Why Your Routing Guide Is Failing

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Chris Caplice (00:05):
Here's the thing.
So you talk about these tariffsand things going on, if you talk
to a supply chain professional,they'll say, Well, it's just
another Tuesday, to be honest.
So there's stuff happening,right? And so, but look at what
we did the last five years,right? That we shifted from West
Coast to East Coast arrivals fora period of a couple months,
things shut down. And, you know,we absorb and I think some of

(00:28):
those muscles that we trainedare still here. Supply chains
thrive on being able to handlethese things. I'd like to think
of them as shock absorbers. Sothe supply chain is able to be
the shock absorber, right? Ofall these disruptions to keep
the ride the business operatingsmoothly.

Blythe Brumleve (00:48):
You spent weeks planning your transportation
procurement strategy, but onerejected tender throws it all
off for paper manufacturers, theexecution phase is where the
money's made or lost. ChrisCaplice Or Yes, Chris Caplice,
from DAT, is here to talk aboutwhy your routing guide may be
costing you 1000s, and whatdynamic tendering can do to fix

(01:08):
it. So welcome into anotherepisode of everything is
logistics, a podcast for thethinkers in freight. I am your
host, Blythe Milligan, and weare proudly presented by SPI
logistics. And for this episode,we are presented by DAT as well.
So Chris, I've been listening toa bunch of your podcasts,
getting, you know, prepped forthis call, and so I'm super
excited to have thisconversation with you. So
welcome to the show.

Unknown (01:29):
Thanks, Blythe, I'm glad to be here. I'm sorry you
have to listen to some of mypodcast, but not as nearly as
professional as you. Oh, well,thank you

so much. That's No No. It wasn't. It wasn't. It
was actually very not, actually,but it was very insightful,
especially one of the episodesthat I was listening to that the
the host, I think theconversation came from a show on
from easy post, and she saidthat you were the most popular
episode of 2024 and that's whyshe invited you back for for

(01:58):
2025

Unknown (01:59):
so that was a fun conversation. They're good, good
people, absolutely. Now,

now for folks who may not be familiar with
your work, can you explain alittle bit of your background
and your roles of what you dofor a DAT and also MIT? Yeah,

Unknown (02:11):
sure, sure. So I'm was actually a civil engineer in
undergrad and went in the Army,came out, got a master's in
transportation, and decided Ididn't want to work in for the
government building roads, so Icame and got a PhD up here at
MIT and focused in on the use ofroads, mainly truck
transportation. Spent abouteight years in software
development, developing tools tohelp shippers procure

(02:34):
transportation. And that kind ofnaturally morphed into working
with then chainalytics Thatbecame and was acquired by d a t
almost five years ago, prettymuch to the month right in the
pandemic, a great time to beacquired right as a pandemic
kicks off. And so what I do at da t is I'm working on the
shipper side. Because this, ifsome of your listeners don't

(02:56):
know about DAT, it's the largestfreight analytics company out
there. We work with shippers,carriers, brokers, and we're the
main source of information onpricing and other data capacity,
data load to truck ratio, tohelp all the players, all three
stakeholders in the industry, doa better job making the market
more efficient and moreeffective. So they brought

(03:18):
chainalytics in, which is a partthat I was worked with, and to
kind of finish off the trifecta.
So working on the shipper side,in addition to that, I've been
up at MIT for a little over 20years, running part of the
Center for Transportation andLogistics. We work with
companies do research, and wehave educational programs. I
created something called freightlab up here, which looks at
pretty much the same thing I dowith D, A, T, how can shippers

(03:39):
cares and brokers work togetherbetter? And so the stuff I do
academically with MIT, and thestuff I do in practice with Da t
really merged. The Venn diagramis pretty full there, but that's
kind of how I my path to thefreight transportation market.
And I thinkyou just celebrated what 50
years a 50 year anniversary forfor the Center for

(04:00):
Transportation and Logistics, isthat correct?

Yes. So CTL started it 52 years now, I think
it started when everything wasregulated. So the deregulation,
the motor carrier act of 1980the staggers act, all those
things before that happened,people didn't know what would
happen. And so there was a lotof analysis and studying going
on to say, Okay, what's going tohappen when we deregulate? And,

(04:24):
you know, so is, that's reallythe kernel of where it started.
But since then, we've grown. Wehave about 150 researchers staff
here, about 80 to 100 students ayear. We work with over 50 to
100 companies a year. We reallytry to come up with innovation
and drive them into practice.
That's, that's kind of what wedo up here.

Unknown (04:44):
And do you find that, especially with, you know, since
2020 you kind of brought it up,that supply chain kind of took
center stage, at least in themedia aspect, is what kind of it
felt like to me? Has that sortof been seen in in student
interaction? Or studentenrollment with your role.

I think the biggest thing is that we don't
have to explain what supplychain is at Thanksgiving anymore
to relatives, because everyoneknows what it is. It's the thing
that stopped me from getting xduring the pandemic, but the
thing that people don't realize,or they don't, if they don't,
they don't think about it asmuch, the supply chains never
stopped. We never no onestarved. Stuff came in. Toilet

(05:23):
paper. The main problem there.
People were hoarding. But stuffkept coming. The supply chains
never shut down. I think peoplehave awareness of that and
appreciation of that, especiallypost pandemic, we're seeing that
there, there was a huge surge ofpeople coming into the industry,
and I think that's stillhappening. When I was going into
college in the 80s, it didn'texist. The phrase didn't exist.
There's logistics wasn't evenreally much of a practice. So

(05:46):
it's really changed since then.
Most people my age came into theindustry different ways, but now
we're seeing more people comingin. They do a supply chain
undergrad, or logisticsundergrad, and then they
continue on. So that ischanging, but I think the
awareness of what supply chainsare has definitely increased
post pandemic. Yeah,

Unknown (06:07):
I definitely get a lot of those questions around the
holidays of what's going on atthe ports. And I'm like, I don't
even know what a port is. Mygrandmother's friends are, you
know, talking to me about this.
And so, yeah, I definitely echothat experience where, you know,
used to have to explain it. Nowthey kind of understand it a
little bit more, but not, youknow, there's still some
education on my end that I haveto do it, at least when it comes
to family and now,

personally responsible now for the supply
chain breaking, because it's,it's kind of like oxygen. You
don't notice it until it's gone.
That's what, that's what peoplehave recognized. So supply chain
was a big issue when it was hardto get stuff now, when it works
smoothly, you should beinvisible, right? And that's,
that's where we kind of are nowin this, this stage of the of
the market. Yes,

Unknown (06:50):
and you, actually, you recently penned an article
moving into sort of the, Iguess, the the paper
manufacturer focus for for thisconversation, because I really
want to get a ground level ofwhat is currently being
experienced by thesemanufacturers, and then how
they're addressing, you know,sort of global supply chain
issues, geopolitical issues,obviously, the T word tariffs,

(07:12):
which, you know, we've beenlearning about ad nauseam over
the last couple of months. Butwhen you recently penned an
article talking about whentendering loads don't go chasing
waterfalls, which I now havethat song stuck in my head. It's
been stuck in my head all day.
But you open the article withtransportation. Procurement has
two phases, or moments of truth,a strategic phase where shippers
develop a long term plan andselect a group of carriers to

(07:33):
handle the freight for thatperiod, or and an execution
phase, where loads are actuallytendered. Walk me through that
first phase of what you'retalking about, what are sort of
the table stakes for today?

