It's been almost a full year since we launched the Heavy Equipment Podcast, so we're kicking off our return from a long break with the first HEP-isode of a brand-new season! We're diving right back into the socioeconomics of GM's $6 billion stock buybacks and giving Manitou's new forestry-focused telehandler a look, too. All this and more on this week's HEP!
It's been almost a full year since we launched the Heavy Equipment Podcast, so we're kicking off our return from a long break with the first HEP-isode of a brand-new season! We're diving right back into the socioeconomics of GM's $6 billion stock buybacks and giving Manitou's new forestry-focused telehandler a look, too. All this and more on this week's HEP!
Well, we at work we'll cut all this out, but at work we invoked a cone policy with the vehicle. So the driver said to put cones out in a direction in which the vehicle could travel upon parked. And when they exit the vehicle, guess what's going to happen? Put the cones out or get tickets.
Speaker 2:Ooh, that'll be good. 100% chance that those cones are going to get left behind at least half the time. We ordered twice what we needed and with that we're back after a long, long hiatus here. We'll call this season two. This will be season two episodes this amazing season two season two, the first ever second season of the heavy equipment podcast. I'm your host, joe boris, here with hot mike switzer, the reason. I know it'd be one season two.
Speaker 1:There can only be one season two you know I've been on the first one you need to peel. You had to get away from the ball field. I've been announcing over there. They're not sure what's coming down trucks, cars, balls, what we're here in the seven inning stretch.
Speaker 2:It's like I thought this was an ambulance yard.
Speaker 3:What the hell's happening okay, we're back and this is my freight liner.
Speaker 2:Freight liner the one that moves the balls this is jesus christ, I got that big cup that just scoops the balls right into the back anyway. Anyway, I know that it's season two because when we did season one we did the very first episode. There is an event out here in Oak Park called Porch Fest. Porch Fest is actually really cool. It's there's, you know, these older 1890s, early 1900s homes. They have these big porches because you didn't have air conditioning back then. 1900s homes. They have these big porches because you didn't have air conditioning back then.
Speaker 2:So you volunteer your house and a local band typically a well-known local band shows up at your house and plays on your porch and the neighbors come out and they've got food trucks and stuff like that. It's like a little, a little music festival right there on someone's porch. Well, after we recorded the first ever episode, we were sitting in front of porch fest and my wife says to me why are you and mike doing this? This is a total waste of time. And I looked at her and I said the episodes are going to take off, woman, and they are going to provide for this family. And a year later I think we're, uh, slightly closer to making that happen. We like to think so. We like to think so any day. Now that sixty thousand dollar contract for mac md is going to close, we're going to be all seriousness.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you in all seriousness. That is the cool thing about the heavy equipment podcast. We're not bought, owned or subsidiated by anyone that's true we talk as if no one is listening, and those that want to partake may well.
Speaker 2:it's a good thing we talk like no one is listening, and those that want to partake may Well. It's a good thing we talk like no one is listening, because if you've been paying attention to some of these dump trucks happening in central Florida, nobody's driving those things. John Deere has been working with a couple of companies out there and they have a single operator operating three remote controlled dump trucks on this job site and I don't know how I want to feel about that, michael.
Speaker 1:Well, it raises a bunch of concerns about safety. And then you know whether or not you can have the attention span to operate three things at once. Clearly they are, and which is hard because most people don't have the attention span to walk their dog. But we have to have a solution Now. I don't want to pronounce this wrong, but I may. Is it? Teleo, teleo, teleo sounds right.
Speaker 1:Okay, they're the ones that are the engineering behind all this and they have that universal system that they're working on, which obviously takes effort and time to integrate that into whatever OEM that you have. But they have it and they have the ability to do that. And the cool part about that is there's now a sustainable system that somebody could go and say listen, I got John Deere, I got CAD, I got Volvo. I can put this stuff on here because I need to run it time and time again and I don't know. I was reading this articles and I'm reading about the company and I'm doing all this stuff because I vowed that I would not just get on here and wing it and they not for season two baby.
