The Heavy Equipment Podcast
Whether we're exploring the latest in equipment technology, talking about the trends that propel the industry forward, or uncovering stories about the dedicated individuals who keep the dirt moving, and wheels of America turning, this is where the roar of the engines and the pulse of progress come together. It is sublime. It is surreal. It's the Heavy Equipment Podcast ... with Mike and Jo!
The Heavy Equipment Podcast
Nothing Smells Like a Deere, Hammer Down, and Road Trains
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On today's thrilling HEP-isode of the Heavy Equipment Podcast, Mike Bush from Hammer Down talks about how the logistics industry offers something for everyone, Mike and Jo talk up the new 91,000 lb. GCWR bill in Congress, and why John Deere could have had a bit more fun with its new soap.
John Deere Soap And Branding Riffs
SPEAKER_03Michael, welcome to this exciting new numberless episode. I have to ask, have you ever wanted to smell like a deer?
SPEAKER_01Well, you know, I don't know. You know, they poop little round balls in the backyard. You know, it's cumbersome. They stink, really. I don't know.
SPEAKER_03They do. But if you've ever uh said, man, I can't run like a deer, but at least I can smell like one, John Deere is uh now offering John Deere scented soaps and shampoos through the good people at Walmart. So everyman Jack's doing this? Everyman Jack is like the company, yeah. So they've been around a while, they make good stuff, like you know, different soaps and deodorants and all that.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so now that they're everyman John, the thing is is that I could totally see, and this is not a dig on anything because I grew up very rural. I could totally see a lot of Walmarts in a lot of places where those shelves will be empty, absolutely empty of that product. Oh, yeah. But I want to know, you know, did they have fun with it? Is it high guard? Is it does it smell like you know, 1030 or CJ4? What are these scents? What are their names?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and that's kind of what I was thinking too. Like if it was like fresh cut grass or like you know, the D, you know, construction diesel, I would have been into it. Turf would have been good, but no, they've got Iron Horizon, which is described as for your butt. That's the one crisp cypress with warm amber and smooth worn leather. That's for the leather daddies out there, and then steel water springs, which is salt, fresh air, and earthy sage. They could have had more fun with that.
SPEAKER_01I mean, you gotta have fun with it. I I think they got real close and they missed it. They gotta come out, they gotta release some stuff. You gotta have a coconut oil type one that basically looks like a looks like a grease tube. Yeah, and then you gotta have you know all that other stuff, you know, like we talked about with the high guard, the engine oil, and all that for a guy that's walking it. Listen, when you get out of your uh your brand new Kenworth 580 and you walk in with your chaps on and you're getting ready to go take a shower, you need to have in your holster the everyman John, John Deere scented stuff right there, hanging out like a six-shooter, okay, which is all to be hanging out later on. And then you go in there, and when you hear driver shower number five is available, you're excited, you're ready to go in there and just wash down with your everyman john scent. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_03Well, but you're really hitting something here because, like, they could have gone another way with this, they could have had like the hair product and like the grease tube, they could have had the the body wash and like a motor oil type deal, you know.
SPEAKER_01How do we not work for them? They need to get on the phone and we need to have Tim back there get a hold of Hobbs. Hobbes has got to get on the phone and find somebody over there and go, listen, we got ideas.
SPEAKER_03They're not we should get in touch with Caterpillar. Forget that. We need to start a little sibling rivalry. We'll have a target exclusive for the people that don't want to be able to do that.
SPEAKER_01We could do that for sure. I mean, I think that uh I think we could get Caterpillar.
SPEAKER_03We can get Volvo CE signed up. You have to go to IKEA to buy it right up there with the meatballs and the uh lingonberry jam.
SPEAKER_01Well, then no, that's the IKEA sense, okay? All right, yeah. When every man jack comes out with the uh IKEA run, you know. When you go in there and you're getting your homel couch that is about to eat you, like the guy from like the one from Pee Wee Herman when you put it together wrong. After you get cleaned up by the paramedics, you can go in and get your shower with your uh IKEA, every man Jack soap. Was that chair eating people? I don't remember that part. It hugged you and stuff like that and had my had teeth tried pulling you in. Is that why you don't like physical affection? You saw that show, you think anything trying to hug you is gonna eat you? I don't know, but when I'm gonna tell you, when the foot rest comes on, if you get bound up in that baby, you're getting hurt. You're done. I mean, the word of the day was out. Come on.
SPEAKER_02Come on, give me three thousand.
SPEAKER_03That was uh what was his name? Not Dustin Hoffman, Jesus. Lawrence Fishburg. Dustin Hoffman. This is a different little minority guy, but yeah, that was Lawrence Fishburn, man. That was Morpheus from The Matrix.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, Morpheus from the Matrix was the the sheriff, the cowboy, yeah on uh Pee Wee Herman. Yeah, I mean, could you imagine Al Pacino walking in there in that get up? Hey, wow, what's going on? You know?
SPEAKER_03Could you imagine universal insanity that would be if he sat there in that scene in Matrix and say, take the blue pill and go back to reality? And then when you take the red pill and you wake up and you wake up in Pee-wee's playhouse, he's looking at you going, he took the red pill, and the whole audience is screaming their brains.
