Ryan Petersen: Relaunching Convoy; rebuilding Flexport

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Hey there, are you ready to truck it? Welcome to Monday, everybody. You doing okay? You have a good weekend? I went to, uh, Chattanooga out here in Chattanooga. It's like F3 but for nerds, comic books and stuff. Um, Bad start to the day. I have a chart before we get to Ryan Petersen that like maybe will spruce you up. It is Monday. Like I am kind of grasping at straws here. Spot rates are the lowest they've been in 3 years on truckload. But Zach Strickland did have this chart of the week. Inventory levels have been a big part of the conversation of trucking rates, the need for trucks and truckload demand. Well, Zach Strickland says inventories appear to have stabilized after years of volatility. Volatility. The Logistics Managers Index inventory levels component hovered in slight contraction territory last year with a sense Census Bureau's inventory to sales fell into a more stable pattern. What's that all mean? Well, domestic transportation capacity still remains abundant with, as I mentioned, prices falling to lowest they've been in 3 years. Truckload, van contract, and spot rates are also well below their 2022 peak values. But inventory levels, they fall too low, as we see here. You need more trucks, there's more demand. So a little something just to whet your whistle to start the day. Hey, on today's episode, by the way, we've got some awesome, awesome guests. It's, uh, episode 687. It's episode 6 here on What the Truck. I'm joined by Flexport founder and CEO Ryan Petersen. Flexport has made massive waves last year with the return of Petersen to his CEO seat and the acquisition of Convoy. And now they've relaunched Convoy. So we're gonna get the story behind that, how Convoy's gonna maybe rule the road for Flexport, and how the rebuild of Flexport's gone on too since he sat in that seat. A lot to get to with him. We got Digital Wildcatters' Colin McClelland. He's on a mission to be the premier news outlet in energy media. We'll find out how he built his company up Microphone on a table to raising $2.5 million from the great Chuck Yeats. And love him or hate him, more fleets getting dashcams. So we got Netradyne's Barrett Young here. He's gonna talk a little bit, a little bit about their fleet driver safety program. Gotta tip the band, then we'll get right on over to Ryan. I will take a second to put these guys on your radar, Dynamic Logistics, because I gotta say they're doing logistics the right way. Their TMS software is saving shippers a significant amount of time and money. Check them out at dynamiclogistics.com. That's logistics With X. But right now, it's my honor, Ryan Petersen, CEO and founder at Flexport. What's going on, Ryan?

What's up, man? Great to be here.

Hey, is that— wait, I was looking at the plane behind you, but it's not this Flexport jet, is it? Or is it?

It should be the same.

No, it is. Yeah, I'm sorry. I saw like the blue underneath, but yeah, that's just the underneath one.

Oh, I got this one as a gold one, but it didn't come out that good. It was just a sample. I was gonna send this to our sales team if they hit their numbers or whatever, but It didn't look that good. So it's just a sample.

Well, I like, I like that one right there. And this is a great one. Thank you. Thank you, Bill. And thank you yourself for saying this to me. Um, where are you coming in from today, by the way? You in San Francisco? You, are you in HQ?

Live in San Francisco.

Love it.

Love it. Love it. Hey, you know what? I was, I've been, I've researched a lot about you. I've read a lot of articles before this interview. Um, I cover a lot just being in freight, but one thing I couldn't really figure out about you is how you got into freight in the first place.

Oh, I came at it from the shipper side. So I used to be an importer of motorcycles, off-road vehicles, dirt bikes, ATVs. We were at, we were at a software company. We were building e-commerce websites, selling them online. It was like pre-Shopify. It was over 20 years ago.

Oh, we lost his signal. We should bring— can you guys reconnect with him? And tech, tech is, tech is the, the greatest and the worst thing about society right now.

It's, uh, whenever something works like magic and then it stops working, you're kind of screwed up.

Well, hey, you know what, man? The, the, the big news came out.

You tweeted this.

You had this really sort of funny meme with The Simpsons one too. So many industry experts had been dancing, tap dancing on this company's graveyard, right on their gravestone. And there were so many haters out there and you guys swooped in. You're like, you know what? We're picking Convoy up. We like the tech and we're gonna relaunch it. And that day was what, last Thursday? Tell us what happened here.

Well, we made the acquisition of the tech and the IP, I want to say November. So it's been 3 or 4 months of really hard work. We relaunched last Wednesday. We've done— we're on pace to do 1,000 loads in our first week. So yeah, pretty incredible to get the thing back going. Customers love it. We got some of the biggest customers to come back. We're bringing some of Flexport's customers. Flexport has a small FTL business. So we've brought that on board, saving us money and getting better service. So it's pretty great. Yeah, we're really stoked.

Well, so like, what is Convoy now? How does it work? I go on Flexport, I'm like, yep, get some Convoy, book some truckload freight. Is that how we're seeing it here?

Yeah, I mean, kind of. Convoy has really become the supply side. We've made it into a neutral supply side only, meaning carrier-facing, built up this incredible base of long-tail owner-operators. Something like 400,000 drivers have the mobile app. And they're coming back in droves, like, as we send them loads. Everyone knows in this environment people are eager for freight. Um, and so that— we're, we're making— we say neutral in the sense that, yes, Flexport will sell FTL, but Convoy will not. And, uh, so if you want to book FTL through us, you kind of come through flexport.com. But Convoy will— is going to relaunch shortly our Convoy for Brokers product, which allows other brokers to tap into this huge long tail of owner-operators, which has been, you know, it's incredibly successful. It's, it was a new product for them last year, but it was really fast growing, great product. People are really happy with it. And so we've gotten good reception. In fact, people like the fact that we're sort of like, look, Convoy's no longer selling freight. So it's, it's taken away some of that channel conflict that people felt.