Yes, I stole that phrase from AJ laughley, the
former CEO of PNG, the twomoments of truth when he talked
about it. The two moments oftruth for a CPG company is on
the aisle, someone grabbing it,and the second is, is it good
when you use it? The two momentsfor transportation, as opposed
to most other commodities orother services or products that

(08:10):
are bought, there's also twomoments. There's a moment where
an RFP, an annual bid, is done,and I'll talk about that in a
second. But that just is thepromise of volume and capacity
if it materializes. The secondmoment of truth is when they an
actual load materializes, youhave to assign it to a carrier.
So two moments of truth. Andhistorically, since probably mid

(08:33):
1990s once deregulation kind ofsank in, the first moment of
truth was done by an annualrequest for proposal or bid.
Some companies don't like theword bid, but it really is. It's
where the shipper says, Okay,here's what I expect the volume
to be on every one of my lanes,which could be five to 20,000
lanes, five to five digit zips.
And they give it to thecarriers, and the carriers come

(08:55):
back with a rate on the lanesthey're interested in. The
shipper does some advancedoptimization, finding the best
mix or assignment or allocationof carriers to lanes. This is
where I did my dissertation onback in the mid 90s, and then
they assign it out to thecarriers, and that feeds into
what's known as a routing guide.
And there's been a ton of workin Optimation, in operations

(09:18):
research and differenttechniques to come up with the
perfect plan, right? To come upwith the ideal plan, use
scenarios. You can favorincumbency. You can restrict it
so that your minority carriersget a certain amount of
business. Your carrier baseisn't so big, so it's very
customizable, and you can have1000s of scenarios that you run.

(09:39):
But at the end of the day, allyou're doing is creating the
plan if the volume actuallymaterializes. So that's the
first moment of truth.

Unknown (09:48):
And then the second moment of truth is that that
actual execution phase. Can youwalk us through that? Yeah,

yeah. So, so the the first phase ends,
essentially when the winners ofthe auction. Right on each lane
are fed into the routing guide.
And the routing guide sitswithin the Transportation
Management System, or TMS, andwhat it's there, it's just a
catalog, right? So when a loadcomes in, it's going from
Chicago to Des Moines, it goesin and says, Okay, which, which
carries has Chicago to DesMoines, and they it goes

(10:15):
straight through. And if it's agood TMS, it'll tender
automatically to that primarycarrier. And if that, the weird
thing about truckload becauseI'm mainly talking truckload
transportation here, is that thecontracts that were set up in
that annual RFP, they're bindingin price, right? If I if the
carrier hauls the load, theyhave to honor the price that
they committed to in the bid.

(10:37):
However, the shipper is notcommitting that the volume will
ever materialize, even if theysaid, you know, five a week.
They're not guaranteeing that.
And the carrier is notguaranteeing that they will,
100% accept every load, justbecause of the dynamic nature.
They might not have a truck inthat area. They might for some
other reason, it might be thatthe shipper is giving more than
they than they said they wouldto the care, and they just don't

(11:00):
have the capacity, so you've gotthis loose contract. And so the
load comes in, goes to therouting guide, gets assigned to
the primary carrier. Theyreject, if they take it, that's
fine. That's great. And it goesand that can be depending on the
market, 70% of the loads getaccepted by the primary 80% even
if they reject it, then it goesthrough what's called a routing

(11:22):
guide waterfall, and thewaterfall is simply made up of
the carriers who bid in the RFPwho didn't win, right? And so
their rates are going to behigher than the winning rate.
And so you go to the firstalternate and offer it to them,
and if they take it, great. Ifnot, go to the third, the
fourth, the fifth that's thetraditional way that a routing
guide works. So that secondmoment of the truth is actually

(11:45):
finding a care to match to thatload right now, not the plan of
future business that's done inthe first moment of truth. Does
that

Unknown (11:55):
make sense? It does.
And you actually help meunderstand that that aspect,
because I, you know, I come froman asset based three PL but I
was just an executive assistant,and so I never actually booked
the freight myself, so that thatis hell. I've heard these
phrases for years, but now tofully kind of grasp of that
entire process, I appreciatethat, that breakdown, that's the
MIT education, I think, comingout of you. Now, I would imagine

(12:17):
that you don't want, you know,the majority of your shipments
to reach that, you know, don'tgo chasing waterfalls, you know.
To go back to the the articletitle, what are some of, I
guess, the with everythingthat's going on in the world,
geopolitical tensions andtariffs and all, I would imagine
that for a lot of theseshipments, are they falling
within that 80% or are theyfalling within that 20%

it's a good question. And so, you know, so
the two moments of truth, right,the RFP and then the tender, the
RFPs, are a pain. No one likesthem, right? And so they take a
lot of work from the shipper.
The carriers never given enoughtime the data no one believes
because you're asking theshipper to forecast for 52 weeks
volume on each lane. It'sridiculous. However, it tends to

(13:04):
work. So how do you can't it'shard to change something that
tends to work. 90% of mosttruckload moves go under
contract. So it kind of worksuntil it doesn't. And so what
typically happened thatwaterfall used to work pretty
well. And the reason why we didit that way, and most TMS is

(13:25):
developed in the 90s, 2000s and2010s It was simple, right? And
so all the all the expertise,all the sophistication, was in
the strategic planning that RFPprocess I talked about with it
does the perfect assignment. Theexecution systems were pretty
stupid, right? They just said,Here, match this. It was all
about execution speed. Well, nowtechnology has changed. You can