SPEAKER_01Well, then what would happen is you'd see that that green code stream in the camera teleprompter, and then you knew you were screwed.
SPEAKER_03You're done. It's like coming right back to you. Well, speaking of being screwed, you know, while you're done sitting there getting your uh every man jack John Deere stuff at Walmart.
SPEAKER_01I didn't think we were allowed to go there.
SPEAKER_03Oh my god. The uh but you know, seriously though, some Rotella T lube in the adult section that might sell too.
SPEAKER_01I don't know what truck stops you stop at, but there's no adult section at any of the pilot or the flying J or the Sheets. Well, this is a Walmart exclusive, and they have the family planning section.
SPEAKER_03Oh, that's true. That's true. Well, what they don't have is motor oil in the automotive section because a lot of stores, a lot of Walmarts, a lot of Costco's are reporting that they can't get motor oil, and now there's even a
Motor Oil Shortages And Hidden Suppliers
SPEAKER_03service bulletin out at Toyota. If you've got that zero weight oil, you are out of luck. They're recommending now to go to uh zero W20 in some areas five W20 with a shortened.
SPEAKER_01I'm kidding. It's surprising because I think a lot of people don't realize that. I say that comment and I said I'm kidding, because there's a good point to be made there. That oil, actually, the private label oil from Costco is good oil. It is sourced and blended, it is not bad stuff. You got to look at the limited number of suppliers that truly make that oil and actually formulate it. And that's shown by what's missing on the shelves today. Just like, you know, we used to talk about this, you know, years and years and years ago, that at one time there was like four filter companies in the entire world. You had Allied Signal and like three other people that made every oil filter, period. Yeah. You know, we're out that way with the oil. A lot of people don't realize that that the oil packages and stuff and the normal OEM over-the-road oil and and vehicle-based oil, it's not that far apart from one brand to the other. Not anymore, not like it used to be.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I think it's also interesting, too, because there are so many different, like small refineries in active operation right now in the US, but a lot of that US oil gets shipped overseas. The oil that we use, it's not like you know, you're drilling in Texas and you're operating on that oil. The gasoline, the diesel that we use, that's coming out of refineries across the world. It's not our own domestic product, which I think is not only super strange considering we export more oil than we produce, but I think it's something that a lot of people just don't know.
SPEAKER_01I don't think a lot of people know that. I mean, the the amount of barrels that are processed here, like you're saying, is insane. Yeah. What was the 2025 United States mileage miles driven on the highway? They do an estimate on that annually.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, the uh federal highway administration does that. They said 3.324 trillion vehicle miles driven in 2025, and that compared to 2024 was about a 1% increase. So that's a lot of miles, dude. 3.324 trillion miles, trillion miles, and that works out to about 1,140 miles per month on a 37-mile daily round trip on average. And there's a lot of people who don't drive, who don't drive a vehicle at all, and then there's people who are putting in serious, serious miles, going 40, 50 miles each way. I used to remember when we were in Ohio, when I lived out there near you, and you were driving from Wellington way out west there, almost into Akron, you were putting almost 100 miles a day on your stuff.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was doing 100 miles a day. You know, it was 49 each way, and then it went the minute you went to lunch and grabbed anything, you were you bumped it over 100 every day. I and you know, it's just what it was. If you wanted to live rural and you wanted to live, you know, and at the time I was living with my parents. But then the commute, yeah, I don't care who you are. You're young and it's fun and you're driving. But the only reason that I was able to do that commute like that is because I was going to other places all the time too. I wasn't, I wasn't doing a Monday through Friday normally hour plus commute each way. I was going to the office and then going to job sites and broke it up and and then I would drive home. So I was doing a lot more miles than that, but it was busted up throughout the workday, which I think is how a lot of people end up when you live far away from your job, it kind of escapes you how many miles you truly are driving because you fall into this trap of planning things on your way home. Where do I need to stop? What groceries do I need to get? You know, you don't want to leave once you drove an hour and a half to get home. And it's a very planned event to do that. But here's the other thing when you live rural and you're and you're driving out of a metro area, you can cover a good amount of mileage quickly. Like when I leave our Indiana office and I come up to you and I go over to uh the studio over there, it's over an hour just for me to get anywhere close to where and it's only like 30 miles.
SPEAKER_03Exactly. Exactly. No, I know it. I used to have this problem when I was a service advisor and I would talk to people about their brakes, you know, especially here in the western suburbs, and they would say, Well, how many miles are my brakes supposed to last? Are my brake pads supposed to last? And I would say, look, if you're driving from here into the city, you might only go 10 miles, but you're hitting those brakes a hundred, two hundred times between here and there. If you're driving out west and you're going into like the far western suburbs, you're gonna get on the highway and you're gonna drive 30, 40, 50 miles, and you're not gonna hit the brakes until you're getting to your exit. So, like it's not how many miles you're driving, it's how much you're hitting those brakes, how much you're wearing down those pads. And that was something that a lot of people I don't want to say they didn't understand because when you explain it to them, they get it, but they don't wake up naturally thinking about it. I think that's true of a lot of things in this industry. You know, everything that you buy, everything that you consume, everything that you eat, even you know, the soap that you buy, whether it's from John Deere or anybody else, all of that is it doesn't taste good though. But all of all of that stuff has to get from point A to point B. That is logistics. I think our next guest, he has a great line. He says, Nobody wakes up at five years old and says they want to get into the logistics business, but everything that they consume is subject to that. So, how do we get more young people involved? How do we get them excited about that industry? And uh yeah, here he is, Mike Bush. Mike is the host of the Hammer Down podcast. And as we were talking yesterday, great topic that came up was nobody plans to get into logistics.