Interesting. You know, so you said in your LinkedIn post that it also did 200 of these loads or, or all these loads so far without human intervention. Is this like completely automated system now?

Yeah, yeah. And it was— for Convoy on the supply side, it was 98, 99% automated. We're at 100% automation. I assume there'll be cases where we have to intervene and take some action, but right now it's close to 100%, or it is 100%, but it's only been a few days. Um, so call it 98% is where they were at before. Um, because the drivers have to use the mobile app, um, they have to come on board and comply and go through all the processes there for background checks, um, and, and everything else— booking load, um, Proof of delivery, everything else that goes through the app. Uh, yeah, so it's fully automated.

Interesting. You know, you Flex— both Flexport, both Convoy, 2 of the top stories, especially in freight tech last year that we had on freightwaves.com. The story, the news behind you 2. Now, now they're combined. How— why did you pick up Convoy? Why did you think this was a good pickup? And how do you do what they weren't able to do on their own? How do you bring them to prof— or, or help make you guys profitable?

Yeah, well, for me, it's a no-brainer acquisition when we saw the amount of technology that they built, the quality of the tech, and like we've known it for many years, but I hadn't really spent that much time. Flexport's not a big player in truckload. It's not been focused. We're an international freight company until recently. And once I got a chance to look under the hood and see all of the various product and technology features that they built, I realized this was like a decade. I mean, it really was literally almost a decade of work on their side, the billion dollars of funding to build all this technology, and we were able to pick it up at a really good price. And so then, yeah, how do you get profitable? Well, honestly, they were pretty close. They were running really good unit economics. They needed to be a little bit bigger or leaner on the team side. We've taken it leaner. We've only brought over the core kind of technology team. and some of the best account management and salespeople they had. So we brought a leaner team, uh, and then yeah, gotta go sell. And Flexport's pretty good at that. We've built one of the biggest freight forwarders in the world, um, by being aggressive and going out there and putting— getting demos from customers, showing them what our tech can do, uh, talking to all the customers out there in the world, doing good marketing, doing good sales. So pretty confident we'll get there, if not this year, then next. And, uh, and that's for Convoy. Flexport's gonna be profitable, uh, towards the end of this year, but that Convoy piece will be profitable by next year, and we think it can be a massive business. I mean, truckload is just such a huge industry.

Yeah, well, before we even talk about the Flexport side, one last question on truckload because we've covered it so much recently is freight fraud in truckload. How do you make sure that Convoy platform is secure and you build that trust?

I think, I mean, honestly, this is what I, as a little bit of an outsider to the truckload business coming in and looking at their tech, It, it— my first reaction was like surprised that they had spent so much energy building tech on freight fraud until I started to study the industry a little bit more and go, oh, actually this is like a core value proposition. So they have, I want to say, 6 different data sources that get run each, each and every time a driver takes a load for doing background checks and, uh, checking licenses and things like this. Um, so that's on the compliance side of just like ensuring this person is who they say they are and they don't have a background of fraud. Um, second is that because the driver has to use the mobile app and keep it on throughout the journey, if the truck deviates from the route that they're supposed to go on, it'll instantly send a message to our security team and notify folks in the chain. So there's— and there's a number of other things too that are in there. But I, I was, like I said, I'm surprised of just like what percentage of the engineering effort had gone into fraud detection and fighting fraud. I think it's one of the key Advantages of the platform versus some of these load boards out there where it's much more of a free-for-all.

How was your 2023? It was a wild year. I remember you had just announced, you were like, I'm going on to Founders Fund. You know, you had the co-CEO thing. It almost seemed like you were stepping out of Flexport. It almost seemed like you were almost out the door. You'd almost freed yourself. And then kind of outta nowhere, you jump back in and you're wartime CEO, as Craig Fuller called you, and you're taking back the reins. How has that year treated you and how is it going now that you are back in that seat?

It was awesome. I mean, look, ups and downs of course, but net-net, like, pretty great. I love being at Flexport. I love getting in here and getting the energy going into the company, into the culture of the company again, and driving profitability improvements, customer quality improvements, etc. So, uh, yeah, I mean, you don't get to write your story. There's never like a straight upline, a line up into the right. There's always kind of like a little bit of downward motion and then back up What, you know, Cinderella is not the same if she doesn't get picked on by her stepsisters and left to— left not invited to the ball, etc. So it's more fun when there's some hardship along the way.

So you've made it clear before in other interviews that like this decision wasn't solely you, it was the board who decided to bring you back in. You were part of it and now you're moving forward and agree with it. What was the— like what happened when you first jumped back in and see what did you have to repair? Because we know there's been some staff cuts, there's been some cost cutting, there's been some changes around Flexport. How did you get started on, on this sort of like restructuring and rebuilding of Flexport into being that profitable power you say it can be at the end of the year?