(13:48):
have be a little smarter downthere, and so you can have a lot
more sophistication in real timeexecution, which is a relatively
new capability. So the waterfallmethod was a great way. It
worked most of the times untilit didn't. And during the
pandemic, it really failed. Andfailed for two reasons. One is
it takes long. It takes too longto do it. You know, every time

(14:10):
you go to the next one, you gotto give them time to respond or
not, and so you can eat up aday, two days, three days, so it
gets very stale and your leadtime keeps shrinking. The second
thing is, they found after thesecond or third, especially
during the pandemic, why botherdeeper? No one's going to take
it. No one's going to take it.
So you need to go out to what'sknown as the spot market. In the

(14:31):
spot market, as opposed to acontract market with RFPs is
it's a rate for this lane, thisload on this lane at this time,
with all the details. When I doan RFP, you have a projection of
potential future business forspot market. It's right now. And
so it used to be using the spotmarket. You know, spot was a
four letter word to mostshippers. You wanted to stay in

(14:54):
the contract because you wantrate visibility and stability
and all that. And so, because ofrouting. I The waterfall method
took so long, and it reallywasn't working that well. That's
what I meant, chasingwaterfalls. And I had to name it
that because the song, I mean,come on,

Unknown (15:09):
which I'm still seeing in the back of my head right
now. Now, there was anotherarticle you penned as well, and
the title was, the RFP is dead,long live, the RFP. And that
kind of sounds like how we're,you know, we're, we're trying to
balance that fine line of theRFP. Is that accurate? Yeah,
it's

a pain. Anyone who's been involved with it. It
takes some shippers, will takeup to six months to get their
data set and everything, give itto the carriers. Carriers get a
week to respond back, and thenthey spend two to three months
analyzing, running all thesescenarios. So it could be that
the rates were submitted andthey don't get enacted for six
months. So it just, it's so hardto do this, but it works. It

(15:51):
tends to work. 90% of allshipments, truckload generally
go by contract, as opposed to adynamic price. But one of the
things that's come up from this,it's really kind of interesting
is that, you know, usingcontracts, it's kind of a one
size fits all, where you set thecontract for every rate. And
when I was running bids back inthe 90s and early 2000s we'd

(16:12):
work with shippers, and theymight have one load on a lane
last year, and most shipperswill take what happened last
year, project that to the nextyear and modify it slightly, you
know, as as they need to. Butthey would keep every lane that
had any volume and bid it out,and they would round it up to
one a week, right? Because you'dshow average weekly volume. And

(16:33):
so what would happen is you'dhave tremendous number of lanes
that get bid out, andunfortunately, a majority of the
lanes, not the volume is getsghosted, which means the shipper
creates it, puts it out to bid.
Carrier analyzes bids on it,shipper assigns it to them, and
then, over the course of a year,nothing happens. No volume goes
on. It's called ghosting and sowe've been analyzing this with a

(16:55):
bunch of different shippers, andit can be up to 50, 60% of the
lanes in an RFP. And so as youlook deeper, and when you look
at the network of a shipper,especially a paper manufacturer,
anyone who has heavytransportation costs as a
percentage of total costs, theytend to be very dispersed. And
so Pareto, the 8020 rule reallyworks. And so 80% of the volume

(17:18):
is usually on just 15% of thelanes. The other 20% of the
volume is on the 75 or 85% ofthe lanes. So you have high
volume lanes, and then you havea long tail. And the the thing
that we've come up with, orsuddenly the realization is you
don't need a contract foreverything. So those ones that

(17:40):
are really long tail onesietwosies really not consistent
freight, then treat thosedifferently. And that's one of
the things I brought up in thewaterfalls argument, because
most the lanes that fail, like Idescribed and have to go down
the waterfall, you can identifyahead of time. They're low
volume lanes. And you know, youonly do it three times a year.
And so, you know, it's going tofail. So why even go through the

(18:03):
process of bidding and justtreat it dynamically? So you
want to set up some kind ofother mechanism to assign a
carrier to that you might notknow the price right away, but
to be honest, it was going to goto the spot market anyway,
because it was going to fail therouting guide.

Unknown (18:20):
And so for a lot of these, you know, sort of low
volume lanes of what you'retalking about, I'm curious, is
this sort of a new data pointthat that you guys are analyzing
and looking at over the lastsay, you know, you've been at,
you know, MIT, I think, for, youknow, 20 years. You just said,
how has that data collectionevolved? Is this a sort of a new

(18:40):
data point for you guys tomonitor. I'm curious if there's
other data points that maybehave, you know, come up or
popped up onto the scene withinthe last handful of years? Yeah,

I think everyone's kind of recognized
that, you know, there are highvolume and low volume lanes. I
don't think people looked asmuch as the impact, because
there's a there's a strategy inprocurement, which is, you get a
contract for everything, right?
You because then it's like, youknow, Linus is safety blanket.
You've got the blanket there.
I've got a contract on thatlane. So it provides false

(19:11):
certainty, and it's there. Butif you're a CFO or a chief
purchasing officer, that's good.
You have a contract andeverything, because the last
thing you want to do is havespot rates, because then how do
you budget for that? So there'sbeen a fear or reluctance to
allow dynamic kind of planning.
There people try to putcertainty on it as much as

(19:34):
possible. The problem is itdoesn't work. It isn't effective
for that. And so there's beenmore of an acceptance to use
spot as a strategy, not foreverything, but for a certain
segment. And thinking ofprocurement, more on a portfolio
where you've got, like,dedicated lanes with a private
fleet, where it's high volume,consistent and balanced, right?

(19:56):
You have out and back and thingslike that. Then you have con.
Lanes which are relatively highvolume, and we can talk about
what that what that means. Andthen you have the lanes that are
very sporadic, inconsistent, andthose should be treated
differently. And you should dothose dynamically. But one of
the points is, if people look atvolume, but in our analysis,
it's actually different, it'sconsistency matters more than

(20:20):
volume. And let me give you asimple example. Everyone has a
lane where you might have 100loads per year, but if it
happens in a two week period,that's not a consistent lane,
right? You want to have a littlebit of volume every week, every
month. So what we found is,you'd think those would be
correlated, but in our analysis,they're only about a 53 to 55%

(20:42):
correlation. So just usingvolume by itself isn't really a
good proxy, because you get someof these wacky lanes, especially
if you're an ag, where it'lljust during the season, your
volume just goes through theroof and then it goes away. So
looking at consistency, which isthe number of weeks per year
that that lane has volume is areal good proxy for whether you

(21:03):
should do a contract on it, orwhether you should let it go to
dynamic freight. Now,

Unknown (21:08):
zeroing in on sort of the paper manufacturers for a
moment. Now, there's a lot oftalk, especially in the news
around obviously manufacturing,bringing manufacturing back. I'm
curious what the overalllandscape looks like for paper
manufacturers. I understand alot of them are located in the
southeast. I'm based inJacksonville, Florida. We were
kind of known for, you know, afew decades about, don't go to

(21:30):
that town because it stinks,because we had a, you know, a
bunch of paper mills around.
Some of those have have shutdown, especially in the the
downtown area. But still, thesoutheast is, is very, you know,
paper manufacturer heavy. I'mcurious, is that sort of, I
guess, a victim of offshoring ornear shoring or is it primarily
staying in the United States forpaper manufacturers?

