In this HEP-isode, Mike Zappone and Kevin Hollingshead from Tempest Storm Rentals join Mike and Jo to talk about disaster response and saving lives. Next up, the boys talk about the Teamsters, the fall of Yellow, why the latest 1075 hp Cummins Ram is perfect for hot shot cargo runners, and the new John Deere P series dozers. All this and an offer we can't refuse – enjoy!
In this HEP-isode, Mike Zappone and Kevin Hollingshead from Tempest Storm Rentals join Mike and Jo to talk about disaster response and saving lives. Next up, the boys talk about the Teamsters, the fall of Yellow, why the latest 1075 hp Cummins Ram is perfect for hot shot cargo runners, and the new John Deere P series dozers. All this and an offer we can't refuse – enjoy!
he is about to get real weird, until that recording light came on and we calmed it back down no comment well, I think, uh, now we've got the new intro going, we've got a nice creepy mood set. Very surreal, very sublime. Welcome back to this episode of the heavy equipment podcast. Your host, joe boris, here with mike hot, mike switzer on the uh, on the brand new mic, it should be noted oh yeah, well, I'm glad finally came in the mail.
Speaker 3:It was a long time coming, although I mean I can't keep recording from the bottom of a trench somewhere, which is what the one sounded like. There was no cleaning that audio up no filter on the planet was gonna fix that no, but that's all right.
Speaker 2:I actually like, like the ones you did from the Jeep when you were driving down the road. The Bluetooth on that was pretty sweet.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and then actually I can get one of these that will connect to the car and I can hang the boom from the headrest on the passenger seat and have it stuck in my face as I go down the road. I think that's the move, right there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's no way that'll end badly.
Speaker 3:No, yeah, there's no way that'll end badly.
Speaker 2:No, no, this is not distracted at all. Exactly, it's fine, I can totally see my mirror.
Speaker 3:When I had an F-250 and I was running the road all the time, I had a base station in there and I had a desk mic and then I had the company radio in there on top of that, which is a short 10 meter radio, and then I had my phone on the dashboard and there's a rolling radio show back then, you know, just bombing down the road and a standard cab F two, 50.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but the problem was you recorded all that stuff into the microphone and then just put it up on a on a shelf somewhere. There's six and a half hours of solid gold sitting in storage. It was pretty good.
Speaker 3:And then, and then the CB would break through. It was pretty good. And then, and then the cv would break through, you know, and then, because you'd be following some 14 foot wide load out of dc, and then I would be in the back with my flashy lights on and then, all of a sudden, you'd be recording something to somebody, and then, jesus, did you see that? And yeah, ruins it. It does kind of come as I took the hydrant right off the sidewalk.
Speaker 2:That's like the bumper sticker on my sister's car If you don't like my driving, stay off the sidewalk. Well, we got a good show today. We want to talk about the new Ram HD 3500 that they showed off at Work Truck Week. John Deere's got a couple of P-tier dozers that we teased on the last show, but before that we have some guests today. This is kind of turning into a thing that we do now with guests. Our guests today are Mike Zappone and Kevin Hollingshead from Tempest Storm Rentals. It's a company that works with local utilities to restore power to communities and governments after extreme weather events. Mike's a 38-year veteran of the utility business and Kevin TSR COO comes with his own decades of construction and coding experience. Guys, thanks for being on the show.
Speaker 4:Thanks for having us on, joe and everyone for listening. Mike Cipone, currently the Chief Operating Officer of Tempest Energy, tempest Storm Rentals and Tempest Utility Consulting. Tempest Storm Rentals and Tempest Utility Consulting a suite of companies that provide storm restoration, preparedness and response to both customers and trade allies Some people call them subcontractors alike to better prepare them and allow them to better respond safely and efficiently to large storm events that typically interrupt electric service.
Speaker 2:For sure. And electric service. You know, a lot of people think in terms of I won't have lights, I won't have television, I won't have, you know, my food, my refrigerator will go bad. But oftentimes people really depend on their electric service. Whether they've got, you know, oxygen machines at home, whether they've got medical equipment or medical devices, or if you're talking about a hospital or an animal shelter, these are really critical utilities and maintaining that service and getting it up and running as fast as possible in many cases can be a matter of life and death, and I don't think that's particularly dramatic, would you agree, kevin?
Speaker 5:No, I agree and, as Kevin Hollings said, I'm the director of operations for Tempest Storm Rentals. But yeah, Joe, I agree with you. It is life and death Some of these utilities. They're challenged with getting power turned on within 24 hours. Crews have to come in quickly and get the power restored safely.
Speaker 2:Roots have to come in quickly and get the power restored safely. It's funny because when we originally scheduled this we wanted to talk about winter storm thin, but there have been in the last six, seven weeks since we've talked about this, there have been so many more storms. Can you talk a little bit about some of the places that you guys have been in the last couple of weeks, some of the equipment that you've used out there and really what you've been able to bring to the table for those communities?
Speaker 4:It's really, when you consider the continental United States, even North America in general, every day is a storm. It's just a matter of where it is and the magnitude you know. So we're typically always monitoring or responding to some degree just about in any region of the continental US. But lately, for us the hub of the activity has really been in the northeast and it's been primarily driven by wind events.
Speaker 2:So well, and that's something that you know's, something that you've been in this space for a long time. Right, I've read your bio. You've been in here for like 30 plus years. You've been a part of Eversource Energy, connecticut Light and Power, and so you have really seen the last 30 years of what some people would say climate change, some people would say it's emissions, some people would say whatever it is they're going to say, right, I'm not that kind of scientist who knows whether or not that's BS or real or anything like that, but it does seem to be happening more often. Is that something that you guys are seeing, or is it just something that, because of TikTok and Instagram, now we get to see it more?