Yeah, uh, it's really kind of 3 big things. One, one was on— actually, the most important thing was on culture. Like, we had lost a bit of our startup edge, a bit of our, we're gonna be obsessed with customers, we're gonna talk to customers every single day and solve problems for them. And that starts all the way at the CEO seat down to the front lines. Um, we had organized ourselves too much around efficiency and not enough for customer quality and relationship. Um, so culture was the first thing. Second was that org structure and focus on quality. Um, and very specifically what we had done recently in over, you know, in the last year in pursuit of efficiency, we made it so that each operator in our company, each employee who was moving and coordinating freight shipments, they would do the same task over and over again across all of our customer shipments. And we reorged it to go back to our roots. The way that we started Flexport and grew it to be the fastest growing company in the world and one of the biggest freight forwarders in the world was we had organized our ops teams to be dedicated to a customer so that the customer would always work with the same group of people and they would be coordinating their shipments for them and they'd get to know that customer, get to know their SOP. And we've actually taken it a step further where each operator on a shipment, there's only 2 operators, one at the origin country and one at the destination country, and they do all the tasks on that shipment. It's a subtle difference, but instead of doing one person doing the same task over and over again like some kind of automaton robot across everybody's shipments without any kind of specific context, now they do all the tasks on one shipment and just make sure it goes well. And so that's a big shift in our kind of operating mindset. We got really good quality KPIs in place for those people. So they can own the quality KPIs on a shipment. That's on-time performance, invoice accuracy, the accuracy of milestone data, predictive ETAs. Software does a lot of this stuff, but humans are there when the software, you know, I mean, you're relying on garbage in, garbage out sometimes. So you need humans to make sure that people can trust the data. So we got, we reorged the company that way. And then the third piece, you know, it's culture, quality, and then costs. Cut costs like crazy. And that's, What some of it is headcount costs. We did reduce the size of the team, but we went hardcore after we cut our server bills in half through better engineering discipline. We reduced our software spend. We've had excess office space. We've been subleasing that software spend, like get rid of SaaS tools that we're not using. So the net-net is that we improved the profitability of the customer of the company by more than $600 million in the last five months. Um, got the— while growing market share, improving customer satisfaction as evidenced by market share, but also in a lot of these quality KPIs. Um, and, and yeah, and I think the culture is more energized, although it's always difficult when you cut, uh, when you do a layoff and you cut people. That's going to erode trust and make, you know, create some challenges in your culture. But I think that's to be expected, and overall the energy levels are really high at Flexport right now.

You know, if you look at sort of a freight market chart and like the rates and that sort of big bubble, I was reading an interview with you from a couple of years ago and it was during that crisis and you guys were hiring a lot of people and you're like, one of the hardest things to do is to maintain culture while you're building because suddenly you have a ton of new people in the house. But also it's got to be tough to maintain it when you're sort of contracting as well, when you're cutting headcount. So is Flexport the size it needs to be now? Have you done that proper reduction and how do you make sure it's the company you want it to be now after having grown, cut down, and with the team you have now?

Yeah, yeah. You know, um, growing, contracting, and culture is hard. It's the hardest thing in business, and, and it is the most important thing. It's like, if you have a great culture, uh, your team will be energized, focused, full of purpose, uh, and you won't have to oversee what everyone's doing. People just know what to do and do the right thing on behalf of the customer all the time. So, um, yeah, we do have the right size team.

We—

it Went through some pain to get here, but we now feel like we've got the right size from both a P&L perspective, the right number of people to serve the customers based on all the ratios that you want to have in place. And in fact, we're going to be in a position to grow the business, including growing headcount going forward, especially around global expansion. We ship freight to and from 112 countries, but we've only got people on the ground in about 15 of them. So we'd like to see ourselves, you know, you'll see us keep expanding, kind of spreading our octopus tentacles all over the world. We want to be in every, every major market and kind of follow the global pie chart of GDP that way. And then, and then continue to invest in technology, but, but in a much more disciplined fashion. We never want to get caught over our skis again where we overhire like we did in 2023.

You know, you've done a great job of making a name for yourself. People know who Ryan Petersen is. You've had some great interviews and articles, but with that, it attracts a lot of haters and a lot of naysayers. Some of them tag me all the time on LinkedIn. It's really annoying. How do you deal with your haters and naysayers?

Oh, you know, try to brotherly love for all of my— love thine enemy, right? Isn't that what you're supposed to do? I don't really care about these people. They're a lot— you know, what I've heard privately is most of them have alcohol and pill problems, so I feel bad for them.

Oh, okay. Yeah, maybe they can, maybe they can get some Jesus and get some help with that. One thing you also said, and there was this, there was this great TechCrunch, and it got me so curious, this TechCrunch interview. And, um, you also have a, you also have a brother, types faster, if you people are at X. But you said all of our childhood conversations were around using software to make government regulations more accessible. Was your house like, was your, were your parents really that serious? Like this was like your constant conversation around the house was government regulations?

Um, well, my mom is like the world's leading, uh, food safety expert on government regulations.

Yeah.

So like when that, you know, the baby food thing happened a couple years ago, she's like the wolfman they call in if figure out what happened. Like, where did this contamination come from? Trace it down in the supply chain. And so both food safety and regulations are kind of where those intersect. She got a number of things she did. Like, she got stevia legalized. You know, the sweetener that's in, I think it's in Coke Zero or it's in, forget if it's in Coke Zero, it's definitely in some of these sweeteners. She got it legalized in this country. She did McDonald's menu. You know, you gotta count how many calories are in there and all the nutrient facts. She helped them Figure that out. It's a hard problem. Um, so yeah, we grew up as, uh, my mom's an entrepreneur, but, but also a scientist. So we grew up at the kitchen table listening to some super boring conversation about that and trying to get outta there as fast as we can so we could play video games.

Love to hear it. Well, let's talk about now. So Flexport, you mentioned something really interesting at the start of this. You said, hey, we are, we think we'll be profitable at the end of the year. Do you think it's the freight market that will get you there? Like, how do you see the freight market going? And, uh, if not the freight market, what is it about Flexport that's gonna get you there?