Paper manufacturing is predominantly
domestic, where we had a lot ofexports of waste paper, and
that's probably, I honestlydon't know how it's being
affected right now with thetariffs. I know so for a while
there, China was refusing, butmost of the domestic because
it's such a heavy product, it'sbeing produced domestically. The
reason why a lot of mills havegone down is there's been

(22:13):
consolidation of the paperpackaging industry. They were
way overcapacitated For the 80s,90s and 2000s My brother used to
work in the industry, and you'vejust seen a lot of
consolidation, more efficientand effective use of their
mills. But the thing that makespaper and packaging so
interesting is that it's such aheavy product, and it's

(22:36):
relatively low value, right?
You're not going to ship amillion dollars worth of product
in a in a trailer. It'ssomething where the cost of the
transportation is very high as apercentage of total cost of
goods. And whenever that's thecase, then you have to pay
especially close attention toyour transportation. It just, it
just makes sense. It's such abig piece of the pie. If I'm
shipping, say, iPhones by truck,right? I wouldn't care as much,

(23:00):
right? Because the value of aniPhone, you know, I'd be worried
about theft at that point, atruck full of iPhones. But for
paper, you you have to be verycognizant of every penny for
transportation. That's why it'svery important for them to
understand where the market'sgoing, where rates are, and
what's the best way to securecapacity for the lanes that they
have freight. And

Unknown (23:23):
are you seeing those manufacturers sort of lock in
those, you know, RFPs early on?
Is it this a once a year type,you know, bid process, or is it
much more, probably steadyfreight, I would imagine? Well,
it's, it's changed,

right? It used to be, pre pandemic. Everyone would
generally run an annual bid, andthen, as things happen, plants
close, new customers comeonline, you run what's known as
a mini bid, where it might beokay, these 20 lanes that are
for a new customer. You bid themout, and it goes quick. During
the pandemic, everything went tohell, right? You have CPG

(23:58):
manufacturers suddenly createdmore manufacturing locations,
ship care, excuse me, retailerswere requesting, you know, high
otif On time in full and so theydidn't have enough product to
send out right away. So if youtalk to some of the CPG
manufacturers, they were takingproduct from the line onto a
truck, no intermediate RDC oranything. So there was a lot of

(24:22):
shipment of partial loads, soyou saw a ton of inefficient
shipping just to get the productout, because you'd have such
change shifts in demand. Andthen the production facilities
would open, close, andpackaging, especially the
packaging side of paper, andpackaging is really a derived
demand, right? They are. Theirdemand for packaging is

(24:44):
contingent on the product beingsold. It's not that no one buys
packaging. Just to getpackaging, you get it for your
product like transportation.
Transportation is a drivedemand. And so you you have to
to see what your demand is goingto be. You have to forecast your
next customers. And yourcustomers, customers demand,
which is very hard. So the paperand packaging have it especially

(25:04):
hard because one, it's such ahigh percentage of their costs,
and two, it's derived, so it'shighly volatile on things that
they can't control.

Unknown (25:14):
And I know that some folks, they will follow what's
called the cardboard index,where if you know, if you are
purchase, if there's certainamount of sales for cardboard,
then things are looking good,then demand is high, and then if
it kind of falls off of a cliff,then demand is low. And you can
kind of, I guess, judge theeconomy based on, you know, how
much cardboard is being shippedout. Have you heard of that
index before? I'm sure. Yeah.

I know. I know of it. I don't follow it as much. I
think it, it's something doesgood indicator. I know that like
purchasing fuel, there is anindex for how people will buy
product and what their priceswill be, because as a commodity,
you usually have an index tosomething, and so in trucking,
you have the same thing forfuel, where you peg it to what

(25:57):
the DOE department of energyreleases every Monday, and you
kind of share your surchargethere, because for any kind of
procurement of a commodity, youalways want to separate out the
things that are controllable andthe things that are not. And for
trucking, fuel isuncontrollable. No one controls
the price of fuel. It moves onmacroeconomic factors for paper

(26:18):
and product, pulp is about thesame thing. So you look at that
pulp index, and that canactually give you a good
indicator along those lines. Oh,that's

Unknown (26:25):
interesting. So instead of the cardboard index, we
should be watching the pulp.
There's there's different

indexes here. I'd have to defer to my brother, who
knows this industry better, butit's the same concept. It's the
same concept, something that youcannot control. You index, and
you try to share the risk, orbalance the risk between buyer
and seller. And

Unknown (26:42):
so for a lot of these manufacturers, of what you're
talking about, that I wouldimagine that they would want to,
well, probably I would imagine,for a majority manufacturers,
they want to keep their freightin a contract system. But are
you seeing for papermanufacturers, are you seeing
that go more to the spot market,or, you know, some of the
waterfall carriers, what likewhat you mentioned earlier.

I think if people had their druthers, they would
go contract for everything ifthey could. But it really
depends on one of the hallmarksof the truckload industry is
that it's not stable. Becauseyou have over 200,000 carriers.
And I don't think we've talkedabout this, one of the
statistics is that 96% or 94% ofthe truckload carriers,

(27:25):
truckloads, point to point, notthe LTL guys, the point to point
full truckload. They 96% haveless than 20 trucks. So you say,
Oh, they're really small. Whatpeople don't do is look at the
other way. 4% of all the truckshave about two thirds of all the
truck capacity. So the marketis, yes, it has a long tail, but

(27:45):
it's pretty consolidated at oneend. And so because you have
such a long tail, and thebarrier of entry and exit is
very low for truckload, all youneed is a CDL, a truck and a
smartphone at this point. So bybecause these carriers can enter
and exit at at will, prettymuch, and some of them will