SPEAKER_05That's true. That's 100% true. And that's that's why I started the show. I was uh I was at the USC supply chain event, and it was this great event. And they they they invite all of their alumni, their MBA alumni back as they're graduating MBA class is is hat is hitting. So you get there, they give you your your name badge, and then they put a number on it. So, Joe, you're at table seven. And the way they work it is they put two or three practitioners at every table, and then six or seven kids. And the idea is hey, the kids are gonna network, you're gonna hang out, you're gonna talk to each other, and you're gonna talk to a couple of practitioners. That year
Selling The Cool Side Of Logistics
SPEAKER_05I was lucky enough, I was sitting next to the chief supply chain officer at Starbucks. I'm like, this is so cool. Like cool, yeah. But all the kids were starstar. So me being a goofball, I'm like, I'm like, hey man, how many countries have you tasting coffee in? And the kids like, and he says, 80. So I asked the kids, hey, how many of you knew there were 80 coffee-producing countries? And nobody raises their hand. I'm like, Did you know you could see the world? Tasting coffee by working in logistics. No, of course not. Well, over the course of the next couple of days there, I'm talking to kids who are mechanical engineering students. Well, what do you want to build? I'm gonna build robots. Cool. Have you been to a port? Have you been to a warehouse? Well, no, why would I do that? Right. Those are the two places robots exist. And if you really break that down, that's not the kids' fault. That's our fault as an industry because we don't talk about the cool stuff we do. We don't talk about the fact that if you're focused on sustainability, one out of every six you know pounds of emission is coming from us. If you're a big data kid and you care about the environment, you can come solve that. If you're, you know, want to build robots, this is a place for you. If you want to see the world tasting coffee, that's it. And we suck at telling that story. So that that was the idea for the podcast.
SPEAKER_03No, and I love that, right? Because like you see so many young kids coming into the industry and they have a sense of what they're into, maybe, but at the end of the day, they're so limited in scope based on what their understanding of that is. Like if you have a finance degree, most of the time you're looking at investment banks, you're looking at you know financial fund managers, things like that. Every fleet has a finance guy, every logistics operation has someone who is looking at numbers, running projections, building out these Monte Carlo models and things like that. All the stuff you're doing as a stockbroker, analyst, day trader, trying to predict the future, you're doing all of that work in logistics and trades.
SPEAKER_05And you're doing it in ways that people have never thought of, right? Like when when goods leave, let's say China to come to the to come to your porch, they go through 14 different sets of hands, right? You've got the manufacturer that it that it's put on a truck, then it's brought to the port, that it's put in uh on a boat, then it's brought over through customs. I forgot the first customs. And if you break that down, it's it's 14 or 17 steps that it has to happen. There's money transacting in each one of those. This is such a crazy windfall to your opponent finance. Like to say, hey, when am I going to get paid? When you have a day job, you expect, hey, it's every it's you know every other Friday or the first and 15th, whatever it might be. When you're in the finance and logistics that's the problem you're solving. That's the problem you're solving. Amazing.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And you know, let's take a step out of it, right? So I'm a journalist. I'm here representing electric. I've got the heavy equipment podcast that I do with another guy who operates a big fleet on his own. And you know, we try to cover the decarbonization of this space. We try to cover the innovative ways that people are trying to find efficiency, right? And we've heard it over and over again this last couple of days here at ACT Expo, is the two kinds of sustainability, right? We have to sustain the environment, the planet, so we all have a place to live and breathe and spend our money. And then we have to sustain the business so that it can keep going, keep us profitable, we can all continue to earn a living. Right. Those things really do come together, getting back to the finance angle. If you can insulate your business from unpredictable costs and insulate your business from big swings in foreign policy or big swings in import duties based on whoever anyone decides, regardless of what side of the aisle you sit on, you have to understand that if you wake up, if you go to bed on Friday and there's a 15% tariff and you wake up on Monday and there's a 30% tariff, you have to do something about it.
SPEAKER_05Your world just changed immediately.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's changed a lot. And whether you're talking about going electric or RNG or CNG, all of these efficiencies that you get on the carbon side, you're also getting on the fuel side and on the cost side. So for guys who are listening to your podcast, who are kind of geeking out over how logistics works and operates, and guys that are listening to mine that are kind of geeked out about the environment and the new technology, where do we intersect here?
SPEAKER_05Uh, we're in the messiest of middles right now, man. We really are. Like I was just thinking about this. So we're we're in a trade show where there's clean diesel, there's RNG, CNG, LNG, battery hydrogen. I'm sure there's a couple others out there.
SPEAKER_03There's ethanol that you missed. There's uh bio the biodiesel. Right. It's it's bananas.