Speaker 4:I would say you're spot on in both facets of the discussion, and one is that, having been around for 38 years now in this industry, I can tell you that there are more frequent events I'll call them events and the magnitude has increased as well. But you do have periods of time, spans of time, where things can be pretty quiet. But, regardless of the reasoning behind it or the science that you follow, definitely there has been an increase in the number of events affecting the infrastructure across the country, not just electric, but all kind of commodities that are out there more severe in effect.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's a really good point, because it's not just electricity, right, that's where your background is and where your early expertise was. But you guys are restoring all the infrastructure, you guys are working on the roads, you're working to help clear facilities and do all this.
Speaker 4:From an electric standpoint. Yeah, it all starts with electric. Most commodities rely heavily, whether it's telecommunications, whether it's the transportation sector, the public sector, it really doesn't matter. It all basically starts with the restoration of electricity so that a number of other commodities can be brought on, because a number of those commodities, their infrastructure, functions both not only from a electric standpoint, but also what we kind of call the Internet of Things. We kind of call the internet of things, right, everything just about, or on an increasing basis all infrastructure is either monitored or operated off of some sort of remote capability.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right. What are some of the ways that that impacts a community that may not be immediately obvious to people who are sitting on the outside, Because I still think there's a lot of people who haven't really experienced what it's like to live an extended period of time days or weeks without basic necessities like power and water, which does happen when you have a major event like this.
Speaker 5:I can talk to living through Hurricane Katrina. That was a bad one. To living through Hurricane Katrina yeah, that was a bad one. So to where you're living and most people down here south in Louisiana everybody to live here, you had to have a generator. Yes, and that is 100% true, you had to have a generator and you can go weeks without power and you're living off a generator and you're having to get resources from you know very scarce. You know going to grocery stores they're running off a generator, but yeah, it's just a. It's a tough time for anybody who hasn't really gone through it.
Speaker 2:So Now, how does that work? Because you guys are obviously in the business of helping to restore the power right when you get out somewhere and there is widespread damage like we saw in Katrina I'm from South Florida, I was in Hurricane Andrew. I've been through a couple of these things how do you decide where to start working, where to start digging? Is there a triage process? Is somebody else in charge of that? Or do you kind of start from where you're at and start going in?
Speaker 4:With regards to that, Joe, a lot of it boils down to information, staying informed and getting prepared. So you know, for the events we're talking about, that we've been referencing, a lot of it is weather or Mother Nature type events, and it's all about information. We all become self-proclaimed meteorologists when we begin to see forecasts that are threatening certain regions of the United States. We'll just use the United States as an example. So we're monitoring the weather, monitoring the. We're all watching the. What do they call it now? They call it the curve, yeah, the spaghetti diagrams and all of that stuff trying to predict when it makes landfall, where it will make landfall and, when it does make landfall, how severe it's going to be and what we can expect based on it. So it all starts with that and usually your community leaders informing the public and trying to keep the public informed on what they can expect when it hits. So that's kind of where it all begins.
Speaker 4:Once it happens, hopefully people have either evacuated, people have hunkered down and prepared themselves for the potential impacts that have been forecasted and are taking the necessary steps to protect what? Life and then property, and then obviously we bring the infrastructure back up. So the first thing we do when there are impacts is you want to protect life. So a lot of times you'll have your utility personnel from regardless of what commodity, working alongside the public sector in fact, maybe part of the public sector in some areas and working alongside them to what? To make sure that life has been preserved and that you're opening up things like roads so that emergency vehicles and first responders have access to all of the roads and residents and buildings and infrastructure in that area. Once those roads are open, we'll call it the 911.
Speaker 4:Series of calls and emergencies have been addressed. Then it's time to start strategizing and you're putting your plans together, so to speak, to start restoring power with some of the more critical identified customers, First moving to some of the larger outages and then obviously down to the single residents. But it's those single residents that could wait the longest. So, again, can't really stress enough the fact of being prepared. When they tell you fill your bathtub with water, it's probably a good idea. When they tell you to have a battery operated radio, it's probably a good idea. When they tell you to evacuate, please listen and you know, because people have plenty of experience with these events, they know what they can do and obviously it's all about the people saving them, making sure they're safe and then returning their lives back to normal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's very, very well said. As we were talking, you know we had Bill Perry is one of the guys that helped us put this show together he posted into the chat power outages US and as we're recording this right now, there's 30,000 people in Texas without power. And looking at this national map, which is really just fascinating I've never seen it before Poweroutageus Definitely check it out you really get a sense of how many people are out there and who's going through what at the moment. When we talk about the work that you guys are doing, you are national right, you're all over the country.
Speaker 5:Yeah, correct, we have four yards currently, but we're in Illinois, we're in Connecticut, we're in Virginia. Of course we're down in our home office down in Covington, louisiana, but we can reach out and send equipment anywhere across the US. Give them a timely call out for our trade allies. They'll contact us within a few days requesting equipment either for pickup. They'll show up on site or they'll ask for delivery, so we can strategically with our yards. You know where they're placed. We can have equipment anywhere anytime.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, let's talk a little bit about that, right Cause this is the heavy equipment podcast. It's not the weather outage podcast or the power supply podcast. Let's talk a little bit about some of the equipment that you guys do have on offer that you can mobilize quickly and get out to help support people when they are dealing with a disaster like this.
Speaker 5:Yeah, some of the primary equipment that we push out there or we rent to are, just to let me define, I say trade allies or they're the utility contractors. For the most part, the equipment that's going out would be our standard buckets, you know, 55 foot reach. We have our standard diggers, digger derricks, which are the trucks that dig holes and set poles when poles are down during a storm. We have pole trailers which are towed behind the digger derricks to get out to the different sites. We have track machines which are, you know, for going in swampy, bad terrain, mountainous terrain, backyard machines, which are smaller track machines and just what I said the back there they're named for getting in the backyard, small places to gain access to putting poles up and restoring power. Yeah, that's pretty much it for a lot of the equipment that we use. There's still a lot of equipment out there.