No, I, I have no predictions about the freight market. I've learned my lesson on that. Uh, you just never know where it's going to go, up or down. Um, we— no, we run a good business, man. And like, freight forwarding is a very profitable industry, and it's going to be that way when we're done. Uh, it's a— um, we have good— we've really turned around our unit economics over the last 5, 6 months, uh, so that we're, we're making good money on all the transactions that we do without raising prices, by the way. What we really did was go run tighter accounting processes, make sure that we're not overpaying and not undercharging our customers, that we're charging what they agreed to and only paying what we agreed to. So a lot of work done to tighten down the hatches, make sure that we're running a tight ship from a unit economic standpoint. And now it's just about some moderate growth, nothing crazy. We've really reduced our costs. Actually, a big area of growth for us that we do need to grow put up some impressive, some important numbers. I don't know if it's impressive, but run a good ship is on our omnichannel business. That's the Shopify Logistics business that we also acquired last year. We did 2 big acquisitions last year, Shopify Logistics and Convoy's assets. The Shop Logistics is a fulfillment business. So we need to sign up, I don't know, a handful of customers. It's not that crazy, the number of large customers that we need to sign up to hit our numbers. We've moved that business. When we acquired it, it was all third-party, meaning it was like 40, something like 35, 40 fulfillment centers, but we didn't own or operate any of them. They weren't our lease, weren't our people. It was third-party fulfillment centers that would kind of carve out a corner of the business to serve our customers. And we've now launched 4 first-party sites and a 5th one coming online very soon. These are million-square-foot facilities, much tighter operational quality, higher CapEx, just a higher level of performance out of these sites, but the buildings aren't full yet. So we've got to go close some customers and make sure we fill up the real estate on those things.

Wow.

So you have a lot planned, you have a lot to get to. What are you most excited about this year? Is it Convoy? Is it the Shopify Logistics? Is it the main core Business?

Yeah, I mean, all these things are pretty exciting. I think for me, it's like we got through the really hard part. The last 5 months was pretty tough, as you alluded to earlier, kind of wartime, letting go of people, had to cut even some close friends of mine that we had to let go just where didn't make sense anymore from a financial standpoint and what people were working on and just hone in the company to tighten things down. It was a pretty tough year for us at Flexport. We've gotten through that hard part. Now it's just about like delivering quality for our customers and going out and selling it. And these are things that we know how to do and we love doing. So that, to be honest, like just settling into that rhythm, living on a plateau and not, not a plateau of growth, we're gonna get growth, but like, hey, just do the same thing over and over again and enjoy it and enjoy the process. And it's not meant to be that life is just like endless climaxes and you're always hitting the next biggest mark. It's like Do things for the benefit of doing them in themselves. The intrinsic value of just running a good tight process, delivering things on time in full, running really good quality routines where you figure out, okay, we missed our SLA on this. Why? Let's go study all the reasons why, reason code everything. When we, and then study all the data about what's causing us to miss our on-time performance, go fix those problems. And it, to be honest, it's just like fun, non-dramatic, run a good business, run a tight ship. And I'm very excited to get back to that. The last, Last 5 or 6 months was not, not that fun, even though it was like valuable and important work and really hard. But it— can't call it fun per se.

Can't call it fun.

Well, you have, you have a lot of work to get to.

I will let you get to that. Everyone check out Flexport. Everyone check out Ryan Petersen. If you want a good children's book too, look at that book over his shoulder. It's The Little Digger from the Suez Canal right over there. He's got a— he's an author. Well, published author, children's author.

It is easy to write a children's book. It's hard to illustrate one. And I didn't do that. I just wrote it.

So Well, you did great work. Hey, take it easy. A little cowbell for you. Thank you so much. Don't be a stranger. We'll have to have you back on soon, Ryan. And good luck. Good luck with Convoy. Good luck with Shopify Logistics. Good luck with Flexport.

All right, my pleasure. Thanks. Have a great day.

Take care. All right, everybody.

Meanwhile, I'm not missing that dedication in Jerusalem without the airplane that we have that I bought from Tyler Perry, and I didn't pay anywhere near Tyler's one of the greatest guys. He made it— he made that airplane so cheap for me, I couldn't help but buy it.

Well, my question then— Hey, you know who's got a little bit of money right now? A little scratch in his pocket? My buddy now, Colin McClelland, CEO and co-founder at Digital Wildcatters. Buddy, gotta give you a little cowbell. You had a nice little raise you guys did recently.

Yeah, man. Yeah, we closed a $2.5 million raise a couple of months ago. And, you know, I love that clip of that pastor. That's gonna get me in so much trouble with my wife from now on. That's how I'm going to justify buying things is it was just so cheap I couldn't pass up on it. So I'm going to make that comment next time I buy a plane sometime.

Well, that's what Ryan, Ryan Petersen, who was just on, he tweeted that, that video the other day with his caption was, that's how Flexport ended up with 3 Boeings for airplanes. These 3 ones. So cheap, man.

Yeah.

That comment's going to get a lot of us in trouble, I bet.

You know, I asked him, so he, he gets a lot of, you've always sort of like embraced the haters, turned them into content. Done everything. He gets a lot because his company's, you know, well known. There's been some controversy with layoffs. He gets attacked all the time. Newer, older entrants in the market didn't like him. So there's a little kinship here with Digital Wildcatters. But you, to your haters, you made them delicious. You turned your haters into a cake. Tell me about this.

Yeah, so this is a funny story. So that guy on the cake, his name's Alberta Garbage, and he is in the oil and gas industry up in Alberta, obviously. And, you know, he made a tweet a couple of years ago that said, how many years until Digital Wildcatters goes bankrupt? You know, it was a poll. First answer was like less than a year to 3 years. And anyways, I printed this tweet out and I hung it up in our office. It sits right above my desk. I look at it every single day. And when we closed this last round, I had it screen printed on a cake so that our entire team could have some pretty sweet cake to eat and be proud of themselves. And it's funny, Alberta Garbage was actually down here in Houston last month. Him and I hugged it out. He reached out, very kind of him. And so turning the haters into lovers, man, that's what it's about.