SPEAKER_05There are nine, ten choices out there right now for truckers. And that and it's such a scary question, right? Like, do you do you double down on EVs and say, okay, I'm only gonna focus on Dreage? And we mentioned tariffs, right? Every time tariffs go from 15 to 30 percent, there's gonna be a dip at the port. So do you invest in a in an EV that only goes 300 miles, knowing that that's gonna work for Dreage, but drainage might fall apart. Do you look at hydrogen, which could be a great truck because it's kind of that perfect theoretical hybrid of okay, I can go long distance, it's the same duty cycle, it only takes 15 minutes to fuel up, all that stuff. But you can't find hydrogen anywhere.
SPEAKER_03So and when you can find it, it's $70 a kilogram retail.
SPEAKER_05Yes, indeed, which is and and for folks that don't know the way to the way this conversion to think about is one kilo of hydrogen is one gallon of diesel, basically, when you when you break and so the diesel's expense. So when when you see eight dollars per d per per gallon for diesel, you're like, wow, that's a lot, and then it's $70 per kilo for hydrogen, that's a whole different ballgame. This is the the scariest, messiest metal imaginable, but it's also the most opportunistic to me. It is, and it's the most optimistic. There are so many smart people on the showroom floor talking about what they're building and showing like a path to the future. Now, which one it is, I have no idea. You know, whether whether there's even a driver of the truck is uh is a whole different thing. And we're we're not even talking about the sustainability side of that.
SPEAKER_03Well, I mean, and you know, we are at ACT, which is advanced clean transportation. A lot of people summarize it as advanced clean trucking, but at the end of the day, we might not even do that. We might look at all this as a as a society, as a culture, as a country, and say, uh, you know what? We screwed up, we shouldn't have built this huge interstate system of ports, we should have gone all in on rail. Now is the time we're gonna do it. And suddenly we displace 75% of the trucks, which are gonna be all those jobs are theoretically getting displaced by AI anyway. We're gonna move them on rails. So now might be the time to do that. And even that has people who are pushing against it and people who are all for it, and like you just don't know, right?
SPEAKER_05Of course. And you know, when you look at rail, I've always asked the question how come Rails' performance performance like SLA is always so low, they're not stuck in traffic, they're not stuck in no, like it's a straight line, you know where you're going. It's not like you can say the driver got lost or whatever. So rail has its own set of challenges. Yes, it's definitely a greener approach, but if you don't know when your stuff's gonna arrive, like like as consumers, we got used to it, right? Like, oh, I log into I log into Amazon. I know I know the sneakers I ordered are six stops away, then they're five stops away. My 10-year-old loves to watch, like, hey, you know, this package is my my Lego game is coming. I'm like, all right, cool, this is awesome. But really, you don't have that visibility. Some of the train
Rail Tracking And Consumer Expectations
SPEAKER_05lines aren't willing to provide it. You know, there are actually services out there that have leased space in people's backyards because there's a train track nearby, and they they put a camera up to say, oh, hey, this train's on time, this train's not on time. That's crazy. That's wild.
SPEAKER_03Like it's but you know, you you and I are more or less the same age. We have about the same amount of gray hair, and talk about the 90s. Thanks for pointing that out. Yes. All right, all right. One of the things that I think blows my kids' mind is when I wanted to order something out of a comic book or a magazine, six to ten weeks with the UP. Yeah, yeah. You'd put the check in the mail, it'd be six to ten weeks for delivery. There was no tracking, that wasn't a thing that existed. And the only way you knew maybe you knew that this thing was actually on its way is at the end of the month, your parents would get a statement in the mail of your bank statement, and they would balance their checkbook and they would see oh, that check I wrote for you know $4.99 for the x-ray glasses got cashed. So theoretically, it's on its way. I love that you might be the x-ray guy because I still see the competence. Yes, exactly. That's a good one. You know, it's funny. Every once in a while I'll I'll run into some weird curio shop and I'll see these things, right? Yeah. And I I looked at him and I was like, oh, these are the rear view sunglasses. I don't know if you remember.
SPEAKER_05I do, the one to the mirror sunglasses.
SPEAKER_03And I was like, oh, these are sick. I had these when I was like 10, and I'm there with my 10-year-old, and I was like, You got to try these on. He's like, These are stupid. I like try it on. And he's like, I can see people behind me. Like, yes, yes, indeed. And as we're sitting here talking about logistics, right? How many hands has that little thing gone through? Right. Somebody's manufacturing those today in China, potentially like four different manufacturers, right?
SPEAKER_05Like you got one company doing the plastic parts for it, you got one company doing the mirrors, one company doing the UV glasses on it, and then somebody else is is is putting the the silk screen. To put a logo on it so that you can sell it as so you can give away a swag.
SPEAKER_03100%. Right now, there's a guy sitting in a boardroom going, like, man, they're just killing us up the street with their rear view glasses. We need to like tweak the design, make them look more like Oakley's.