Speaker 2:Oh, for sure, For sure, and there's room for a lot of people in this space. You're not going to call in just one guy when there's a weather event. Right, there's a ton of stuff that needs to be done and this is a critical part of it. You know you were talking a lot about the pole diggers and putting up the power lines. You know the restoring the power lines when they go down in a storm or an event, I think is a better way to put it. I remember after Hurricane Andrew in South Florida when I went through that, I remember there being a proliferation of poles before and then afterwards FPL spent a ton of time and energy putting power lines under the ground. So roads that I used to drive along as a kid and I'd look up at the power lines while we were driving by, they all kind of disappeared. Are you starting to see that in more markets that are experiencing more frequent weather events? And what are some of the drawbacks to doing that? Because I mean, it's got to be hugely expensive, right.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's definitely putting things beneath ground versus overhead can be much more expensive and costly. However, the key word here is kind of resiliency and recovery and system hardening. Those are some of the buzzwords you're going to hear. In the industry there are many programs that are funded and unfunded based on performance requirements of people like FPL and other utilities like them. The expectation is that the system they own and maintain is both reliable, resilient and it's tough, so it can withstand a lot more punishment from these storms.
Speaker 4:Undergrounding is one way to protect and preserve the integrity of the infrastructure.
Speaker 4:One of the issues with the underground is when things do happen, having been spending several years in the underground in the utility sector myself. When something does happen in the underground, it can be very difficult to diagnose, it can be a little bit tougher to access and it can also be a little lengthier when it comes to getting it returned to normal. Now, resiliency, obviously, after Sandy and places that had massive underground networks I'll just use kind of New York City as one they, you know, ended up with six feet of water down in Wall Street. So, again, system hardening meant it was already underground but maybe building in different alternate sources of power so that things could be isolated. So I don't know that you're going to ever completely cure it of ever going out or service being interrupted, but what you can do is put in some mitigating equipment and alternative sources of electricity to try and minimize the number of let's just call them customers for lack of a better word or stakeholders to minimize the number that are impacted by any current or any potential outage that can occur.
Speaker 2:You bring up a really good point, because we talk about grid resiliency a lot on the outlets that I write for. We write for CleanTechnica, electrek, things like that, and we always talk about electrification and grid resiliency in terms of its ability to handle not only electric vehicles but electric water heaters, electric HVAC systems and all of these different newly electrified devices that 10 years ago nobody was even considering electrifying. Now we have induction stovetops, now we know that a lot of asthma and childhood stuff is being caused by the gas stoves, and now that's a whole politicized mess. So we talk about grid resiliency in that context mess. So we talk about grid resiliency in that context. So to hear about grid resilience in terms of being resilient to damage, resilient to failure, resilient to going down because of external things that happen, I think is really refreshing. Do you think that one type of grid resilience supports the other in these cases?
Speaker 4:Absolutely, and then Kevin's probably going to have a comment or two here. But Kevin's team is a direct contributor to resiliency in that when the people responding to emergencies have equipment failures, tool failures, they may have some of their fleet out of service. They may not have the equipment available to respond properly or the tools to respond properly or in large enough numbers to have a greater effect on the damage that's out there. Kevin's team comes in by effect on the damage that's out there. Kevin's team comes in by supplementing them with a means by which they can still get out there with the equipment and tools necessary to get the job done. So not only is the industry producing and moving towards a more resilient system from a brick and mortar standpoint, but you've got people like Kevin who are supplying those resources, those craftsmen, with supplemental tools to not only scale up their operation but keep it up and running so that they are in a position to respond.
Speaker 2:Yeah, kevin, please feel free to build on that.
Speaker 5:Yeah, that's true. So, my team, what we'll do is we'll. You know, all our equipment is tooled. You know what that does is provide our trade allies, our customers, our contractors, trade allies, the ability to build their resources to get out there and put the power on. So all our tools, you know, are tested, they're insulated. We provide a lot of resources and help the trade allies get out there and restore power.
Speaker 2:That's great. Well, guys, we're coming to the end of our time commitment here. Obviously, we've got Mike Zappone and Kevin Hollingshead of Tempest Storm Rentals TSR Guys. Thank you so much for being on the show. I want to give you an opportunity to kind of let us know how we can follow along, let our readers know how they can find out more about you, get in touch, any events or anything like that that you're going to be at where people can come find you. Yeah, the floor is yours.
Speaker 5:Well, you can follow us on our website, wwwtsrtruckscom. We're at most of all the trade shows, linemen, rodeos, with our sister companies. We're located in four, four different yards we're in mantino, illinois, we're in connecticut, covington, louisiana, and in new market, virginia. So, uh, but we do have a website, it's tsrtruckscom.
Speaker 2:so come take a look at our website beautiful and mike doesn't ever get up on the table and dance for t.
Speaker 4:I'm not above just about anything, joe, when it comes to this industry. I've loved this industry and I can't say enough about it. After 38 years, it's still quite as addicting to me as it ever been. But when it comes to TSR, you know, listen, we're the equipment you need, managed by the fleet team you wish you had, and that's. I can't say enough about Kevin, his team, their dedication to the trade allies and the success they built and maintained, based on feedback from customers and trade allies alike. So kudos to this team. Look us up, tsr TempestStormRentalscom, and we're here when you need us.
Speaker 2:All right. Two last things before I let y'all go. I remember when I was in Hurricane Andrew, it was three weeks before we had power back, and I'll never forget how I felt when I saw that FPL truck pull up. So I'm sure that you guys are bringing a lot of joy, a lot of good feelings to the people that see you. So thank you for doing the work you do. And the last thing, mike, I hope you don't take this in a negative way. I don't mean to play up to stereotypes, but you have absolutely the best radio voice I've ever heard. I would like you to make some threatening voicemail messages that I can send to some other people, and maybe in like a Godfather's theme playing in the background. You've been absolutely awesome. I hope you come back on the show again.
Speaker 4:Listen, make me an offer.
Speaker 2:I can't refuse. I always love it when we splice back in and Mike's like oh yeah, I was here the whole time. No, anyways, no, all right, well, let's get back to.
Speaker 3:Uh, that was great, let's get back to the ram you say that when it's not great, you're like that was great that was great.