You know, I've always found Digital Wildcatters really interesting and we've been following you guys for a while. You've been following us. We even did a virtual event with you many years ago. And you know what's really, when I think about it now, because that was like, geez, that was like 4 years ago now. It was like during the pandemic, wasn't it? That we did that one. And you had like a year before that or even 6 months, It was just you and a couple guys with microphones in a warehouse and maybe an MMA cage, wasn't it?

That's a really good description. Yeah, it was. So it was just a couple of us. I think we had 2 people at that time, 3 people, sorry. And yeah, when we did that event, I mean, the reason for doing the digital event is because it was during COVID so we couldn't do a live event. And I'd been following you and Craig and FreightWaves, and FreightWaves has always Couple of years ahead of us on the event side and the media side, and yeah, so reached out to Craig. I was like, "Hey, it'd be awesome to partner up on something." And so yeah, we came up there to Chattanooga and did the event from the studio. But yeah, things are really taking off for us since then. You know, things move up, move fast in startup land, and so we've really transformed the company to where we built this professional network for the energy industry, and we have a pretty cool AI search engine on the back of that that we're selling to energy companies. And so went from a 2 to 3 person podcast operation to building one of the leading AI applications in the energy industry.

Oh, wow. So what does the AI application do?

Yeah, so what we started off with was this content library. So we have thousands of videos in there. It can be Digital Wildcatters content from our podcast, from our webinars, from our events, and then bringing in third-party content from the public domain and our partnerships. And we've made it to where artificial intelligence watches that content and then indexes the information. So if you're So if you're an energy professional, say that you're a petroleum engineer at Exxon and you want to learn about the latest and greatest in methane mitigation, you don't have 6 hours to go listen to 6 podcasts to find the information that you need. So you can come into our platform, you can type in methane mitigation, and boom, it'll pull up every single video that we have. You can run through the transcripts really quickly. And so ultimately what we're doing is we're allowing energy professionals to take a large dataset and a large library of content.

Yeah.

and streamline really quickly to be able to find the information that they need that's relevant to 'em.

Very neat. So oil and gas, was that, I have to imagine that the media world surrounding it is probably a lot like what freight was, where it was a lot of just press releases, pay-to-play, not really real opinions that you actually would hear from, well, you guys, maybe a roughneck for us, maybe a trucker or a broker or something like that. It just seemed like this very sort of fake world. that was being presented to everybody. Was that what you guys initially came out to sort of attack and be like, hey, this is what oil and gas is really about, and there's a lot of younger people coming in here and we understand how to get to them?

Man, you hit the nail on the head. That's what I've always loved about oil and gas and freight and supply chain is that there's so many parallels and it's really analogous. And yeah, that's 100% what it was. Oil and gas was a bunch of press releases and interviews on CNBC and Bloomberg, things of this nature, but there was no real community and there were no real voices. So when we first started our podcast back in 2018, the Oil and Gas Startups Podcast, the thesis was, hey, let's get these cool new oil and gas tech founders on the show. Let's make it Joe Roganesque. We're over there, we're dropping F-bombs and just being really genuine and authentic. And that's what ultimately allowed us to build a community was that we were an actual voice for the industry and we came from the industry and gave people valuable information in an entertaining format.

You also, like, we're talking about parallels between freight and energy. Our worlds kind of are converging, at least in Southern California right now, but there's a lot of regulations coming through with zero-emissions vehicles, and it's a big challenge in our space. We're talking about heavy-duty vehicles like trucks, especially over-the-road ones that have to go very long distances. But you're right on like ground zero of probably having to deal with these types of regulations. Do they seem as unrealistic on your space as sometimes they do on what they're putting on us?

No, 100%. I mean, look, I'm pro-energy. And so that means oil and gas, it means renewables, it means all energy, right? And over the last few years, I think that we had peak ESG and peak virtue signaling. And it's funny, I don't know if you saw this, Dooner, but last week Mercedes came out and said that their EV targets are being readjusted. And so in 2021, They said, hey, 50% of our electric vehicles, or 50% of our vehicles sold will be electric vehicles by the year 2025. That hasn't happened. So now they're readjusting that goal for 2030. So saying that 50% of their new vehicle sales will be EVs by 2030. And you saw it really in 2020, 2021, and parts of 2022. This was a result of zero interest rate phenomenon. A lot of offshore wind projects right now are just absolutely getting destroyed by high interest rates. So some of your big offshore wind operators like Ørsted are having to cut projects. You're just seeing the world is really coming to terms with reality. I think I was on y'all's podcast a couple years ago, or maybe it was with Craig, I can't remember, but I was talking about electrification of trucks. And when you look at short-hauling trucks, Amazon had a really good program where some of their shorter routes were electric vehicles and CNG. I mean, the idea that you're gonna have electric trucks over long-haul trucking is just, it's absurd. This is a game of physics and the physics aren't working out with that. Now, when you look at compressed natural gas, things like that are interesting, but when you look at people like us in industries that we operate in, I mean, it's just completely unrealistic and idealistic of what some of the outside world wants. And the way that the outside world is driven is kind of by financial markets. Financial markets don't always have the best understanding of how things actually happen out in the field or out on the road.

Are you long on— do you like hydrogen at all? A lot of people are starting to pivot or put the conversation towards hydrogen. But when I look at some of the costs, they're just astronomical right now too. That's not really a solution at $16 a kilogram.

