldn't get the death, they couldn't get the ad blue, they couldn't get their vehicles to run and work and operate.
Speaker 2:And sometimes we're talking about ambulances, we're talking about work trucks, we're talking about school buses, we're talking about people that they had to be able to get up and get out and get on the road or else a lot of people who were depending on them weren't able to live their lives properly, and a lot of that was done just simply to get around that death thing. Now, again, I am all about improving the environment. I am all about reducing air pollution, I'm all about punishing people who are knowingly breaking the law, but I just I'm not convinced, in this case, that this is the right way to go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I totally agree with you and I think more is gonna come out of this. I think this is just the first of many. So clearly, if they're gonna go with Cummins, who's been a partner with Ram since what? 89, 90?
Speaker 2:Yep. Well, they're going after Packard and Daimler next and they're trying to make a. They're trying to make some noise. They're trying to say, look, you're not gonna be able to get around these emissions regulations.
Speaker 3:This is coming and I totally agree with the aftermarket stuff. If you're gonna go after an aftermarket shop that blatantly has sawzalling stuff off of a vehicle and they're promoting this for on the street, you just your time's coming okay. Yeah, and a lot of those shops know that. I mean there was a time where have the equipment was getting deleted and the emissions were getting pulled from that stuff and I say trucks were getting deleted. Some of that still goes on in parts of Canada and Mexico. There's more to come with that.
Speaker 3:There's gonna be a need for some solutions where we can't be dependent on death fluid. Death fluid goes bad. You haven't sit out in the sun too long. It doesn't work. The truck knows this. The dosing modules seem to be a huge problem in the industry right now. Caterpillars having a mess with it, so is John Deere, so is some of the on-road guys, where the module that regulates the amount of death coming in and out and pumps it in and then draws it back out so it doesn't freeze in the lines. There's a huge problem with that right now. There has to be a better way. We gotta do something different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, if you believe some of these guys out in California, the better way is to switch everything over to electric, and that's what Volvo. We've had those guys from Volvo Construction Equipment on the show. We've had those guys at Wave that are building this stuff into the ground over at Port of Long Beach and now Port of Houston. We gotta get him back on to talk about Houston. But Hitachi, hitachi seems like they're convinced about electric as well and they have announced that they're gonna be developing a new line of battery-powered excavators and haulers two ton, five ton, eight ton and 13 ton models. That a new R&D lab that they're gonna open in Ichikawa, japan. They've broken ground on it right before Christmas. They'll be opening that up in May and I think that that again, it's not gonna be the final solution.
Speaker 2:Right, electric is not right for every job, but it's right for a lot of jobs and for those jobs where it's gonna work, it's gonna be something that I think is really gonna be game-changing in terms of getting more people involved in this business.
Speaker 2:When you don't have, you know, back to the very beginning, because this is all a loop and we are all stuck in Ned Ryerson's Punxotani adventure. Right, it comes back to. If you're not gonna go home smelling like diesel with your ears ringing in Tinnitus from all of the noises on the job site, if you're gonna be sitting there, you know, covered in oil and grease, that's not a job that a lot of people want. But if you can hop into your nice quiet excavator and hear yourself think, and not come home smelling like diesel and get to do something where you're working with your brain, you're working with your hands and it's smooth and quiet and electric and you can breathe at the end of the day without a respirator or anything, you're gonna get more people who wanna do that job and we're gonna get more work done.
Speaker 3:I was just gonna say who wouldn't wanna work that way? And your point about electric isn't the final solution. We all know that. I mean hydrogen isn't either. They all have their place.
Speaker 2:No, eventually someone's gonna figure out nuclear fusion and we're gonna have a little fusion reactor inside. Every one of these is gonna be great.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean. Well, what did they have in the Starship Enterprise? What did they power that with?
Speaker 2:Delife dilithium crystals and you know the hopes and prayers or something.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's what we need, Kirk's unbridled lust for alien poon.
Speaker 2:Make it so, make it so. Oh, was that Kirk? That was the other guy.
Speaker 3:No, that was Picard, sorry.
Speaker 2:Oh, we'll run that clip too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Gene Roddenberry's turning over in his grave.
Speaker 2:Gene Roddenberry's the guy that wrote Star Wars. Right, he invented the lightsaber and we could hook up some diodes to him. I bet he's running up the generator at 9000 RPM right now.
Speaker 3:Oh, he didn't write Star Wars. That's the joke. Oh, yeah, yeah, edit that out, edit that out.
Speaker 2:Edit out the joke or edit out the part where you didn't get it.
Speaker 3:I didn't get it, so just edit that out. No, negative.
Speaker 2:That stays forever.
Speaker 1:The title of this one.
Speaker 2:The title of this one is Episode 17, the one where Mike doesn't get the jokes.
Speaker 1:Tune in next week for more heavy equipment podcast on Spotify, apple Podcasts, google or wherever you find podcasts.