Speaker 2:No, it's good, I'll leave it in. I'll leave it unedited. Six and a half seconds of silence, mike staring into the camera don't do that.
Speaker 3:They're screaming from behind the glass. Now what are you doing?
Speaker 2:The guy's being so if it wasn't for the glass.
Speaker 3:I swear to God there would be apples and bananas and me the whole time. We're doing this the whole time. Everyone's right here Half a mango hits you in the side of the head because they're like what are you doing, Squirrel?
Speaker 2:Squirrel, squirrel, I don't know. I thought that was pretty good. So obviously these guys have a much needed service and I like where they're positioning themselves in the southeast. They got something in the northeast for the snowstorms, they're in the Midwest for the tornadoes, and I think it makes sense right, because you don't want to have, as a utility or a construction fleet, a whole bunch of assets in your inventory that only get used once or twice a year, if that, whenever a hundred year storm comes through. But for these guys that have their business model of, we'll bring it to you and we'll help you rebuild your infrastructure. I think that makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of need for that. I mean, as storms roll through and we have issues and, depending on what kind of storm it is and it could be I'll use the term climate change the sheer winds that we see in certain parts of the country, I mean that alone is tearing up things. We didn't see those before. Yeah, so we need services like that. I think it goes without saying. There's not enough of it, and if anybody's ever been stuck without power you have any kind of medical issues or anything like that and you depend on it, you need it. You need it to turn back on. Yeah, exactly right, you can't be mad when they, when the power company goes, listen, we're going to get to you in a week, but I got 2000 other people up the street that you know do this whole state route that don't have power either.
Speaker 2:We need people, so yeah, I noticed that you got a little hesitant using the word climate change. But I mean, again, we're not here to say that you know it's because of this or because of that, but I think you'd be hard pressed to say that we haven't experienced some differences since we were kids. I mean, I remember having family in North Carolinaolina. They'd get 10 feet of snow in the winter. We'd go up there and go sledding.
Speaker 3:Now it's rare to get snow out there well, you fell right from my trap and you walked right into it. Oh, no I'm so glad I. All I did was I dare not say climate change. And then you just walked right into that one. I skied right into it on my snow that we haven't seen in decades, for fear that the tropical weather is about to upon the Northern United.
Speaker 2:States. Yeah Well, I'm good for that because, like, quite frankly, it's been way too cold in Chicago lately. Well, when you grow up, in Costa Rica and Miami.
Speaker 3:Chicago is a far cry from tropical weathers that you were native to.
Speaker 2:Oh, I know it. You know I was laughing because I keep thinking about that time that you and Adam came out to the Chicago Auto Show and you were standing out there on the Metro train station. Oh you were late. We were waiting for you to pick us up. It was negative 19 degrees. I felt so bad. It's been 15 years. I still feel bad about that. My suit pants cracked from that weather alone.
Speaker 3:The fabric split as soon as I got out of that train. I felt like I had one of those windbreakers on in a hurricane that turned to freezing ice.
Speaker 2:I think that's what happened. That was an accurate description of the weather event that you experienced. Well, back then you were driving that old blue, the 2500 dodge ram 3500, sir, dually that's right that's right, the five speed with no synchros in it, and you just shifted it.
Speaker 3:There was no clutch. The clutch stopped you and got you moving that was a cool truck man.
Speaker 3:I like that was a cool truck. You had to heel toe that thing quite often to get it moving and it was all right. I was like, actually you know what it was like? It was like driving an old yellow freight truck. Oh no, that's exactly what that was. I think by the time I got done bombing that down the road at 370,000 miles on it when I sold it. It was clunky, it banged, it moved all around going down the road.
Speaker 2:It was dangerous, it was perfect you know we didn't plan on talking about this, but I can't believe, with everything that's been going on with the yellow freight stuff, that we have not done a whole episode about it.
Speaker 3:We do need to talk about and this is okay, they're already holding up. They're holding up the cue card that says don't do it, Don't do it. So he's got the whiteboard out and says don't do it, but I'm going to anyways, and he's mad. We do need to dedicate a whole episode to that. Or we need to talk about the degradation of non-regulation within the trucking industry and what that did to companies like Yellow Freight that were forced to buy up other companies to keep people working, go into massive amounts of debt and, at the end of the day, were struggling to pay their fuel bills, couldn't pay their parts bills and were parking trucks that needed worked on. That was an empire in itself that got drove out of existence by the free market.
Speaker 2:That is an interesting take. So talk to me about that. How did the free market? Because and I'm not saying this facetiously, I'm not saying this to be argumentative, because I always know that you don't say stuff like that without knowing what you're going to say to back it up you know, I can't just leave that alone, but oftentimes Oftentimes you go oh, I see where you're going with this and I scare you because I watch your eyebrows move around like two caterpillars.
Speaker 2:At least it's better than just the one caterpillar I used to have. Yeah, so okay. So the free market did them in.
Speaker 3:But no, I'm saying that that was a big component of it, because here's the problem with the trucking industry today you have rising costs, rising inflation.
Speaker 3:Inflation is where it is and we know what that is Okay and those that have salaries or drive for a company we do not bear the burden of all the encompassing factors of inflation. I and other companies that manage their own trucking fleet understand what it takes to overcome an ever escalating inflationary period such as what we've gone through now. The government will tell you that inflation is under control and it is now into a, you know whatever percentage they deem is acceptable, and that is an entirely different discussion for itself. But we look at that going. It still costs us 20 cents per dollar more than it did not too long ago, and somehow we have to figure out how to overcome the 20 cents per dollar increase that we're facing on tires, oil, fuel, manpower and equipment replacement costs and this is a part of the Heavy Equipment podcast that we talk about all the time. Heavy Equipment maintenance costs increase all the time. Heavy Equipment replacement costs increase all the time.
Speaker 1:When you have a free market-.