Yeah, hydrogen is interesting because there's a lot of interesting things happening there. So I don't think that it's a very binary decision for me to say if I'm bullish or bearish, there are a lot of interesting things there. I think that it has to be heavily subsidized. I have some friends, shout out to my friend Moji, he's the CEO of Senvita Factory. They're using biology to turn old natural gas reservoirs into hydrogen. They call it gold hydrogen. And so, there's some really cool things happening over there. But, from a transportation perspective, I'm not that hype on it. One, just from an infrastructure perspective, it would take a lot. You're seeing companies like Plug Power. Plug Power is not doing well, just had mass layoffs last week. Their stock's down, I think, 76% over the year. They put out a notice in November that they're running outta cash. And so the hydrogen space is a really tough space. And I think that people really don't appreciate the logistics and the energy density that things like commercial freight and mining require. And so I think people are just kind of getting a dose of reality with that.

Not a lot of people think about this, but you sure do, is the relationship between energy and Bitcoin. You've thrown a lot of events. And one thing I was really curious about is talk about that Bitcoin energy relations side, because people who don't trade Bitcoin, they might not be aware of that.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I started getting interested in Bitcoin mining back in 2017 because I started realizing that Bitcoin mining needed cheap and reliable energy and started realizing that Bitcoin mining and high-performance computing, all together is actually energy infrastructure. And so, the Bitcoin network is a massive decentralized network all around the world. And what's unique about the United States is that we have a bunch of independent natural gas producers that have flared gas. And so, you can take that flared gas, run it through a generating— a genset, and generate electricity and mine Bitcoin. So, it gives these oil and gas companies a different revenue stream. to monetize their asset. It's allowing Texas— Bitcoin miners are part of the ancillary program, so it allows Texas to have better flexibility while managing the grid. These large Bitcoin miners, if they're connected to the grid, can turn off instantly, and that helps ERCOT balance the grid during peak demand times. And what you're seeing with the rise of artificial intelligence, this compute, that's needed for AI is just crazy in terms of energy demand. And so, we're going to need a lot of energy, man. We're going to need a lot of energy. And, this is a good thing also. I mean, direct correlation between society progressing and our energy usage. And so, we're going to need a ton of energy for high-performance computing whether it's artificial intelligence, if it's decentralized networks like Bitcoin, we're going to need a lot of energy for space colonization and manufacturing. And then we're just going to need a lot of energy as different third world countries come online and continue to increase their GDP. There's going to be a lot of shipping and supply chain logistics associated with that. So I'm an energy maximalist and I think that we need more energy.

You're also a bit of a kung fu or MMA master. My boys are 7 and 9. They just started karate last week, Colin. What advice do you have for them and for me to make sure that they're deadly assassins in the future?

You know what's funny? I started my mixed martial arts journey with karate when I was a kid as well. And so, big fan of getting the kids in mixed martial arts. It's great for discipline, exercise. It's just stick with it over long periods of time and be curious as well. You know, I think the best martial arts in the world are Brazilian jiu-jitsu, wrestling and Muay Thai and judo. And so just being curious and always working hard and having the discipline to stay with something over a long period of time is what it takes to get good at anything. So that'd be my advice.

Just stick with it. Stick with it.

Just stick with it.

Listen to your sensei.

It's very boring, but that's what it takes.

That's what it's— I mean, the answer to everything is boring. There's so many coaches out there and all their coaching is just like these It's like, this is a repeat of the basic fundamentals. It's like, yeah, because now it's up to you to do them. I mean, really, honestly, it's not that hard. What about before I let you go, is the future of drugs in space?

Yeah, it's funny. I make one tweet about manufacturing pharmaceuticals in space, and here we are on a podcast talking about making drugs in space. And yeah, there's a couple of startups that are working on this, one of them down here in Houston, which is my friend, and I'm not going to say the name of the company yet because he's not ready to come out and say it yet. But, really interesting things happening. What's interesting about manufacturing pharmaceuticals in space is that space has a better environment to make certain drugs. And, this has to do with protein stability and being able to manufacture with better elements in space, whether it's zero gravity or vacuum. And so, what's interesting about Houston is that Houston Houston has so many nicknames. You know, we have Space City, Clutch City, H-Town. But what's really interesting about Houston is the talent density that we have here. You know, it's the energy capital of the world, so we have a ton of oil and gas professionals, but then we have a huge aerospace industry as well. So you have guys like this that are aerospace engineers and partnering up with, you know, chemical engineers from oil and gas to solve the problem of manufacturing drugs in space. And the reason that this is important, especially for, you know, the, the This show is that this technology is gonna be able to be extrapolated and expanded upon so that we can manufacture other things in space as well. So if we're ever gonna colonize space, we need to be able to manufacture in space. We need to be able to mine in space and harness energy from our solar system and the broader universe. And so it's just a really cool time, what's happening in the space industry with SpaceX and other private companies leading the charge. It's becoming economic to get loads up to space. And so now we can start working on the foundation of manufacturing and supply chains in space.

Deep space logistics. Love to hear it. Well, hey, Collin, very cool. People who want to, if they're in the oil and gas side, they want to get their message out there and they want to get out in a cool way, or if they just work on the side, they want to understand stuff in a cool way and not just read a bunch of press releases, where do I send them to?

Yeah, absolutely. So you can find me anywhere on the internet. My handle is @frackslap. So I'm on Twitter. TikTok, and then you can find Digital Wildcatters at digitalwildcatters.com, and you can find our podcast on any podcast platform, Spotify or Apple.

Hey, congratulations on the raise. Congratulations to an awesome 2024. Thanks for stopping by.

Thank you, Dinner.

See you soon.

Take care.

All right, gotta tip the band again. Dynamic Logistics gives you total control of your entire shipping operations, live location and status updates every 15 minutes, and the ability to combine multiple orders into a single load Leading to significant savings. Check them out at dynamiclogistics.com. That's logistics with an X. Elsewhere. Hey, wait!

Oh no!

I didn't know you were gonna fly home!

Oh!

Oh!

Hold it together! Hold it together! You got this! You got this! Hold it together, please! Hold it together! Oh, mama!