(28:07):
enter the market, and then themarket gets soft for them.
They'll park it and they'll gowork construction, or they'll go
fishing, or they'll do somethingelse, but the capacity can come
right back in. So because ofthat, the truckload market, it
works in cycles, and we saw thebiggest cycle was the pandemic
cycle that really took off in q2of 2020 and it ended in q2 of

(28:28):
2022 so two years we had theseridiculously high rates where
spot was higher than contract,and that's when every shipper
wanted to go to contract, right?
Because he didn't want to paythose spot prices. But then,
since the summer of 2022 itdropped, and it's only now
recovering. In december 2024 itfinally approached the the
levels that it was pre pandemicin the first quarter of 2020 so

(28:51):
that's been three years it took.
So two years up in a cycle,three years down, crawling back.
And since then, what's actuallybeen happening? We've been flat.
So when you ask to do, doshippers prefer contract or
spot? The answer is, it depends.
If the market is tight, whichmeans con spot rates are higher
than contract, then yes, theywant contract. When spot drip

(29:13):
dips below contract, which ithas been for last three years,
then they'll say, Well, maybespots not so bad, right? And if
you're a heavy like a paper andproduct packaging manufacturer,
you're that's a big chunk ofchange, so you'll tend to use
the Spot more. And so what, whatyou see now is the relationship

(29:34):
between the shippers and thecarriers. Do you honor the
contract? You know, on whichside we did a paper up here,
gosh, about four years ago, andit posed the question, are
carriers elephants or goldfish?
And so the idea is, and this waspre pandemic, so it's looking to
the last cycle before thepandemic. Was a tight market,

(29:57):
2017 2018 and it crashed in 20.
19, right? And we posed thequestion, if a shipper treated
you poorly during a soft market,how did you treat them during a
tight market? Are you anelephant, which you remember
those who did and you treat themaccordingly, or are you a
goldfish who has no memory,right? And so what are your
thoughts? What do you what doyou think are carriers elephants

Unknown (30:21):
or goldfish, depends on how the money is. I guess they
are

total goldfish total, because they can't afford
not to be. And so we're in themiddle of doing this process,
the same project, but for theother side, our shippers,
elephants or goldfish, mycolleague, Dr Angie acacella, is
working on this, and we'llprobably have something over the
summer, but our hypothesis isshippers are total elephants.

(30:45):
They remember, if a carrierscrewed them over in their
opinion, or didn't providecapacity, they're not going to
get the business in the bid. Soit's kind of an interesting
dynamic. And this kind of goesto, you know, what do shippers
prefer? Depends where the marketis right, where I stand depends
on where I sit. So, but we dosee in better shippers, right?

(31:06):
That it's not like everyonebottom feeds goes trough to
trough. So what you do if you doan RFP, and let's say, you say,
I think there's going to be fiveloads a week on this lane, and
if there are five loads a week,you go contract. But if there's
a six load, right? You send thatto spot, you don't give it back
to that contract carrier. Sowe're seeing better shippers

(31:26):
will adhere to that contract.
And the same thing happens in atight market. If you have those
five loads and a six load comes,the carrier won't say, Oh, you
send that to spot. They will,you know, they will try to
capture it as spot, because theywill cover what they promised,
but above that, they'll treatdifferently. So I think both
sides are starting to do thatand but it really depends on the

(31:48):
state of the market. Where it is

Unknown (31:53):
is that where dynamic tendering kind of comes into
play?

I think so. The thought is, if you have that,
you're 10,000 lanes, and only,you know, 500 of them, maybe
1000 of them, say, 2000 of themhave volume of more than, say,
one a week. Then those otherones, why bother set up a
contract for them if they'regoing to fail anyway. And
instead, you have to set up somekind of mechanism to get

(32:20):
capacity in real time. Andthat's what we call a dynamic
tendering. And there's manydifferent ways to do that. One
is you could go to a load board,which brokers do more than
shippers, but you can also setup a small set of carriers,
whether they're asset based ornon asset. It depends on the mix
you want and you want to be ableto give them a shipment, a

(32:43):
tender, and have them come backwith a price they'll guarantee,
and then you solve it that way.
So yes, it's dynamic in that theprice will change, but you've
controlled the market. You'regoing to you're not going to the
entire market, because you wantto validate the carrier. You go
to a set core. And so those setof core carriers also have
committed and they probably havebusiness elsewhere in your

(33:05):
network. So these are, like yourcream the crop carriers, mainly
non asset brokers, are reallygood at this, because they can
control things a little better.
And so you just have to havesome kind of mechanism that, in
real time, will assign a carrierto that. And again, it's a
closed group of 567, carriers,but the price will be dependent

(33:27):
on the situation. At that time,other shippers will use the DA T
rate, which we can develop amarket rate for whichever day,
for whatever location tolocation origin, destination.
And then you can say, well, thecarrier will do d a t rate plus
7% whatever. So there'sdifferent mechanisms you can

(33:47):
have to make a dynamic matchingthat's not relying on the
routing guy that came from anRFP 18 months ago. So, and it
makes sense for those low volumelanes, high volume lanes, it
works like a charm. Don't even,don't even bother contracts
work. Everybody wants stability,and that gives stability to both
parties, shippers and

Unknown (34:06):
carriers. Now, does that also apply to sort of the,
I guess, the real time pricing,or do maybe more API
integrations? Do those play arole in both of those different
strategies?

Yes. So API is just so if you look at the
history of connections, you knowthat you've got the phone,
right, that people connect andemail, but the predominant
method that shippers andcarriers communicate for this is
EDI Electronic Data Interchange.
And it's bulky. It's pain to setup, but once it's set up, it's,
it just works like clockwork.

(34:40):
It's just works. So for highvolume lanes, it makes sense.
You know, you set up, you have apain right up front, but then it
just flows. Once it's set up.
For the low volume lanes, thecost of setup is not, isn't
worth the amount of volume goingthrough. So you want to do
something different. APIs are.
Good way of providing custominformation, and it's system to

(35:03):
system. So it really ties tothat, and it makes it a lot
easier to communicate. You don'thave to go through the formal
EDI structures. So that workspretty well. What the thing
though, is there is no standard.
I mean, the joke with EDI issupposed to standardize
everything, and the joke is thatit works because everyone has
their own standard. There is nostandard EDI, everyone has some

(35:24):
kind of the field in the 64thspaces means something
different. So the question is,do you want to find a standard,
enforce a standard? Or whatwe're seeing now is more firms
are using AI generative, AI tosay, You know what, however you
react to me, however you sendback to his email or something
else, my layer will take thatand that unstructured data and

(35:48):
turn into structured data. Sothere's two ways to approach
communication. One is agree upona standard which is hard or move
the the intelligence toreceiving and being able to take
any kind of input and turn itinto something that I can use.
So we're seeing a growth of bothof those over the last couple
years,

Unknown (36:09):
and I imagine that that's a perfect use case for da
T's IQ product, where they canuse all of those different
benchmarks and apply it to anygiven situation. Do I have that
assumption Correct?