Speaker 2:You're not taking an $80,000 machine or $180,000 machine and replacing it like for like. You spent 200 grand on something in 2019. You're spending 250 or 280 on it now.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So what I'm getting at is, when you have a free market, like we have, and when you run into a blip of escalated inflation, you have a massive monster like YRC that is making it work and they're working to work within it. Now there's all kinds of stories about how their debt was uncontrolled and they had maxed out debt with creditors and they were mismanaging their funds, but the bottom line is a company like YRC has no motivation to go bankrupt and set everybody on the curb. If you were going to motivate anything, your motivation would be to keep that company alive. Now, I'm not saying this is the way that they operated. What I'm saying is, if you had a nasty, negative mentality towards the company of which you controlled mentality towards the company of which you've controlled your goal would be to keep it alive, to systematically milk it for every dollar that kept your luxury lifestyle moving. You have no basis to take that and remove it from yourself.
Speaker 3:Think about it on this level If Jeff over at Amazon said I don't care, the best thing I could do for this right now is default on all my loans, all my debts and all my people and walk away. There he has. No, he has absolutely zero motivation for that Because, if you looked at it from sheer greed, all he can do is make more money with Amazon when it's managed correctly. Yeah, yellow Freight was in the same position where they needed to figure out how to overcome massive increases in operating costs and there's no secret to that. They talked about this in shareholder meetings Exactly.
Speaker 2:This was not something that's a total surprise. The company was at risk of bankruptcy for at least two or three years prior to it actually happening.
Speaker 3:Correct and then they bought. Over the years. They bought up companies to help control debt, which is a tactic that you do when you're trying to mitigate your risk and when you're trying to mitigate your risk. You're trying to mitigate your risk and when you're trying to mitigate your risk, you're trying to mitigate extra debt. You buy up a company that is more liquid to then spread your debt out or do whatever they needed to do or show a different way of their portfolio.
Speaker 3:My point is is that no one will ever understand and no one will ever know the inner workings of why they did what they did, other than what's been documented and been released to the public. But anybody would be foolish unless they were just being downright spiteful to think that Yellow Freight had any motivation to wind the doors down and lock them and systematically shut the company down throughout the country. They didn't, and that's where I'm getting back to free market. So free market says wait a minute, I can only move so much freight and I can only move so much freight for this much money. My brother company over here that is not affiliated to us it's not what I mean by that says I'm going to save you $20,000 annually. This is one customer because their operating costs are higher or they haven't been able to achieve a few milestones to drop their operating costs just enough to play in that same level field. So what they say is fine, let them take that cheap freight, we'll move more premium freight.
Speaker 3:That is when a trucking company that is what they always go back to they say, well, you know what, we're not going to go out there, we're not going to bid the cheap freight, we're going to get the good freight, we're going to get the freight that needs to be there on time, undamaged. We need to get it there. And our customers know that. That's why they pay that extra $10 per skid period. Yeah, there's a whole segue to that where you can look at that and say, well, okay, that's one way of looking at it. Now there was a bunch of spending over at YRC that has been documented as well, and that's the flip side of this coin. It is not all innocent, but I do believe that the inflation that we saw in this country for a period of time didn't help it either.
Speaker 2:No, and I think it's worth noting that right near the end there was a $700 million bailout loan that the taxpayers provided to Yolo. It didn't do much to keep the company afloat. It kind of kept it going a little bit.
Speaker 3:Was it six months? Because I think it satisfied some fuel debt. If I'm not mistaken, yeah, it enabled them to continue.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was supposed to be a bridge loan to enable them to restructure, but for whatever reason, if you listen to the Teamsters, it was gross mismanagement. If you listen to the yellow executives the few that did go on record they said that there was a resistance from their creditors to work with them, which I think is probably true. So let's give them the benefit of the doubt here and say look the government Well, the teamsters worked with them.
Speaker 2:Hold on. The teamsters did, but their other creditors did not. So if you're looking at this and you're a creditor and they're coming to you to restructure a loan and they're saying, look, let's restructure this, let's go pennies on the dollar, and you're looking at this and you go, you know what? The government just bailed them out to the tune of $700 million. The government took a 30% ownership position in yellow, effectively coming as close to nationalizing an industry, as we've seen since the breakup of uh.
Speaker 3:They couldn't do it, they. That was as far as they could go.
Speaker 2:That was as far as they could go reaching some serious legislation a hundred percent so.
Speaker 2:but you're looking at this as a creditor. You're going. There's no way they're not going to keep getting bailed out, especially if they're a government owned, pro union thing and we've got a pro union administration in the white house. That's, you know, depending on all these boats, I probably wouldn't have restructured either. I would have said hey, instead of, you know, settling at 30 or 40 cents on the dollar, I bet you're going to get another big fat bailout check, and then all the people that didn't negotiate with you are going to get a better deal than me.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to hold out and I think that happened enough times that everybody involved just said this isn't tenable. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think that's the other side of the coin and that's what I mean. Like you know, anytime a company like this goes under. Cf went under in a very similar circumstance. That's right, rising costs. We had deregulation in the trucking industry. Cf, who created some of the systematic freight organization in this country, along with pie, who is no longer around, when rider bought them out. Cf was the original creator of the Freightliner as a company-owned vehicle that they created to build their own trucks to control cost, and I also believe in this and people are going to freak out on this.
Speaker 3:It is horrible for the people that lost their jobs from YRC. However, if there was a time to shed people, it is now. You can't get enough drivers on the road. We can't get enough people on the road. Yeah, the Teamsters are working diligently to get people already seated. They already have People are driving. You don't see massive bread lines because YRC went out of business.
Speaker 3:Yes, there's people that have been affected and it did mess them up, you know. There's no question about that, but the Teamsters did work with YRC right up till the end, saying, look, we understand that we need to keep our people moving, we need to keep paychecks coming into our drivers and I wouldn't be surprised if the Teamsters knew prior to when the lockings were going to start and the lockouts were going to happen, so that they could help position their drivers and put them in a better position. I wouldn't be surprised to that because the Teamsters throughout the years have gone out of their way to walk into many a meeting and say listen, if you tell us what's going on, we'll work with you and we will get the people back to work. Yeah, that's what we care about.