SPEAKER_05And can we can we give them a camera so we get the medical approach? Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_03But this is this is the kind of thing where if you are just kind of interested in that human story of like, these are products we enjoy, these are experiences we have. Even you know, the most American thing in the world, Fourth of July, fireworks, right? Those are being shipped over from overseas. You're in that business of logistics, you're going over the factory, you're meeting with those people, you're talking about the different varieties that are there. There's nothing in our commercialized, western, materialistic world, however you may feel about it, right? Right. I mean, I love manicures and pedicures, I love my Casio G shocks and all that. Like, I'm I'm in no way complaining, right? This is gonna turn into one of those.
SPEAKER_05No, I get it.
SPEAKER_03But like, you know, I'm not a Zen Buddhist. I'm doing I love materialism, I'm into it. I have a 65-inch flat screen TV. When I was a kid, I had a 19-inch CRT that was garbage, not going back. But every part of this society that you touch was designed, moved, shipped, carried, moved overseas, global economy. And like that is what I love about your podcast, Hammer Down, is that you get into all of that. You know, you were telling us a great story about an early episode. If you're catching this on Electric, you've never heard of Hammer Down, go to those early episodes, find out how Cambridge Capital is solving the problem of shipping products into Ukraine during the war. Oh, yeah. It is such a cool concept to say we're doing this.
SPEAKER_05That was cool. I was lucky enough. So Ben Gordon, who founded Cambridge Capital and has invested in a ton of great companies, RXO being one of the biggest ones, looked around and realized that you know, when when the Ukraine was invaded, there's no easy way to get medicine to folks who need it. When a bomb goes off, the street is destroyed, you got people there that are looking around for first aid and they can't have it. Right. So Ben called together all the founders that he works with and said, we're gonna solve this. And it wasn't a question,
Logistics In Crisis The Ukraine Story
SPEAKER_05it was, I need your help. We're gonna do this. Yeah. And through the process, they they they they set up bike messengers with cell phones for track and trace so that the EMT on site knew that the first aid uh kit he was gonna need or she was gonna need to use would be available at a particular time, as well as you know, like, look, if somebody gets hurt, the building's gonna fall down. You need to move them. Well, how do you, if you're a bike messenger, how do you find that? So using track and trace through that and setting up like airdrops through, you know, air freight and all this stuff, even even shipping in at the time. I think Ben said they were they were importing uh Israeli first aid kids. So, how do you get first aid kids from from Israel to a place near the Ukraine where you can't actually fly into, get that truck into a place where people can grab a hold of it and then you have track and trace on it? It was such a cool story, and it was just just such a cool thing to be a part of.
SPEAKER_03We actually covered that on the flip side because we wrote about the e-bikes because they were electric vehicles, right? So we're talking about that. So it it that interconnection, that interconnectivity of the shipping freight, logistics world, you can't escape it. And uh, why would you want to?
SPEAKER_05Exactly. Now, we do we talked about, you know, you can you can do anything, you can do fine heads, you can do data, you can be a journalist.
SPEAKER_03So I've got yeah, we're here covering.
SPEAKER_05There we go. Yeah. What one of my favorite questions to ask journalists is like, how do you engage your audience? And and very specifically, I'm not not just what's your gut, but what statistics do you look at? Do you realize every time you write about the Tesla semi, you you see a spike? So that do you feel pressure to write about that a little more? Or how what what's how do you how do you keep a finger on the pulse?
SPEAKER_03That's such a great question. So I I have I am not a fan of Elon. And I think that that's a kind of a rare thing in this space. I think there's a lot of people who are looking at the Tesla semi and they're kind of, I don't want to say believing the promises or banking on the promises, but they're looking at the specs, they're looking at that spec sheet, and they're saying, man, this is gonna be really transformative. And maybe it will, you know, but I I've been covering this thing for the last nine years. I've heard a lot of promises, and I just I'll believe it when I see it, right? Like I'm not from Missouri, but I can I can do the thing, you know, a show-me state, right? So I do see things in statistics where you know the readership does go up, you get a different size of audience, a different kind of audience when you talk about certain things. But, you know, there is something to be said for having a different set of eyeballs, right? So, you know, one thing I'll often talk about is we'll do like these hand, what I call a hand raiser, which is where we'll send out a newsletter, and people participating in our newsletter can sort of say, Yes, I'm in this industry, I do this job, this and that, right? We had a hand raiser that went out, and we have many thousands of subscribers because we're very lucky. And when we got it back, we had something like 90 respondents say that they were other and that they were fleet managers. Got it. Now, a fleet manager who's buying trucks, who's buying that kind of thing, of those 90, about 40% of them said they had a hundred or more vehicle. Okay, right. If I am a OEM, if I am a logistics provider and I'm a 3PL, I'm someone who's selling managed charging software, I'm not looking for the website that gets 500,000, you know, YouTube commenters and college kids going to war in the comments over who said what about Elon and who believed what. If I've got a hundred guys that are engaged, that are buying trucks, that are buying vehicles, that are like effectively real customers, that I think to the sponsors, I think to the OEMs, I think to the guests of people, the kind of people that I have on the show, you know, we've had C-level guys from Rio Tinto, we've had guys from Fortescue, we've had guys from Libair, Volvo, they're engaging with us because the people that they know are reading what I'm putting out. They're right, they're listening to it. So I I'm not necessarily chasing numbers, right? Which I it Seth, you're my publisher. If you're listening to this, I'm totally chasing every time I see a little spike, I'm like, I'm gonna do that again. There we go. I I wanna keep those people engaged when I come to shows like this. And I, you know, yesterday met the CEO of Green Lane, who uh Patrick McDonald came, who's a very cool dude. And when he shook my hand and said, I listened to your show, that justified to me like I'm doing it right. Yes, because I didn't know his name, I had no idea who he was. Understand. And like he was there, and like, oh, I listened to your show, he made comments about it, and I was like, I'm doing the right thing. And you have such a celebrity moment with that, isn't it?