Speaker 1:No, no. So my thing is is that I wonder what the unions think about this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they've got to be just livid about this. They also recognize they have a shortage. Yeah, it goes both ways right, but I I think it's one of these things where, like, there is a shortage. But I think that what this does is it uses the shortage and it gives the corporations kind of leverage to say, like you know, hey, you're, you're bringing me union labor and I get that, but you're not bringing me the bodies that I need to fill my equipment, so I'm going to go source it from somewhere else, because you got to imagine that this is not a union operator sitting up there yeah for states that you don't have to be union.
Speaker 1:It doesn't matter, it doesn't care what you are.
Speaker 2:well, that's it. It doesn't care if you're union, not union, man, man, woman, black, white, green, purple, it doesn't care, it's non-denominational, and you believe in the strength of organized labor and you care about your fellow workers. Somebody offers you hey, you know, you've got a skill set that we need. We need three machines operated, five machines operated, 10 machines operated. We're going to pay you to do it, you know, but you might get paid more to do it. But that means that your union brothers and sisters are not going to be able to get those jobs because you're going to be doing it. So where do you land on?
Speaker 1:that that's a good point Because, let's say, you call the hall, wherever hall you're at, and the hall goes. I got five guys and you're like, but I really need nine. And you're like, I got five guys, I'm like, all right, send them down. And. And you're like, I got five guys, I'm like, all right, send them down. And we're going to crash course. We're going to train them on how to operate a haul truck and like a roller, and while they get the haul truck running and doing its thing, they're rolling out some BS on the side and sealing up some stuff at the end of the day. Meanwhile, they're only running one thing at any given time. They're only running one thing at any given time. My point is is that it would allow somebody the opportunity to make a weird different type of rate and at the same time, you're getting work done with less people, because that's all there is.
Speaker 2:Right, so that is a?
Speaker 1:that is kind of an interesting thing. I don't know. It leaves a lot of things to wonder. I mean, kat's been working on the remote control skid steer. John Deere has remote control skid steer. They've been working on a bunch of remote control integrated technology.
Speaker 2:Yep, husqvarna has got a couple of remote operated machines now, but it's still one operator, one machine they're taking the operator out of harm's way.
Speaker 2:But it's one operator, one machine. Now some of these electric forklifts and we covered this a couple of months ago some of these electric forklifts are trainable. So what that means is that they follow a certain path. They raise and lower the forks at the same point on that path and they kind of just follow a pre-prescribed or a pre-programmed route within a warehouse. So the idea is that with one guy who's forklift certified, he can reach up, scoop the thing out, pick it out of the rack, bring it down, and then he turns around and there's an empty, driverless forklift waiting for him, puts it down in front of it. The other forklift picks it up and takes it outside and puts it down where it's supposed to go down.
Speaker 2:And I think on certain types of job sites, especially with dump trucks, where they basically just kind of go and stop, they wait to get filled up and then they go and finish it out, finish out their route. I think that lends itself to this kind of multiple unit control, because you could theoretically have two units parked, one being loaded, one unloading, and then the other one be driving it through the field. And to your point earlier about safety there is a safety concern, but whose safety are we worried about? Because there's no operators in there to be unsafe, and the more we get to automate, the fewer and fewer operators we're actually going to have in the mud and the sluice and in the rocks. I mean, how many gory, horrific accidents happen every week on job sites across the country because somebody is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Somebody didn't see them. They slip fall. Maybe they're doing something stupid, maybe somebody in the machine is doing something stupid.
Speaker 2:You know, you could just as easily say that this is a pro-safety thing.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I mean it absolutely could be. When you remove the amount of people from the work site, the work area that's actually being worked on, and then you have the ability to run three, two machines all at the same time or as they alternate. That that's a whole different dynamic than the industry is used to. Yeah, because, like you said earlier, with the autonomy and with the remote control that they're working on, like at the various oem levels, it's a one-for-one basis, right? Or it's a removed operator basis, meaning that there's no one involved? It's a removed operator basis meaning that there's no one involved, it's just going right.