Speaker 2:There definitely was a sense that they saw it coming right, because before the shutdown actually happened I mean we're talking back in like early July of last year John Murphy, who was I don't know if he still is, but back then he was the national freight director for the Teamsters he sent a memo out that got picked up by NPR. I'm reading it now and it says yellow appears to be headed to a complete shutdown in the next few days. So they had a little bit of a sense that this was coming. And that's after the. That's after yellow missed its $50 million benefits payout to the teamsters labor fund that it was supposed to do with the last contract.
Speaker 3:that was on july 15th I was in a meeting not too long ago and I actually got people that listened to this podcast brave souls that, um listen, it's picking up the last one was uh it's terrifying, but yeah, this is.
Speaker 2:This is why, because I was in a meeting and somebody.
Speaker 3:Somebody came over to me and they said I didn't realize you had a podcast. I said yeah, I don't flaw in it or anything like that. It's not what it's about. We don't advertise it. And they were like, yeah, well, I was listening, you guys, you were talking about the Teamsters and this is another union representative from another union organization and he said you're very pro-union. And he said you're very pro-union. And he says you guys seem to be very big on the Teamsters. And I said no, we're very big on the working man and the guy that actually has to go to work every day. That's who we're big on, because whether it's heavy equipment trucking, hotshot freight loads with a pickup truck or just your general F-250 or anything, it's all related to the man that's using it. And that's been the whole mantra of the whole thing, right down to socioeconomics and healthcare and everything else that we talk about. So we were talking about that and he sat down and he goes that's a very interesting take on the whole thing and I said there isn't another podcast out there talking on it from that perspective. They talk about it on the perspective of products. They talk about it on the perspective of marketing. They don't talk about it. On the perspective of the working man, who's actually going to use all the other stuff that people are advertising for, it's very rare.
Speaker 3:And we went into this thing and I said, and I backed him up and I said, listen, I think about the Teamsters is this Teamsters are twofold Teamsters worry about the working man. They worry about putting the guys to work. The operators union does the same thing. International operator engineers they do the same thing. They put guys to work. They put them in the seats of the equipment. If you're a union company, you're going to put people to work, even in their what you would call maybe a negative days of greed and mismanagement of funds, which has been heavily documented and glorified through movies. At the end of the day, there were a whole lot of people and even when you watch any of the movies about Hoffa and the casinos that were built and all that stuff, look at where they're at. They still provide a pension, yeah. They provide a retirement ability for people that drive every day of the week, yeah, and driving is not easy. It's gotten easier because of the stuff that we talk about but the industry itself is not easy, it is dangerous, and the operators are the same way. The operators have one of the best pensions going on in the country, as they should. As they should, and all this legislation that's coming through. We talk about this stuff as they should, and all this legislation that's coming through, we talk about this stuff.
Speaker 3:This all circles back to what I'm getting to, which is these companies are at risk. They carry too out of balance. Systematically. We lose these companies. We lost CF. The world would have never thought never in 1990, I think it was 95 or 94 when CF went under. We would have never thought Joe's looking it up right now we would have never thought that we were going to lose Yellow Freight or Roadway. Roadway was bought up by Yellow. That's why you have YRCc. No one ever thought roadway was going to go out of business and they didn't really. They got swallowed up. I was a partnership agreement. That why that yellow freight roadway needed to make to keep going yeah, exactly so.
Speaker 2:Uh, just for those of you listening to this and who were catching that, cf, cf, uh, officially closed its its doors in September 2002. After about a year of bankruptcy proceedings. They had 15. Yeah, 2002. It took a while for them to shut down. 15,000 employees was generating $2 billion in annual revenue. When it finally did close. And CF, obviously they were kind of the pioneer of the ltl freight and logistics industry. Right, because at that point it was still. You know, you had the stevedores at the ports just loading up the trucks and strapping stuff together and figuring it out on the fly in richfield ohio, one of their largest terminals in the country, which was a major hub for them.
Speaker 3:The drivers literally walked into work one day and it was locked. Yeah, the maintenance people locked the gate on the way out and said, well, that's it. That's it. You know? The other thing I was in part of this meeting that I was talking to this, this other cause, it's all. My rants are multifaceted. We were talking about one way to put it. Yeah, that.
Speaker 3:We were talking about the fact that, you know, moving freight is becoming ever more challenging, especially for heavy equipment freight. So if you have to move buckets, components, things that don't regularly fit or are conveniently fitted into a pup trailer or a 48 foot freight trailer, companies like UPS, fedex Freight and those guys don't really like picking up an excavator bucket that's eight foot wide, eight foot tall and seven foot deep. They look at that and they go, no, now they'll move it. And don't get me wrong, we ship stuff all over the country like this, but they don't like doing it because it tears up the trailers, it damages the other freight that's inbound, and you don't want some guy on a forklift literally getting hurt trying to move something he shouldn't be moving across a dock Right.
Speaker 3:So a hotshot freight has turned into a big thing in this industry Because when you have like three buckets or you have like a multitude of what we call gang boxes, which the NAC Corporation makes along with Crescent, we load those up with tools. They were very heavy, they're very dense, we ship them all over the country and we have a bigger need than ever for hotshot freight and the OEMs need to really take a look at this. They've been building cab chassis models for hotshot freight models for a while now, but we have an ever-growing need for what I would consider a medium-duty, but not truck.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know if that was the best segue for a new product launch that we have ever done on this show but it's definitely top three we have ever done on this show, but it's definitely top three, so thank you. The spirit of this, uh, you know ideal hot shot rig that you just described. Ram just debuted their new 2024 hd 3500 cummins i6 turbo diesel. They are the first I'd call this a class 2 truck, maybe class two B, with 1,075 pound feet of torque on an optional Cummins diesel.
Speaker 3:Let's talk about that 1,075, or knocking on the door of 1,100 pound feet of torque Emissions, legal Emissions, legal. That has to be one of the most powerful pickup trucks in the marketplace.