Well, we use AI in a bunch of different ways,
and a lot of it is a generationof rates in that. And so we have
a bunch of very sophisticatedmodeling techniques because, I
mean, the way that the shippersnetworks are, most shippers,
paper manufacturers, you know,they don't. They all have their
plants in weird places. Let's behonest, everyone, all of their

(36:43):
networks are snowflakes, everyevery industry. So the last
study I did is a couple yearsago. If you stack 3040, 50
shippers on top of each other,their networks, less than 5% of
the lanes at a three to threedigit level will overlap, very
little. It's their snowflakes.
Now they those will tend to bethe very high volume lanes,
right? Atlanta, Chicago, LosAngeles, you know? So those, but

(37:08):
then the rest of it, it's veryunique. And so you have shippers
that are very different fromeach other. And so then you have
all of these different lanes.
And so how do you price those?
How do you set a benchmark onthose? And that's where the
modeling comes in. And we usevery sophisticated modeling.
Some was developed bychainalytics over the last 1520,
years. And dat is really our ouranalytics team has done amazing

(37:32):
things, and technology hasimproved dramatically, using AI
to come up with a better ratefor that for any situation, even
if you don't have if that lanehas never been used before,
Portland, Oregon to Richmond,Virginia. Who does that? But we
know what the price would be,because we can, our model is
able to predict that. So that'swhy you need to have different

(37:54):
modeling for that. Because youhave so many different lanes,
that's where it really comes inhandy, the AI, that's super

Unknown (38:02):
interesting. Because I imagine, with all of the
different scenario planning, canyou, can you actually plan for
for what we're currentlyexperiencing right now? We are
recording this on april 22 2025just in case, folks at at 145
you know. PM, just in case, youknow, these things change, but
with all the geopolitical issuesthat are going on. How do you

(38:23):
how do you find what benchmarkworks the best?

Yeah, it's funny, because one of the biggest users
of benchmark transportationrates are people or companies
that are doing network design.
So I want to put a facilityhere. I don't have something
there now. What drives thedecision a lot of times is,
yeah, it's labor cost, landcosts, all that, but it's also
transportation. So using thesebenchmarks, you can actually
determine, Okay, what would therough price be for this if I

(38:49):
move my facility out to thislocation? And so that's one of
the big use cases of it. Andduring the pandemic, it was used
heavily because companies like Isaid, before, CPG manufacturers
had to open and closemanufacturing facilities almost
on a weekly basis, so they weredoing network flow analysis
weekly instead of annually. Andso to do that, you've got to

(39:13):
understand where yourtransportation rates are going
to be. So we're finding, as itgets more volatile that they
need for benchmarks become evenmore important because you're
doing things that you haven'tnormally done. If we're a steady
state, it's kind of boring. Youkeep going. I'll read on. But if
something new happens right, theFrancis Scott Key Bridge goes

(39:33):
down, that's going to affectrates right? The West Coast.
Remember when it had 100 shipswaiting off and everything
suddenly come to the East Coast,and we realized that we didn't
have the infrastructure to takethat many containers off the
east coast. So these are thingsthat your benchmarks can really
help you with. And

Unknown (39:51):
then you've mentioned a couple times about, you know,
using different AI throughoutmaybe your shipment process, or
maybe there are companies thatare using AI. Slash, you know,
machine learning. I'm curious ifyou've seen any other maybe
interesting use cases for using,maybe, like a large language
model or something that shippersare using during their you know,

(40:12):
I guess facing complications andfacing different issues that are
going on within the industry.
There's, you know,

there's a lot of debate of what is AI and what is
not AI. And if you go to some ofthe large conferences for
software, AI pretty much meansthey use math sometimes. But if
you really look at it, AI is anaspirational term, and it
historically, it's a movingtarget, and it's usually been
the thing that we can't quite donow. So things that we you know,

(40:39):
20 years ago, a lot of machinelearning was considered AI, you
know, neural nets andeverything, but it's it's moved.
So I think people have gottencomfortable with the idea, and
they say AI slash machinelearning, ml and machine
learning is simply a method of,whether supervised or
unsupervised, of gatheringinsights and recommendations off
of data. And then there's awhole suite of techniques there.

(41:03):
Generative AI is anothertechnique that use a large
language model that doesmatching and probabilistic
nature of determining what makessense to follow pattern
matching. It really is all aboutpattern matching. So in my
opinion, generative AI, largelanguage models do really well
when you have unstructured data,unstructured data is emails, you

(41:24):
know, blog posts, things likethat, pulling that down and
making sense of it. If you havevery structured data, it doesn't
add as much value, to be honest.
So some of the use cases thatI've that I've seen that I think
are very strong, or one that Idescribed earlier, that enabling
you to receive data, informationfrom any form, from from your
carriers, brokers or other otherpartners, and making sense of

(41:48):
it, getting unstructured dataand making and making it into
structure so you can act on it,instead of trying to force them
to adhere to a standard, whichthey never will. Another one is
if you have to summarize, sayyou're have a marketing channel,
and you have a bunch of thingsthat you need to understand, and
so you're pulling something frommanufacturing reports, something
from sales, something from allthese different sources,

(42:10):
generative AI is very good atpulling things together and
making sense of it and providinga framework for that. So I see
that being very useful as well.
Where I don't see it beinguseful, it to be honest, is in a
TMS when you want to know, okay,what carriers are not performing
well, or what Lane has too muchcapacity, questions like that,

(42:33):
because the data in a TMS is sostructured, you know, the six
reports you want to ask. Now,beyond that, you might ask some
more interesting things, butgenerally, I think for
structured data, you know whatyou want to ask generative AI
won't add as much to that, butthere are other vendors out
there that are doing that. So achat bot, essentially, I think

(42:55):
that's fine. That's helpful, butI don't think it's where the
real money changes, thetransformational change. And

Unknown (43:01):
so it almost sounds like you need to have really
those two approaches, where youcan contextualize the
unstructured data, like youremails, your blog posts, but
then you have more structured,firm data that plays probably
the primary role, if I'munderstanding correctly,

yes, yeah, yeah.
And I mean generator has so manyother applications, procurement
is a big one, especially if youhave a lot of products, a lot of
skews, and a lot of times yourproduct Master is not in good
shape and generative. AI can bevery good at that to helping
determine and better identifyingthings. So we're finding more
and more use cases for it. I'llgive you another one that we're

(43:38):
doing up here at MIT. There's aclassic problem called the
vehicle routing problem. Andit's just like it sounds right?
You have a bunch of loads forpickup or delivery, and how do
you route your driver based onthe capacity, the cost, all
those different things? And thishas been studied since the 17th
century with Leibniz, right?