Speaker 2:Well, you're seeing that in the in the big class, eight heavy trucks especially like in uh, you know, I wouldn't say over the road, but I would say when you're looking at from port to warehouse, like if you're looking for, you know, like the kind of thing that Amazon does where a container comes off a ship, it's loaded onto a trailer. That trailer gets connected to the back of a semi. The semi goes, you know five, 10 miles down the road to a warehouse, backs it up, decouples and goes and gets another container. That of thing I think you're going to start to see automated very soon. They're already talking about the next two, three years. We need, we do need that especially, especially at container ports and and it, container shipping is a rough is a rough business and it's really rough on drivers because if you could be sitting there in a line waiting to pick up a container, waiting to pick up a load and, depending on your contract and depending on how you're paid, you might be sitting there for hours and not make a penny running on your logbook.
Speaker 1:You can't drive, but only 11 hours a day. So you know, unless you have some extreme circumstance. But the point is is that you've burnt your available hours waiting in line. At some point you just say I don't know how far I'm going to get, but I'm going to get that far, and then I'm a day off, a whole week shot.
Speaker 2:Exactly Right, and that's why I think that if you could automate the just those lines, if you could automate that idle time when you're in that stop and go traffic, if you can say okay, I'm connecting the autopilot, and the autopilot is going to handle this, the self drive is going to handle this, that becomes some places would be better off for that.
Speaker 2:Some places would be better off for that a hundred percent. Some places would be better off for that. Some places would be better off for that a hundred percent. But think of the driver. If I say, okay, I only have 11 hours that I could be driving in a given day, but this thing is going to take over for two of those hours. I've now added range that I could do, and especially if you're in a place like you know, like I said, stop and go traffic, or you're at a port where you're going to be, where you know you're going to be sitting for a while, you can get up, you can walk to the back, make yourself a cup of coffee, stretch your legs. You know you could. Oh my gosh, this could be something that would not.
Speaker 1:Everyone has. Not everyone has the bun coffee maker in their in their sleeper, joe not everyone is privileged with the power of 100 inches of Volvo Mac. Just absolute, taking care of you the entire way. You're there for your entire existence on the road.
Speaker 2:My Twitter handles Volvo. Joe, for a reason, baby.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we came from the two by five coffin sleepers. Let me tell you, cab overs were popular because you could actually stretch your legs out when you laid sideways across the cab. That's right, you know. When you have somebody running multiple pieces of equipment or multiple trucks or whatever, you want to try and multiply with the single human's ability. Think about the power you've harnessed and what they're in charge of. At that point it's a lot. Yeah, it's a. It's a lot. Not since the days of the freightliner powerliner have we entrusted somebody with that much under their ass at any given time. Kta 613 speed moved it down the road like it was nothing back then.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, now we're back. We've gone full circle well, kind of I may have hallucinated this, but I swear I saw one of those old. It must have been early 80s. I was a young kid and I swear this thing had four axles.
Speaker 1:It had like two axles underneath the cab there's a lot of that stuff out there, a lot of heavy haul stuff that was built Late 70s, early 80s. They did a bunch of stuff and then through the 70s they built all kinds of wild stuff. I mean, they still do they still make multiple steer axle trucks and different things?
Speaker 2:But you don't see them on the road like that.
Speaker 1:No, not anymore. They kind of standardized a lot of that stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like that. No, not anymore. They kind of standardized a lot of that stuff. Yeah, boo, you still see that in australia, though you get like the scania guys that are running these long trains, the trains are crazy.
Speaker 1:The road trains are crazy. They had scania power over there. They got mac over there. Kenworth's running all their stuff with the cummins platform over there. They're. That's a whole different world. We got to get somebody on there from there. They like their Chrysler stuff.
Speaker 2:Like their Chrysler.
Speaker 1:They do Chrysler Utes.
Speaker 2:They do, why would they not? All right, I think we've talked to that one to death. Actually, you know what we haven't talked to death. While we're on the subject of union labor and union brothers and sisters and all the issues that come up with that, when you start considering automation, I have to say I don't know if you remember this last year, september through november, there was a six-week strike. Uaw strike affected the entire industry, and especially gm we talked about it several times.
Speaker 2:They were saying there's not enough money for a pension fund. We're never going to renew the pension fund. We're're not going to continue with those obligations. They pushed back against increasing wages.