SPEAKER_05Like so rewarding. Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_03It's kind of cool when I think something is cool and the person doing that thinks what I'm doing is cool. It's it's really, really neat. You do want to be careful though, you don't want to fly too close to the sun. I get that, and you don't want to like really meet your heroes too much. That's that's fair. Yeah, it is a definitely uh a fun vibe.
SPEAKER_05I remember years years ago. So, my my first job out of college, I worked for a radio station, and that was at Clear Channel's biggest country station we see. That's and they had this small station up in Frederick, Maryland, so 90 minutes away, and they let me do a weekend shift because I was gonna be a DJ man, had the face for it, yeah, I was ready to go. Not that funny though, didn't work out. Um, but one day I was in Starbucks, and apparently all my sorry stories go back to Starbucks. But it's okay, I was in Starbucks, and uh this kid behind me. I hear him say he's on the radio, and I got recognized by the points. And this kid was like, Can I have an autograph? I mean, that was 25 years ago to this day. It's still close. Absolutely, I am. I I gave one kid an autograph 25 years ago, and I hope he's out there listening because he made my week.
SPEAKER_03That's cool. Maybe he's in logistics. We'll do that. I would love to think so. Well, I mean, that's all I got, man. I thought that'd be a good one.
SPEAKER_05Oh, I got it as well, man.
SPEAKER_03Appreciate it. Mike, again, if you're listening to this, check out Mike Bush. He's over at Hammer Down. And uh man, check out ACT Expo if you can. There's a ton of great stuff happening there. Mike, what do you think about this idea of doing more crossover episodes like this with Hammer Down? So, like our interview is gonna be on Hammer Down, edited a little different for their audience, and then obviously it's gonna be here with us with all of the uh all of the dick jokes left in.
SPEAKER_01I'm good. I'm good with whatever works. I mean, I think that there is a raw, natural state to the podcast that we promote in a and I mean that in a way of where it's just an honest, it's just an honest conversation between a couple people, and then we broke other people into it. And
What Makes A Podcast Work
SPEAKER_01if people like to listen to that, they like to listen to it. I mean, there people listen to this while they mow their grass. Like it's a very strange uh thing that we've fallen into.
SPEAKER_03I think you know, one of the things, and you know, obviously nobody likes to listen to a bunch of podcast guys pat themselves on the back about why their podcast is so great, but somebody described this to me once as these guys are idiots, but when you listen to what they're saying, they actually know what they're talking about, so you can't ignore them. And that's gotta suck for people who just have no fun and no joy in their souls, man. Because like I totally agree.
SPEAKER_01I mean, we when we talked about this podcast, and I think this is a good conversation about this, real quick, for people that that listen to this and record. When we talked about this podcast originally, we were at a restaurant and we were just having a goofy conversation about stuff in general in that moment that was somewhat current, and we went, This is a podcast, and this is a yeah, and I remember uh Tom was with us, and Tom goes, What was? And and you go, This, this right here, and it is exactly like Seinfeld because you're talking about all these things that are legit, they're just twisted in a weird ass way. We don't sugarcoat it, we don't overly script it, we have footnotes on what we want to say, and we do it, and we appreciate everybody that listens because yeah, we don't pat ourselves on the back, we're not on there, you know, rah-rah, rah. Look at listen to this podcast. But that's honest to God how it came about. And we it works.
SPEAKER_03It works. And uh, speaking of other things that works, the new Build America 250 Act has passed the House. Looks like it's in a uh subcommittee here in the Senate, and they are now pushing. This is Representative Dusty Johnson, which by the way, you don't ever want your Johnson to get dusty. That is uh that's what you need that John Deere soap for. He is looking to increase the maximum allowable truck weight from 80,000 pounds CGWR, and that's 82,000 pounds if you're electric, up to 91,000 pounds on a six-axle
Heavier Trucks Road Trains And Safety
SPEAKER_03configuration. And I don't know, man. I see a lot of trucks going down the road. I think that this is a step towards kind of like what they have in Australia, where they have multiple trailer trains, because there's a lot of freight that's being moved in this country that they're running out of space in these containers and they're not hitting the weight. And I'm talking about like food waste, flowers, pharma, stuff like that. I agree.
SPEAKER_01I think this is a smart move. Look at what is advanced on the road today. You your braking systems have advanced, your trucks have advanced with power. Naturally, you have more horsepower, and trucks naturally have more braking power, not through only the braking system, but the engine retardation system, the the trans. You dynamically brake the truck and trailers easier than you used to. Okay. This isn't the days of you know a high 300, 400 horsepower engine, but your braking system was was okay.