(43:59):
It's been out there forever. Andso there's a bunch of or type
techniques to try to minimizethat, the traveling salesman
problem, all those kind ofthings. Well, one of the
challenges that you find is thatdrivers don't always follow the
path because they know thingsthat the model doesn't. For
example, they might bedelivering, and they know you
can't park this time of day, orthat street is overly congested

(44:23):
at this time, so they willdeviate from that. And so we did
a project with Amazon trying tounderstand, well, can I use
generative AI, large languagemodels to come up with more
viable, driver friendly routes,not minimum cost? Because what
they found is the plan, justlike in truckload procurement
didn't match the execution formany good reasons. And so what

(44:45):
you can do is you can look atall the good routes that were
done, and you have to train on alot of data, and you start
understanding what makes a goodroute, what makes a good
sequencing. And so you can usegenerative AI to help you with
vehicle routing. So. This wasreally hard for me to
understand, but you think aboutit, we all know generative AI

(45:05):
from like our cell phone, whenwe start typing a message in and
it recommends the next word.
Well, think of a route as asentence, and every stop as a
word, and so all it's doing issaying, Okay, here's my
recommendation based on theprobability of successful ones
that you should link togetherinto a chain. So it's very
interesting early days, but ithas shown to perform as well as

(45:27):
some of these very sophisticatedmathematical programming kind of
approaches. So there's a ton ofareas that we're looking for,
Gen AI. We're still on the hypecycle, right, but we're getting
there, and we're, I think it'sgoing to find its areas where it
really adds value.

Unknown (45:46):
Yeah, I think you're right. And I think you hit the
nail on the head when it's, youknow, certain tools are great
for certain things. It's knowingwhich ones to use at the at the
right moment that's going tohave the maximal impact that you
want to see. And speaking ofwhich, you know, for paper
manufacturers, we've talked alot about, you know, all of the
different tools that you couldand strategies that you could
implement, what are sort of the,I guess, the table stakes right

(46:10):
now for dealing with all ofthese unexpected costs and how
to maybe potentially save moneyin the future.

So I So, I think this, here's the thing. So you
talk about these tariffs andthings going on, if you talk to
a supply chain professional,they'll say, Well, it's just
another Tuesday, to be honest.
So there's stuff happening,right? And so, but look at what
we did last five years, right?
That we shifted from West Coastto East Coast arrivals for a

(46:41):
period of a couple months,things shut down. And, you know,
we absorbed and I think some ofthose muscles that we trained
are still here. Supply chainsthrive on being able to handle
these things. I like to think ofthem as shock absorbers. So the
supply chain is able to be theshock absorber, right of all
these disruptions to keep theride, the business operating

(47:02):
smoothly. So if you think about,you know, tariffs come in one
country. There's someone inprocurement thinking about, how
do I dual source? How do I moveproduction over? So you're
really well equipped, especiallyin supply chain over the last
five years, to be reallyresponsive to these changes. So
I think the tariffs, you know,yeah, do I agree with the policy

(47:23):
as a discussion for another day,but what a shipper can do about
it, and especially paper andwell, you know, they're going to
figure that out. This is whatthey do. This is why they get
paid, what they do. Andtrucking, to be honest, is very
fungible. You can move thingsaround, as opposed to, you're
not building new rail track,right? You're not building an
intermodal yard. So the abilityfor truckload to be so

(47:47):
responsive makes it very littleeasier. It's not easy, but you
can adjust as much more flexiblea tool. And so I think in some,
yeah, we're seeing some bigchurn and all this stuff. And it
gets, you know, the press is onit. Now the press is suddenly,
they're not. They're experts insupply chain. Now they're
experts in global trade. Andyou're getting all these, you
know, the Dire Straits of stuff,but in the real world, you're

(48:11):
dealing with it. You deal withthis every day. And this is just
one of those situations that'sfinally rising to the level of
public awareness. There's awhole bunch of stuff going on
that people aren't aware of. Butnow this is just we're hyper
aware of it.

Unknown (48:25):
And I imagine we kind of started this conversation
talking about how, you know, ourrelatives and things like that,
know about, you know, the supplychain, and know about, you know,
just common logistics practices.
I'm curious, though, during aphase like this of what we're
experiencing where, you know,the the media hype cycle is all
eyes on supply chain andlogistics is the the seat at the
table still there for, you know,the the chief supply chain

(48:49):
officer, the chief procurementofficer. Are they still getting
that regular seat at theexecutive table for for large
scale manufacturers? I imaginethey are. Yeah, it

has not changed.
It has not changed. In fact, I'mlooking back at your background,
and I see you have Levinson'sbook, the box on your stocks
there, and that was one of thoseobscure books that came out,
what about 15 years ago? And hehas a sequel that came out with
it that looked at it more. But Ithink back then that was, it was
kind of obscure, but now it's,it's at the table. It got, I

(49:20):
think it definitely got itstable, a seat at the table,
rather, during the pandemic, andit stayed there. It hasn't
changed, because now it's justthe opposite. One of the big
things that we do at Da T is tryto arm transportation executives
with the arguments, to go to theCFO and see CPO and CEO the
whole C suite to understand whythings are different. Truckload
trucking, transportation isdifferent from most other

(49:43):
commodities, and because whathappens is in a soft market like
we've had for the last two tothree years, if you run a bid,
you're going to lower the rates,the new rate differential, which
means the rate contract ratescoming in compared to the rates
leaving you. Will be lower. Soyou'll, quote, save money. If a
CFO sees that one year, they'llexpect the same thing next year

(50:05):
and the next year and the nextyear. And we have to train
people say, No, you're justit'll come back to bite you,
right? It's just the marketmoving. It's not like you're
doing a amazing things to themarkets in your favor. And the
same thing with the idea that ifI have a certain amount of
volume, if I double it, if Iincrease that I'll get a lower
rate. And that's false too.