Speaker 2:Well, within weeks of the strike ending, gm announced that they wanted to do a $10 billion stock buyback. The stock buyback is a rough deal because it doesn't serve anybody. It doesn't put food on anybody's table. It doesn't enable you to go out into your community and spend money and buy things for the kids and put taxes into the system that funds the schools and the roads and everything. It's just strictly taking money out of circulation and raising the value the stock value for the shareholders in the boardroom. So I don't care for that to begin with.
Speaker 2:But back in November the GM board said no, no, no. We are doing this to save money because we have a stock dividend that we pay out every quarter and if we buy back this $10, or rather $6 billion, it ends up being $6 billion worth of stock. We're going to save over the long run paying out those dividends to those $6 billion worth of shares. So in the long run it's actually going to save the company money. All right, maybe it will, maybe it won't. We'll leave it at that. Yesterday the news broke on Automotive News that GM had done the buy. They've started that purchase of that $6 billion. But oh, by the way, they also voted to raise their stock dividend 30%. So the company saves nothing and their stock value goes up. And I am just absolutely, completely and utterly disgusted and I can't believe the unions haven't flipped out about it. I think behind closed doors they got to just be fuming.
Speaker 1:Well first of all, I'm going to start off my next few moments by saying this despite my love for gmc branded vehicles not chevy but gmc I like gmc trucks way back in the day when they claimed they were hand-built but weren't manner. But the point is, is that I like GMC vehicles, I like what they do, I like all of that. What I hate is this kind of crazy that companies do and it doesn't have to, it doesn't. It's not just GM. This is a whole other problem of other companies to do the same thing.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, we're going to go out there and we're going to swallow up using our cash which, if we go back even further, the American public lent them.
Speaker 2:I was going to say it's actually our cash as taxpayers.
Speaker 1:And we're going to buy back our shares and then we're going to put them back into the share pool and by buying them back at the rate of whatever they announced that they've determined to be, do you know what they were? Buying them back at Market?
Speaker 2:day pricing. Well, they were buying them at market pricing, but they did it real quickly in a way that people couldn't time the buy to jack up the prices. Okay.
Speaker 1:So they do that which virtually sets their free market share price Exactly, and then by doing so they capitalize on a good run that they've had lately because they're actually able to put out product. And when you really look at that, you go this is the crookedest thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:The unions should be freaking out because if anybody and we've talked about this before if anybody needed a stock dividend and anybody needed a bonus, it is all the workers on the floor that if you walked up to them and you handed them a $900 net paycheck and said thank you for your hard work this is why we're here and you know what this is for you. Right? $900 for lead people and every plant, half of that for the guy who's literally sweeping the floor to promote workplace environment. Positivity would go so much further than reading this kind of crap on the news and reading about how people are working the system to freak everything out. And then they have a whole guaranteed stock pool and then, oh, we're going to raise our dividend bonuses by 30% or whatever. They ended up being no, raised it by 33 percent.
Speaker 2:A full third. So one third. So what do you do? It's gross. What do you do? Well, I've got worse news for you, because you made the comment if they just gave every line worker nine hundred dollars, make it a thousand, make it five thousand.
Speaker 2:Here's the reality. If you take $6 billion and you divide that over the 46,000 United Auto Workers that are working at General Motors, it's a one-time bonus of $130,434.78. That's my point. You could have changed the lives of 46,000 people. You could have changed the lives of their family. You could have given their kids an education. You could have given those kids a future. You could have invested in those communities. You could have gotten them schools and hospitals and libraries and services that they need. We're still talking about Michigan, where there's lead in the water, there's roads that are horrible, there's a lack of community engagement to the point that some areas of Detroit don't even have police and ambulance coverage. But $130,434.78 for every single GM United Auto Worker member could have gone into their account, but instead it went directly into the pockets of the people sitting on that board and it is offensive let's.
Speaker 1:Let's break it down into something that's even more plausible. You could you could feasibly hand everybody a ten thousand dollar check out of that 133 cash. That's, after taxes, okay, $10,000 net. You could take the remaining third of the $133,000 and dump it into their pension. That's it. You could take the other third and fund their health care for the entire UAW period. Yep, you could take the third after that. So $6 billion is third is $2 billion. Take the $2 billion and hand it to the state and say thank you for nothing, because we haven't been able to give you shit for the a hundred years we've been here and we've raped and pillaged your state, from your roads to everything else, your waterways and all the crap that we burnt for the last hundred years since we've been making clean it up. Take $2 billion, balance your budget, fix your stuff up. Let the casinos fund the rest. Thank you, have a good day and you know what? We're the best company on the damn planet because we're General Motors and we did this for you.