SPEAKER_03You know, we still had people on the anti-lock brakes, there was no, you know, brake vectoring, torque vectoring.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. There's so many advancements make the trucks better to drive, and not to mention the fact that they're less distracting going down the road. The sticks are all but gone. You have all these auto mirrors, all the safety equipment that's on there. You can virtually see around the entire vehicle now, most of the time on the freight trucks. Absolutely, we could put some more weight on them and make them run without permits. Everything is more capable. And I think that, yes, when you get into these situations where you got freight and logistics companies and they're running multiple cubic feet containers worth of stuff that doesn't weigh anything. We don't have enough drivers now. Well, I can't even tell you how many times we have said that on this podcast. And now is the time to try to come up with some creative ways to just move more freight. What's less efficient? Adding three trucks to carry three trailer fulls of air, basically, because they're Amazon packages or whatever they are, or having one truck pulling three trailers with the same stuff. Yeah, 100%. If there was anywhere outside of Australia that you could have a road train, it is out west. In the southwest United States, you could absolutely put three and four trailers together and run that thing out there in the desert, live out there with your dingo, and just go have fun. And I think it this leads into the conversation of why Kenworth, if you're listening to us and Peterbilt, who had the class act of all cab overs, should bring the cab over back to the United States so that we can pull three trailers at a crack and not be obscenely long.
SPEAKER_03I don't know. I I being obscenely long has never hurt me in any way.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's that's absolutely true. Except for you getting caught every now and then. Sorry.
SPEAKER_03Every now and then, yeah, it's the old they call that move the old Dusty Johnson. We'll we'll edit all that out. Yes, yes, absolutely all that is correct. We talked about the powertrain, we talked about the brakes getting better, but the roads themselves have gotten better. They drain better, they have more traction, all that stuff is engineered in there for all the talk that we have about potholes and you know urban infrastructure falling apart. The reality is the road technology, the tire technology, the brake materials, all of that, 91,000 pounds. I think is uh is is totally reasonable. And uh it's just gonna make it easier for you to load up someone else's equipment in the back of your trailer and drive it down to Mexico. Here, people are gonna shoot me for this. This is gonna cause an upheaval. All right, let's do the upheaval.
SPEAKER_01Allow guys to haul two and three trailers, okay? Put a max limit on it of you know 180 feet, whatever you want to do. And that's a lot of trailer, dude. Well, 353 footers plus a truck. I know it. Okay. So have more toll roads. More toll roads with audited funding, meaning the tolls come in, you have a budget, you allocate it to certain stretches of miles between the booths, put the easy pass fast lanes in, and the more people that pass between those fast lanes, the more money you're gonna make, therefore, the more traffic you have, therefore, the more maintenance you have, and run it and take some of that burden off of the fuel tax, yeah, for the people that are paying at the pump that fill up their car once a month, and there's a lot of those, and this is why
Road Use Taxes And Toll Ideas
SPEAKER_01this is goes back to the 3.324 trillion miles that you got people that are burning up the miles, therefore they're uh theoretically using gas, and then you have the people that don't. Well, you know what's even a better system? Tax the roads and let people use them and take the tax off the damn gas.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it simplifies the system and it also encourages electric vehicle owners, guys that are running on propane, dudes that are running off of you know old fry oil from the McDonald's. Everybody who is on the road pays their fair share. Exactly, exactly, because right now you've got a ton of people that are being subsidized by gas and diesel taxes.
SPEAKER_01We have technology today with GPS transponding to know when the guy pulls off the road, how long he's been off the road, was he on the shoulder, was he pulled halfway off the lane, unless you're in a bad cell phone area and then it thinks you're one state over and freaks out everything. But absolutely, we have the technology to be able to track all this. Let's pay the easy passes, let's just do it and knock the crap off the pump. Take it out of the state tax money that we get robbed with constantly, unless you're in one of those fortunate states where you don't pay it. Those are far enough. You that's my point. That's my point. Standardize what we do. Yeah, you use a road, pay for it. You stay off the road, you don't have to pay. Then leads me into the Unamog Baja 1000 truck. This will allow you to traverse the southwestern United States through the desert without using the road, hence paying no tax, and fueling yourself up with red-dye diesel because you haven't been on the road. That is how you move freight and hotshot freight efficiently.
SPEAKER_03You think that's what they were doing? You didn't see that coming. I did not see that coming. I think that's actually an even better segue into this El Paso uh Salinas bust here where they have three hundred
Heavy Equipment Theft To Mexico
SPEAKER_03counts, Michael, of stealing heavy equipment and dragging that down to Mexico to be resold or cut up for parts or scrap. How? I I don't even know how you steal one excavator. How do you steal 300?
SPEAKER_01Well, okay. I'm gonna tell you right now. Tell me right now, you get one under your belt, and then you're you're just crapping yourself, right? Because you're like, oh, I'm gonna get caught any day, and then it doesn't happen. Two, three, four later, you're like, they'll never catch us. 300 later, it's a giant bust, and you're going in for life. That's how that stuff progresses. If you watch or read any of that, that's exactly what happens. But 300 is a lot of stuff to cross the border.