Mama! Oh!

Oh! I knew you had it in you. I didn't, I didn't doubt you for one second, man.

I knew you had it in you, man.

I'm proud of you. Are you all right? You all right back there?

Okay.

Oh my— hey, pull this over. Pull it over. Dirt Road Trucking says, bro, I would be yelling, bring me my brown pants. Rick Perico says, steer in the direction you want to go. Don't overcorrect. Don't lock up the brakes. Well done, driver. Copilot But it's funny as hell. If you look a little closer, that, that guy wasn't really in the truck. He was just, uh, his little green screen on there. But right now we got Barrett Young, CMO over at Netrend. Barrett, what's up, man?

Doing well. How are you doing?

You ever, you ever, uh, you ever been in a hairy situation like that? You hit some black ice before?

I grew up in Indiana. We, we learned how to drive on black ice when we were 9 years old.

Okay. Well, I look, one good thing, people can say what they want about inward-facing cameras, but one good thing is they help, uh, me create content when they present funny situations Like the one we just saw. What's up with you? What's good at Netradyne right now? I think we're gonna talk about your safe driver apprenticeship program. What's cool with that?

Yeah, things are going great. You know, the technologies continue to advance. We're seeing the statistics and safety continue to get better and better, really making a material impact on the safety of our roads. You know, some of our customers are seeing incredible improvements in accident reduction.

How are you doing that? How are you seeing reductions? Because like we just covered insurance going up recently. Everyone wants to keep everyone safe, want to keep that insurance down. No nuclear verdicts. What are you guys doing to help with that?

Yeah, so as most people know, Netshine's an AI company at our core, and we have developed some of the most advanced artificial intelligence and are applying it to the commercial vehicle industry through the use of advanced softwares and hardware, the hardware being, you know, a dashcam in its simplest form. Right. And so what that does is allow us to monitor the road, monitor the driver behavior, and be able to assess a risk profile in real time. And in that real time, be able to deliver the best driver coaching experience that will immediately and continuously improve safety. So drivers can avoid or reduce accidents long before they ever actually happen.

What do you guys have to say to drivers or fleets that hate the inward-facing cameras?

Yeah. I mean, initially, I don't blame them. I mean, of course, no one wants a camera staring in their face. That's understandable. We're all human. However, given certain scenarios, it makes sense over time to be able to correct your behaviors you don't realize are bad. Example, I have a new car and that new car has an ADAS system. And, if I'm following too close or approaching a vehicle too close or whatever it may be, it beeps at me. And oftentimes, I'm happy that it does because Because had I not looked up quicker or paid attention quicker, I may have rear-ended someone. The dash cameras do the exact same thing, right? And if I'm a young driver staring at my phone, checking X or Twitter, whatever it's now called these days, then I can't— I'm not looking at the road in front of you. And so this camera system will be able to alert the driver of that risky profile and be able to make sure they're paying attention to the road. And we've got tons of quotes from drivers going, man, I didn't really like this at first. But the moment that alerted me to a situation where I could have been in an accident and I was able to avoid it, I won't drive without it now.

You know, Barrett, what some people say to me is they're like, you know, it's okay during operation, but what I'm really concerned about, especially if you're female drivers, is when is that camera on? Is it, you know, they live in the truck, so, and they're back in their sleeper. Is that recording them? Could it catch something that they don't want? Could that information be hacked? Could it get out? So there is some privacy concern. How do you address those?

Yeah, great question. And I will start off by saying, as a company at NetGenAI, we take privacy incredibly seriously. We have a Privacy by Design certification. Like, we do— we go the full length to make sure that we're covering everything from a privacy standpoint. And there's 2 big elements of this. One, to address what you just said, if the camera— if the truck is off, the camera's off, right? There's no recording of, you know, sleeper berth or time away during personal time or anything like that. No one cares about that. No one wants to see that, right? The whole purpose of the camera is to improve driver behavior, reduce risk while they're on the road driving. That's it. We don't care about anything else, and no one else should. And so in addition to that, for drivers that are still a little skeptical about having the inward-facing camera, NextGen actually offers a privacy mode, meaning that it's not recording the internal video, but the AI is still in parallel able to analyze the behavior. So if a driver's still looking at their phone or falling asleep or whatever it may be, it can still alert them to some of those inward-facing behaviors to correct it without necessarily recording or sharing video elsewhere.

Interesting. So do you think AI will replace fleet safety managers?

No, never. So here's, here's the great thing about AI. AI is only as impactful as we make it, right? So we still have to be able to build and train the AI And there are lots of things that NextGen is doing to make the life of the fleet manager or the safety officer better and easier and more effective. Example, like we have a new safety manager assistant, which is basically an AI-driven chatbot inside our fleet manager portal. And the fleet manager can go in and say, hey, who are my drivers that need the most coaching today? Or, hey, here are the drivers that are my best drivers, right? And instead of having to dig through all the reports and all the data, The AI can analyze it in a matter of seconds. They go boom, boom, boom. Here are the top 3 drivers you need to coach today. Here are the routes they should be taking, uh, et cetera. And so it only just makes their jobs easier and more efficient so they can actually help their drivers get better faster.

Now you are a CMO, which means you're a marketing guy. So I got another AI question for you. How do you feel about using AI on LinkedIn posts? I don't know if you've been on there recently, but every time you go generate a post, there's a little button down there now that says rewrite with AI.

Yeah, it's interesting. Even Google now and search engines, you're like, I'm looking at this and it gives you all the AI results and everything. So again, I think the whole purpose of all of this is that for LinkedIn, if you're writing a post, you want to make it sound more professional or you want to make it sound smoother, whatever it may be, it just gives you the ability to move faster or to think outside the box. I think a lot of times, to tangent on marketing really quick, with our team, We use AI to come up with ideas that we maybe were blocked on. So we're like, hey, give us a list of 10 different things we didn't consider. And that's really where the power comes from.