Speaker 2:That is 100 percent the problem with it. You're telling me that you couldn't have funded the pension. You're telling me that you couldn't have. You know, know, let's not even make it about people. Let's just say let's, let's pretend that we're like corporate overlords, right? And we just say look, we have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders and this is what we're going to do.
Speaker 1:That's six billion responsibility to their yacht.
Speaker 2:That's your problem exactly, and not only that, but like that $6 billion puts you so far behind. We're trying to like launch a whole new generation of hybrid vehicles right now. You are behind Toyota, you're behind Nissan, you're behind everybody.
Speaker 1:You were trying to launch a whole generation of workers.
Speaker 2:Fund some of that crap. No, fund some of that stuff.
Speaker 1:That's the problem. Right now. We're not funding anything. We are literally handing it to people who don't need it any more than they already have gotten.
Speaker 2:That's right. No, and it's not just UAW, it's not just auto workers. We talk a lot about socioeconomics here and I want to say that a couple of years ago, george Lucas and Disney were talking about putting a LucasArts Star Wars museum here in Chicago, and they decided not to do it because they said the only way they would do it is if the city of Chicago gave them a billion dollars and the city of.
Speaker 2:Chicago said exactly as they should. First of all, star Wars sucks anyway. As soon as they started kissing their sisters on that show, it was the end for me oh, star wars.
Speaker 1:Star wars itself makes money, no matter what happens and and when george lucas drug himself out of the back office trailer that he was in at that lot and then decided somebody was going to buy his stuff and they could build that movie. And that movie sold and sold, and sold, and sold and sold and and then Disney bought it and it's continued to pay out. Take the money and build the park, build the center, build whatever you want to do. And you're exactly right, that has nothing to do with heavy equipment, trucking, construction or anything, but it's the same basic principle.
Speaker 1:Oh, city of Chicago, we want a billion dollars, that's it, no negative I'll tell you, if you wanted if you needed that billion dollars, that and you needed anything trucked into the city, the teamsters are going to take a piece of that back for the through, all the fees and and all that stuff that you're going to pay. I mean, like, here's the problem these people don't realize that when you screw the system, the system will screw you, the system, the system will screw you.
Speaker 1:The system screws back, baby, when you screw anybody that's listening to this that works for a living. I don't care if you're an engineer, I don't care if you're a sales manager, if you're actually driving a truck or you're operating a piece of equipment or you're dispatching somewhere and you just have us on because you don't want to stab yourself.
Speaker 2:Well, if you listen to this, you have to be enraged by this you have to be, unless you have enough stock options, that you're better off this way.
Speaker 1:No, we know you're still enraged. No, we don't have enough stock options. The stock options were taken when they bought the back, so then they gave it to the people that didn't need it. There's no stock options. Do you think that they care that in some town, somewhere a guy couldn't get enough people so they had to get this company to come in and automate their equipment so one guy could run three. No, they're trying to figure out where they can park their yacht.
Speaker 2:It's bad, it's bad, it's upsetting. Well, one thing that's not upsetting I love this. So there's a story that come out a couple of days ago Manitou. Manitou equips their telehandler.
Speaker 3:I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:Equips Manitou, it's Manitou, it says Manitou. If you go up to Manitowoc, wisconsin, it's Manitowoc, not Manitowoc.
Speaker 1:Well, it's manitowoc, not manitowoc. Well, it's man anyway. Well, wait, is that how you ask?
Speaker 2:google ai. Yeah, I don't know how you pronounce it. That's fine, listen. It gets weird out in the midwest because, like anywhere in the world, m-i-l-a-n is milan. Somehow you cross into michigan, becomes milan.