SPEAKER_03That's a lot of skid steers, it's material handlers, it's telehandlers. Like, come on, dude. There's so many things.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. You got a buyer's order, you got a bill of sale. That was actually a big problem. I saw a couple of these go down in Florida when I was at the Mercedes deal, where somebody would come in and they would do all of their financing, all of their paperwork, and they would do, you know, whatever it was, 5% down, 10% down. And then they would roll, especially on a Saturday afternoon, and they would roll out in the new car. That car was on a container by midnight that night, and it was on its way to Lord knows where by the time Monday rolled around and the bank came back and said, Wait a minute, this guy's a ghost, or this guy isn't right, or that's not the right paperwork. This isn't on file. You need to get the car back. Well, that car's gone, that dude don't exist. And say bye-bye to your C65 AMG. Here's what I know.
SPEAKER_01I mean that stuff would never happen up north. And if you're trying to get over the ambassador bridge and you make it over there with a material handler, you're not happening. And those people barely let regular people through.
SPEAKER_03So that's interesting. So you think because you've got to have theft up there, right? So this is down in like Laredo and McCallan, Texas, and San Benito and way down there, right? Like we're talking like you know, where California is 200 miles north of you, down near Monterey. But yeah, you're thinking that if again, we're not trying to teach people how to do this, but if you're up in Ohio, you're in Indiana, you're in Michigan, you gotta have equipment theft.
SPEAKER_01Where does it go? Well, I think any equipment theft that I've ever heard of that was actual, like I'm talking like talk to the other company first person. Okay, that was still domestic. It got it was a landscaper that got a skid steer stolen, and it turns up four years later, and another guy's bankrupted business. The only times I've ever heard of that actually happening. Well, there was a skid steer, like I said, that the guy went bankrupt, and the skid steer ended up being stolen from another guy years earlier. There was a wheel loader that was stolen from a company, um, and it was just something, you know, it was theft, but they literally took it from one side of a shared material dock type thing and just kept it. And they found it years later and realized the serial number matched. And then you there was an excavator that was taken by an employed employee that bought it on behalf of the company and it never made it to the company. Oh, yeah. And my point is that trying to get that stuff into Canada, I don't know. If anybody's ever exported or imported equipment through the Canadian border, that is a well-oiled machine, and you are not gonna make it up there. Hey, listen, I mean, I I don't care how much maple syrup you give them, you're not getting it over there. Well, they don't need maple syrup, that's your first mistake. Oh, that's trying.
SPEAKER_03That's trying to they're trying to give it to you. They're trying to give it to you. They actually have a strategic maple syrup reserve, which uh we should do a Mrs. Butterworth commercial here. Oh, there we go.
SPEAKER_02Mrs. Butterworth? Yes. How can we taste so yummy?
SPEAKER_00Well, my syrup is very thick and rich. Thick and rich? Twice as thick as the leading syrup. See how the leading syrup runs over this stack? But Mrs. Butterworth takes her own sweet time. My syrup's got to be thick to pour this slowly. Why just one taste will tell you I'm thick and rich. Yummy. Oh,
Nostalgia Syrup And Final Thoughts
SPEAKER_00you say the sweetest thing.
SPEAKER_03And we're back. This is a surprisingly docile and sober episode. I think we're staying pretty well on track here. It had it didn't go off the rails until the OnlyFans thing, and we edited that out.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that was good. I got a couple other things. Back in the 80s, the Pellateer logging family up in the Northeast had special permission, and they used to haul three and four trailer loads of logs at the same time. Really? Yes, they absolutely did that. They had custom trailers made, they had special trucks built to pull them, and they used to run down the logging roads, but also the main roads with these road trains full of logs because of the commodity up there, they were allowed to do it with special permitting and special routes.
SPEAKER_03I was never doing that today.
SPEAKER_01No, and they had a bunch of Macs and uh some Western stars that were doing it, and in later years, the Western Star was their their truck of choice, honestly.
SPEAKER_03I could see that, but you have now an entire generation of guys like you and me that grew up after that final destination movie, and like there's just no way that anyone our age is gonna pass a law that says let's put three of those things on the road together.
SPEAKER_01Oh that's a good point.
SPEAKER_03It's just not gonna no matter how safe or reasonable the data is, we're just gonna hit that final destination roadblock mentally, and we're not gonna be able to move on.
SPEAKER_01I think too though, that if you're on a state state route and you got two lanes, right? One in each direction, sure, and you have to have designated rear trailers with some sort of a uh some sort of a bumper system on it because when you pass and the last one's wiggling back and forth a good couple of feet, you know they're gonna collide. And then if that if that happens, you might as well put some kind of uh like flint or something back there and just let the sparks fly. Give every give all the motors around you an absolute show when that happens and let them know what they're paying for with the easy pass.
SPEAKER_03I like that. Have you ever seen this? This is a tweet that came out a while ago. Is this dude on a bicycle and he's got a tank of propane strapped to the side of it? And he says uh something like, Whenever you think it's a car versus a cyclist, and you think that you're automatically gonna win, we can both lose.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, if it's not one of those uh ten thousand dollar bicycles, he's got like 200 bucks in that Huffy, and he's gonna take you out.
SPEAKER_03Next week, we will be talking about the new Lunar Rover because that thing is badass. That is badass. Be sure to like and subscribe so you can catch that one. That was good.