Interesting. Is there any concern though that if everyone's using AI to rewrite their posts, all these posts sound the same? So instead of standing out, it just becomes sort of homogenized. I know with AI art, like the ChatGPT, there's a distinct style that every AI art picture has that you can immediately tell it's AI art.

Yes, but that's where the humanistic element comes in is because we are now telling the AI how to work and how to design things for us. And, if we just change out the prompt or change out the way that we're describing it, then the AI listen to it and then we evolve. And, that just comes to our own training and knowledge of how the AI works.

Very, very interesting. Well, hey, I like your perspectives. I like what you have to say. People who want to work with your training program, people who want to connect with Netradyne, where do I send them?

Yeah, go check it out. Netrodine.com.

Netrodine.com. Easy enough. Well, hey, Barrett, thank you very much. Have a great week.

You too. Thanks.

Take care. All right. Got some got some crazy news stories to send you home with here. First is this ATM theft. Roll the tape on this. This is pretty wild, and this isn't like the aftermath. This is this is the theft in process happening right here. This is some bystanders. You can see this truck backed in backwards, obviously by backing. It hit the doors. It broke all these doors, and it looks like it crashed into that ATM. to knock it over. And now there's 2 guys, 2 masked guys, picking this ATM up and throwing it into the bed of their truck. MyProgress reports— or sorry, MVProgress reports the Mohave County Sheriff's Office, that's the MCSO in Arizona, is seeking assistance from the public in this ongoing investigation into the brazen heist of an ATM machine in where this was. This is Littlefield, Arizona. The machine was forcibly removed from the Eagles Landing convenience store located on the 400 block of Fleet Street. In Beaver Dam, Littlefield, Arizona during daytime business hours at 8 AM. These guys started early. 8 AM on Sunday morning, February 11th. The truck and empty ATM were then founded— were then found, sorry, abandoned in the 200 block of Hillside Drive, indicating the suspects fled with the currently undisclosed amount of cash. So MCO, they're seeking your public's assistance. They want to know who these guys are. There's actually 4 of them. We only see 2 in the video removing the thing, but I guess there was 2 other gentlemen, uh, I guess I wouldn't call them gentlemen, 2 other thugs or crooks stealing, uh, helping case this and helping steal those things. So if you see these guys out there, let them know. By the way, some people are calling out the number on the side of that truck. That's a stolen truck. They abandoned that and both the ATM when they did this, this act right here. Here's another horrible video that, that just happened over here. This happened over at the, at the Georgia Welcome Center. If you have Roll the tape on this one. Keep a keen eye on here. A truck is going to come just flying through and crash into the cab of that blue truck. The AP reports that 2 truck drivers were killed in a chain reaction crash at a Georgia welcome center that engulfed several tractor-trailers in flames. That's according to authorities. The wreck happened Wednesday night after a speeding semi-truck entered the parking lot of a welcome center off Interstate 95 near the Georgia-South Carolina line. The truck slammed into a second trailer, setting off a chain collision involving 6 total vehicles. The driver of that speeding semi-truck and the tractor-trailer that got struck first, they were both unfortunately killed in this incident. The drivers of the other vehicles fortunately were able to escape uninjured. The State Patrol is still investigating what caused this crash. I mean, obviously speed is one of them, but why did this guy come through so fast? Why didn't he stop? We don't know. I mean, because he died, but we don't know if he fell asleep behind the wheel. I'm sure they'll have to do some investigating to find out exactly what happened here. But our prayers are obviously with the, uh, the victims over there. Speaking of parking lots, here's a little drama that went down in Marina del Rey.

Really?

It appears that you're damaged. My car is damaged. Where?

Right here.

If you want to see, you can come over. Why are you hitting my car, lady?

Because it's not It's not damaged, you—

would you tell her to get away from me?

She's crazy.

She's got a— she's got a friend here. You know, just, you know, he's not happy. It's not damaged.

I mean, usually what you're supposed to do in an accident, yeah, is we exchange information.

live in Marina del Rey for a little while back in— when was that? 2005? Yeah, it was a nice area.

I got it now.

Well, not live there, I used to work out of there. Sorry, it was like early 2000s. I used to work out of there when a record label I worked at, their, uh, their, um, their headquarters were located right over there. I never necessarily had an incident like that. You definitely always meet some, uh, some weirdos in Los Angeles. No shortage All right, let's rate the strap work, then I will hit the music and send you home. Let's take a look at this. Jake Herrera says 10 out of 10 for effort. Have a— had a Razor scooter too. Yeah, watch this thing break. There's gonna— it's like a loot box. Razor scooter is just gonna pop right out there under her arm. Impressive. Must have been a Kia. Shia Stang says poor steering was the demise of these efforts. Roman Nabilin said, actually, this is a real-world example why everyone insisting on no-touch rate Bob Busey says, I love this. Should have balanced it on the Razor scooter. Dinesh Sardar says, presenting in America's Got Talent. And Katherine Ziegler said, since it was that easy to disassemble, maybe they should have done that before they started. May have been a good idea. Well, hey everybody, we're done a little bit early today. Hit the music, I'll send you home. If you like this episode, you can find What the Truck wherever you get your podcasts. Just look up What the Truck, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, You want to watch these things, go to FreightWaves' YouTube channel. There's an entire playlist of What the Truck episodes. You can find me @TimothyDooner. You can find this show @FWWhatTheTruck. We'll be back Wednesday. Thank you very much to all of our wonderful guests today. Take care and don't be a stranger. Beep beep.