Speaker 1:So no, that's true, that's true, and it medina. Is medina anywhere else in the world? Anywhere else in the world but in the in in ohio, in central ohio, it's medina right exactly so you got. What do you? How did you pronounce it, manitou? Manitou yeah, because there's manitowoc wisconsin, because I mean, if you had two of them then it'd be manna too, manna twosome. Yeah, man, it's two of them. Hey, did you see that? Uh, tell him over there, man, that's two of them.
Speaker 2:Oh there, but these things are awesome, man. I love those youtube videos where these things yoink the trees up and they saw it and just rip all the branches off and toss the log off to the side.
Speaker 1:I love watching those, so as soon as I saw this cross my news feed, I got real excited. This that is fathering the deforestation of the very country which we live in stop.
Speaker 2:We can't sit here talking about the raping of the earth with our strip mines and how cool the dump trucks are and not getting no, I know, I know, I'm just, I'm just being, I'm just being kidding Deforestation I guess that's what we're on about today.
Speaker 1:No, no, no.
Speaker 2:I think these are cool, but I think what's really neat about these is I have zero experience with one of these.
Speaker 1:I can't imagine you've ever been near it.
Speaker 2:Have you driven one?
Speaker 1:Well, I have not ran one, but I have actually been to paul bunyan show where they actually show you this stuff and they process trees and stuff and and it is cool and it is neat to see the efficiency of the lumber equipment that is being produced out there and john deere bought a bunch of this stuff years ago. There's all kinds of companies that make the stuff, from chippers to harvesters to de-limbing tools, selective cutting tools. So if you have a forest you want to go in and selectively cut, you can do that. Imagine when you had to do this stuff by hand. When two guys go out with a saw, they drop the trees, then the crew goes out and pulls them with the steam donkey back and then limbs them and then stacks them. It was dangerous work, it's horrific work. And they I mean they made it simpler and easier with all these new pieces that keep coming out that are improvised. And then really it comes from the workplace.
Speaker 1:The logging industry is one of the most innovative workspace providers of tools because all they do is refine it based off of the users that use them. And if you ever talk to anybody that actually sells any kind of forestry items, we'll call it, we'll just lump it into that umbrella. I mean, they just geek out about this stuff and some of these guys that get involved with this stuff they are so far into it. It's incredible If you're a dirt guy that doesn't really get into that stuff or you're a driver or anybody like that, that's not around that stuff. Look up tub grinders. Tub grinders are another example of how they minimize waste and then they actually process tree waste and it is literally a tub with rolling knives in the bottom of it and whatever you put in there will come out a certain size off the belt. That's cool and it is cool and you know Moore Bark and those guys.
Speaker 1:I mean there are so many companies that have all this equipment. But what's cool is is there's only so many people in each space. It's like the industry has worked itself out and there's a balance there. These guys build some stuff. These guys build some stuff. These guys build like semi-commercial rental equipment because you're going to rent it and you're going to run like a 12-inch tree through it but you're not professionals at it. There's so much of that stuff that goes on. The telehandler with the woodcracker tree saw on it is neat, because that to me screams selective cutting. I don't care if you're harvesting special wood or you're just trying to selectively go and harvest a tree off of a golf course because it's in the way. This allows you to go in there, reach out, take it, move it away and do something with it, and that's what's cool about it?
Speaker 2:you know I was checking out this tub grinder thing. I don't know if I ever told you the story now we've gone down the rabbit hole.
Speaker 2:We're down the rabbit hole. I don't know if I ever told you the story. When I was like 13, 14, and I was in costa rica with my family, they took me to a rock quarry to like just kind of show it to me and show it to the kids and this is what a rock quarry does, and look how cool this is. And it was close enough to the house that I ran away and I went to like try to work on the quarry because I just thought it was so freaking cool and we had something that looked a lot like one of these tub grinders, but it was basically for turning soft rock into sand and smaller rock and asphalt and stuff and you know, basically churning it into this like little aggregate stuff. And I just remember this conveyor belt and dudes would hop onto the conveyor belt, push stuff that wasn't supposed to be on there off of it and hop off before they dumped themselves into the grinder.
Speaker 3:And like I never had the vocabulary.
Speaker 2:I didn't know what any of that stuff was, but I just loved it.