Speaker 2:It has to be For sure, for sure. And now this is a vehicle that has up to 37,000 pound towing capacity, 14,000 pound GWR, just under what it would take to make it a class three. If you've got less than 10,000 pounds in that trailer, you're not going to need a CDL to drive this thing Correct no-transcript.
Speaker 3:We don't have enough companies, and so we'll talk about this. So when you don't have enough companies, you don't have enough people, you consolidate your freight even more, which means that the oddball freight has nowhere to go and no place to move it, and your costs for moving such an oddball freight do what they skyrocket. That's right. So we're going to go back to my rant earlier, where I talked about free market. We bid work, we price work, the clients. Those clients sell their products to other people. Those people that pay for those products are shopping for the next best option or quality option. That's the most high level way you can put it. So any way you can do this and you can work on controlling your costs as they escalate. So, any way you can do this and you can work on controlling your costs as they escalate, as escalation happens through inflation.
Speaker 3:We need this. We need powerful pickup trucks that are reliable. The other side of that is, yeah, their emissions legal. They have to be. You can't have a bunch of guys deleting and tearing out and running rebar up inside of a SCR to clean it out. You can't have that well, but even credit because they went out. They went out and they hit the map and they said here's a truck here's a truck and let's move it.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right. You know and we talk about this some of the stuff that these diesel tuners were doing, the power puck tuners were doing, even with all that, even with the straight pipes and the rolling coal and all that, they weren't getting 1100 pound feet of torque like this. Not many, no, they were not. So, yeah, this is a solid truck. This is definitely something to keep an eye on. Do they have a price point on this thing yet?
Speaker 3:Ah, let's, because I was just at an auto show not too long ago and now, granted, this is not a freight truck. Okay, right, they had the loaded most absolutely optioned out sunroof, dually, 3500 you could get, and I think anybody with a horse trailer would probably want this thing. It was absolutely gorgeous.
Speaker 2:Oh, I think the sticker on was 108 that sounds gorgeous, but I can't imagine that that's really what we're looking for. Looking at it as a chassis cab, it looks like you're looking at around 67 with that engine in it.
Speaker 3:Absolutely worth every dollar at 67,000. And I'll tell you why Because anybody that's bought a semi truck in the last two years understands how expensive they've gotten. Yeah, they've gotten nuts. And this is the other thing about buying trucks. Right, it's the same thing that goes for buying equipment. Buying trucks is not the truck. If you don't want a freight company and you're not running a freight company, that just literally buys the truck, no extras, hooks the trailer to it and takes off, you need a bunch of extras on there, you need boxes, you need stuff to store things in. All of that adds up and all of that's becoming more expensive as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure, and you are getting to a point where it's getting cost prohibitive. But on the flip side of that, think of all the safety features, all the monitoring features, communication features that are built into these trucks that a generation ago would have been $100,000. Been a hundred thousand dollars. I was thinking about this the other day. I got my kid he's in college, my oldest kid I got him one of these, uh, photography drones. You know those remote control photography drones.
Speaker 2:It was a couple hundred bucks and I was like, man, we didn't have stuff like this when I was a kid and I was looking at it. I was like if I had tried to build this when I was his age now, 25 years ago, it would have cost me a hundred thousand dollars to build it, and now it's something you just go pick up at Best Buy.
Speaker 3:Right, we've talked about this all the time is how technology becomes cheaper, but it segues to how other things become more expensive.
Speaker 2:That's right. I mean, if you look back a hundred years ago, I always loved doing the Chicago architecture tour, right, because they take you through all these old art deco buildings and things like that and it's like, man, that was all so beautiful, why don't we build them like that anymore? It's like because all of that took labor, that took crafts, people, that took artisans, and back then technology was expensive but labor was cheap. And we had an inversion of that, where labor is very expensive but technology is cheap. So the more you can throw tech at a problem instead of brains at a problem, human gray goo, you're going to save some money there. So we're coming to the end of our time commitment here. Thank you for listening along and I think we have to do this now or else we're just not going to do it. We're going to talk about the new. Uh, john deere, pp dozers well, the p series.
Speaker 3:P series is came out and I'm actually I already know people that have gotten these and and I've chatted with yeah, they're in customer hands, for sure they're in customer hands.
Speaker 3:This isn't something that's just out at the training facility and I'm I'm gonna tell, tell you that this is a sweet machine and it's a long lead up, right. So John Deere, as it has moved away from its partnership with Hitachi and its in-house management of all of its engineering, this was inevitable and I think this machine is going to be badass. Anybody that I've talked to that's gotten it while they haven't had it very long. They all say the same thing. But there is also some innovative stuff in this dozer that the marketplace needed. Now. People always compare John Deere dozers to CAT and all this stuff like that. But John Deere's biggest thing that they have worked on forever, and every OEM does, is just the ergonomics of the cab and vision out of the cab, right. So right down to you know, forever John Deere had a stance and the seat was centered. It looked forward. Then they moved it. They had some for a while that you could tilt back and forth.
Speaker 3:But if you look at how the controls are set up in this thing, with the joysticks, the adjustable armrests, the other thing is they're keyless. They have a term for it. I can't remember what it is off the top of my head but for the push button control pads, where you go in and you select all the functions and turn the wipers on or lights on or all that stuff and you start it from that. You also enter your codes from there. They've had that for a very long time.
Speaker 3:They're one of the industry leaders and saying you know what? Everybody has a key. We don't need to put a key in this thing. We need to put a code in there. If you're worried about somebody getting out that shouldn't be in it, we'll put a code in there. There's also talk of it's not mentioned in anything so far, but there has been talk of bluetooth capability and equipment where you take your cell phone and your cell phone gives you an identifier by your operating company, where you say, hey, I'm licensed to run this, I'm trained to run it, whatever terminology you want to use and you wave it in front of the machine and it goes green and it says, okay, you can run it they talked about that with me a little bit at ces this year when I was there.