Speaker 1:No, that's a whole other industry. The, the crushing and recycling industry is massive. Yeah, you know, some of the leaders in that industry were Terex and have been Terex, power screen, um, as people have bought up other companies and done stuff like that. I mean that that is like the same as the forestry stuff. Out of necessity and need, that industry is developed and built crushing, sorting equipment. It's not simple, but it is Like you have an impact crusher where you have a flying rotor and then there's sacrificial wear items on there that beat the rock. You can have a cone crusher where you have a center mantle that moves around and it breaks it down until it gets to the size that it needs to on a funnel type basis. It's just like the forestry industry, but for rock, right?
Speaker 2:Diamond blades or something.
Speaker 1:That is another group of people that are just so passionate about that stuff, because that's another industry, that where when you're in the heavy equipment industry and you're like working for Caterpillar and you are a hydraulic excavator guy midsize, that's what you know, right when you are in the rock crushing field or you're in the forestry field, you somehow get swallowed up into all these things under the umbrella of items that your company offers. And if you're a user of the stuff, then you're quickly all into all of it, from everything from tire chains to walking forestry equipment that actually has legs instead of tires, like it's a whole thing. And and we need to, you know, honestly, we should get some people on here from more bark and and guys like this, where because those guys they love working on this stuff and they love talking about it A lot of people have no idea what it does.
Speaker 1:They just know that, uh, they just know their stuff from Ikea is in a box and they bolded together and they're trying to figure out how it works, but how that goes from a tree or recycled wood to sawdust, to that, that first part where you grind all that stuff up to make what that's made out of, is incredible.
Speaker 2:We should get some of those guys on here, but I think the next guest we have, oh, we gotta have.
Speaker 1:We're gonna get biff on here. We gotta get biff on here to talk telematics. He hides in the background he hides.
Speaker 2:We gotta get him on the show. I think he's embarrassed about his accent he's got.
Speaker 1:He's got a super strong midwestern accent. So when you, when you run a taxi, you when you run a taxi in east cleveland, you're gonna pick up some weird stuff and you shuttle people from the cleveland clinic and uh, and all that stuff over there, which are great hospital systems, and you're running them downtown and over to the west side where they go. Maybe you're taking them to the flats, or you're picking doctors up from the flats because they've been on a bender all day and they gotta go change a heart.
Speaker 2:You can speak however you want to in the cab of that cab yeah you can do what you want, but then, when you get interjected into an office environment, you have a weird blend now, my friend, now it's gotten weird, right, you're sitting there trying to tell becky and receiving as per my last email, and it's gotten weird, right, you're sitting there trying to tell Becky and receiving, as per my last email, and it's coming out all kinds of wrong.
Speaker 1:That's right. You're better off using a speak and spell.
Speaker 2:We should have a speak and spell on the show we tell you anytime.
Speaker 1:You know, I remember back in the dealership days there would be guys that would come over from Japan or South Korea and stuff like that, and they would have the mobile translator, oh yeah, and you would talk to them and they would spin it around. They would read it, they would type in it and spin it around and it would tell you what they just said.
Speaker 3:He's learning spelling with Texas Instruments Speak and Spell, spell rain, r-a-i-n. That is correct. She's teaching her brother with Speak and Spell H-E-R. That is right. They're learning new words with Speak and Spell. But don't tell them they're learning, they just think they're having fun. Speak and Spell for words. Speak and Read for stories. Speak and Math for numbers From Texas. For stories. Speak in math for numbers from texas instruments. They make learning fun yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:It was funny when they when they had it kind of off because they thought they're saying the right thing and they're smiling and nodding at you, but what they basically told you was all your filters in the parts department were organized wrong right, which I think is probably what they meant to say no, they were right. I took offense to that every time that it happened. Let me tell you they haven't more than once. I don't know what that means.
Speaker 1:Yeah it seemed pretty frustrating all these spark plugs are in the wrong order oh, yeah, yeah, all right.
Speaker 2:Well, we are perilously close to, uh, the summer solstice, so we'll make this pagan and druid close out. We'll have them chanting in the background, like they do at Stonehenge in Sacrifice of Virgin, and that'll kick off season two, right? Thanks for listening, like and subscribe All that stuff.