Speaker 3:The john deere, guys, and we talked about that on a previous episode episode.
Speaker 2:That's right. Thanks for using the terminology. Yeah, and that's really important because you know, you've got scenarios where you've got guys who are rated on some machines, not rated on other machines, and it's so simple to just be like oh man, I just got to hop into this thing and move it 10 feet. I'm going to do that and inevitably, even through no fault of their own, that's when something goes sideways and the liability goes through the roof because of that. So that's really smart stuff. That's an update to the ATS. Quick start. That's typically what John Deere calls that.
Speaker 3:And the other thing about the P-Tier they're calling it P-Tier, not P-Series. Sorry, the 1050, I ran a 1050K a long time ago. When 1050K came out, we actually put it on a mountainside and we moved material with it. It's a great dozer. It's hydrostatically driven. Hydrostatic is different from the ways of so. If you take a 1050 dozer and you put it in the hands of a guy who's used to operating like a D9R, d8r, d8t, d9t, the way that they release the power Okay, so let's say you're doing this, you're taking a blade full of material and you're pushing it uphill. You're going to push it uphill, you're going to broadcast it over the upside of that hill and then you're going to let the machine come backwards down. The hydrostatic dozer is a more controlled environment because you're controlling each drive motor individually, hydrostatically. Anybody that's ever drove a lawnmower or any kind of garden tractor will understand what this means when you have a hydrostatic versus a manual. Now, not that the D9 or D10 Caterpillar stuff is manual, but like conventionally with a stick. My point is is the way that it breaks the power and allows you to steer as you come back down. Some of the biggest feedback in a hydrostatic dozer that you'll ever see on the marketplace is that when I put this thing in reverse, it doesn't kind of like free fall, it doesn't free wheel Well, it's not going to. You are throttling it backwards, right. And it's a very similar phenomenon to anybody that's drove a Tesla or electric vehicle, where it's like driving a golf cart. I put the thing in reverse. It doesn't mean it's going to roll away. It means I have to press the pedal and modulate how fast they want to go right Now.
Speaker 3:The other thing about the P-tier dozers, which is neat if you look inside the cab, there's a lot of stuff in there. There's a shelf in there for a lunchbox. It's got an indentation built around it. You put your box in there. Cup holders, you know the climate system inside of those, along with the seat for comfortability so you can set your weight. You know people always talk about the big operator. There's a lot of younger. You know smaller operators when they get in there and they get on the seat and it feels like a rock that can dial that back down. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff with the P-tier dozer. That is just an evolution of where we're going and at the end of the day, it just makes it easier to do a 10-hour workday. If you're working four tens on a job and that's the way you're set up it just makes it easier to get through four tens.
Speaker 2:Well, a hundred percent, and the other you know.
Speaker 2:The other high-tech issue on this is that all of the P-tier dozers now are coming with smart grade, which is they call it the massless 3D grade control, and that's something we've talked about before, where it used to take a ton of skill to be able especially if you were doing a road or anything to make it not look like waves on the ocean, right on the ocean right.
Speaker 2:And now this is something that a lot of that math is being done for you by the machine. It's just going to make it that much easier for new operators to get into the business, for work to be done at a timely rate with the fewer operators that are there, and, I think, just basically make it better for everybody involved, including the companies, because when you're running a construction company and you've got a whole job site, if you're lucky running at a 5% margin probably closer to 2% margin in real life If you ever have to redo that work because you had a new operator that didn't know what he was doing and you know, put a whole bunch of waves in there, you're automatically out. You're out Exactly. So this is going to, you know, push some of that back.
Speaker 3:But you know, look, if you go back and we're gonna run over time. They're yelling at me, pointing at their watch it's like I gotta go. The wife needs to take me to costco listen, they haven't upgraded their food costs in 20 years. Costco, costco is the backbone of somebody putting their foot down and saying no, anyways.
Speaker 3:That's exactly what I was going to say but no, what I was going to say about that is imagine back in the 70s, right? So you got Jack Nicklaus. He's hot off the tour, gets into the 80s and he's like you know what? I'm going to design an all new golf course and this baby is going to be sweet. We're going to have some rolling hills in there and we're going to have some rolling hills in there and we're going to put these sand traps over here and this is what this is going to look like. And he's in there with the designers. The design team is like this is the best thing ever. And if this guy hits this shot, just right, he's going to bank it off the fairway. It's going to roll left and prep them right to put it on the grade. They hand that down to the project team, project team. Team project team hands that down to the job trailer. Job trailer walks out and says guys, this is what we're going to do. And the operator looks at him and goes you're out of your mind. How am I going to grade this?
Speaker 3:That was a real struggle in that era, all the way up into the nineties. How are we going to shape this without spending hundreds of man hours in hand raking material. Not that the 10, 50 P is going to do that, cause that thing, in all honesty, is meant to move the earth backwards around itself and put material where you need to do at an ungodly rate. And John Deere puts something on this planet that's going to do it every day of the week. It's got a ripper on the back. You'd want to go out and build a golf course. You're going to build a gorge. That's what you're going to do with a 1050. We have a 550P and that 550P is going to go out there and say hey, big brother, you just tore the earth, a new one and I'm going to clean it up for you and we're going to be all right.
Speaker 3:That's the idea behind it right, that's the idea and anybody that looks at the dozer world, you have the smaller brothers and you have the bigger brothers and they all have their place in between and they're doing a hell of a job with the peter dozer yeah, I think they are.
Speaker 2:I think it's great stuff so all right you don't even know what to say after that rant, I don't know it's. I think it's good. I think that's a really good summary. There's nothing to add. Let's uh, let's all go to the lobby.
Speaker 1:Let's all go to the lobby. Let's all go to the lobby to get ourselves a treat. Delicious things to eat. The popcorn can't be beat. The sparkling drinks are just dandy, the chocolate bars and the candy. So let's all go to the lobby to get ourselves a treat. Let's all go to the lobby to get ourselves a treat.