(50:29):
There are no economies of scaleto purchasing truckload
transportation. It's all abouteconomies of scope. And scope
just means a balance. Do I haveloads going here? Do I have
loads coming back? The moreunbalanced I have, the higher my
rates are going to be. It's justa natural part of the economics
of truckload transportation, butbeing able to explain those

(50:49):
things to someone who's not inthe space is another thing that
we do at Da t try to educate soyou know that the C suite
understands the challenges thatyou're facing. And so for

Unknown (51:01):
those procurement workers, Chief supply chain
officers, you know, all of thosedifferent roles that serve,
let's just go back to the papermanufacturer, example. What are
some of those, I guess, insightsand tips that you would arm
those people so they can go backto their executive team and
essentially explain, you know,what is the current market
conditions? This is what ourcosts are expected to be, but it

(51:24):
might fluctuate at somewhat, youknow, in the near future. What
would those little tidbits be?
It's,

it's, it's a tough thing. So we'd like to say
that, you know, the time to fixyour roof is when it's not
raining, but it's a temptation.
And so we were advising peoplethrough the end of 2024 that we
expect rates, truckload rates,in the in North America, to rise
two to 4% over the course of theyear. And so if you're running a

(51:49):
bid, you know you can easilysqueeze it and go the lowest
cost, or you can give some back.
Like, every time you like wantto favor incumbents, you're
giving some money back. And sowe're advising them to do that,
because that we sense that themarket is tightening now with
these tariffs, it's pushing thattightening off. We if you look

(52:10):
at the rates, you know they golike this, 2017, 1820, 1920, 20
goes back down in 2022, but thenit's been flat. It's not rising,
it's not dropping. It's been anin what we call a trough for
last 12 to 18 months. So when asystem is at equilibrium, where
it's kind of balanced, any kindof sharp reaction will cause a

(52:32):
big jump, one way or the other.
And what we're trying to figureout is, well, what will cause
rates to suddenly increase? Itcan either be increased demand,
dramatic increases in demand, orcontraction of capacity. We've
seen the carrier base contractover the last two years, but
there's still 100,000 of thosesmall carriers out there who

(52:53):
might have parked their truck,but if the rate comes back,
they'll come right back in soyou're trying to understand
where where do we stand rightnow? And so we're advising
people, get your roof in order,get your routing guide in order.
And, you know, get take, bewilling to take a one, two, 3%
price increase. And so now we'reseeing that push off a little

(53:13):
bit with tariffs, becausetariffs will not increase
demand. We don't see thathappening, maybe, if it works,
according to what theadministration is saying, all
this manufacturing suddenlymoves back to the US, maybe, but
that will be years in themaking, and assuming that the
the policies are stable, and allsigns are pointing that they're
not stable, they're changing atthe you know, enacted On Monday,

(53:37):
removed on Wednesday. So in thisera of uncertainty, it's really
hard. And so my recommendationthat we always recommend to
shippers, work with your corecarriers, make sure you have
your core capacity in place thatyou need, and make sure that you
have a stable relationship forthe spot or those, those low
volume, low consistency lanes,create a connection with

(54:01):
brokers, three non asset basedcares that can provide ramped up
capacity when needed and keepthem in tow as well. So just
prepare for the surge up when itdoes happen, because it will
happen. It will happen at somepoint. I don't think it'll be
like the pandemic, but it's notgoing to continue to go down. If
you look back 15 years, acompound annual growth rate in

(54:22):
rates for Drive and truckload isabout 2.4% and so if you
continue that out, that's kindof sustainability. If you talk
to a carrier, it's tough at atwo point whatever percent
growth, because their insurancewent way up more than that,
wages went up more than that.
Tires are more than that. Sowe're that, that weird

(54:44):
equilibrium. I wouldn't expectrates to go down any further,
but we're, we're waiting to seeif what would cause rates to
start increasing beyond thetrend of 2.3 to 3%

Unknown (54:58):
Yeah, I think a. Lot of folks are holding their breath,
hoping that we've alreadyreached the bottom, or maybe
we're currently at the bottom,as far as rates are concerned.
But I think it's sort of the thecommonality phrase of it
depends. It depends on a lot ofthings.

That's why this markets. I mean, the industry is
so interesting. I've been inthis for what, 30 years now, and
it's fascinating because you'vegot so many players, and it's
such a big it's, it's thebiggest niche market that we
have. It's about $500 billionand it's weird. It's, it's, I
used to give a presentationcalled truckload. Keep truckload
weird, um, because it hasdifferent behaviors. It's a

(55:32):
drive demand economies of scope,hundreds of 1000s of players. No
one sets the price. No one's aprice maker or or sets the
stage. Everyone's a taker. So ithas all these interesting
components to it. And it's beenthe play child of economics
professors and or for decades,because it's fun to play with.

(55:52):
You can do all these interestingthings. It's highly competitive,
and it's strangely deceptivelycomplex. It's, it seems simple,
but it's very complex.

Unknown (56:03):
Well, I think that's a perfect place to it's sort of a
mic drop moment. But one lastquestion here, is there anything
that you feel is important tomention that we haven't already
talked

about? No, I think you've hit most
everything. I mean, it's it'ssuch a big industry, and there's
a lot of everyone is a littlebit different. Every ship is a
snowflake. Every broker has adifferent angle, every carrier
has a different area ofexpertise. But what makes it
interesting is really findingthe puzzle piece to fit them all
together. Where does it makesense to use which different
asset, which different type ofrelationship? And so, like I

(56:35):
said, it's been a veryinteresting industry over the
last 20 years, and even more soin the last five years has
technology has changed. I talkedto the President of oida, the
owner operator, independentdrivers Association, and he was
describing trucking in the 70s,and he said, you pull into like
Chicago, you stop it at thelocal truck station, and figure

(56:56):
out where the address is, andsee if anyone there knows where
the heck you're going. And youlook on a map now carriers, an
owner operator, has the marketin their pocket on a smartphone.
I mean, with D 81 all thoseother things, load boards, you
can see the whole market. So oneof the things that's
contributing to this morestability, equilibrium I've been
talking about is technology.
Carriers are much betterinformed and have much it's much

(57:18):
more frictionless than it hasever been before. So is that
leading to less volatility?
We'll see. We'll see, but it'san interesting time to be in
this industry. So, Blythe saint,thank you for having me on
today. Absolutely,

Unknown (57:33):
knowledge is power, and you are definitely sharing a lot
of those gems throughout thisentire conversation. So So
Chris, where can folks followyou? Follow more of your work,
all that good stuff. Just

go to D, A T. I'm the Chief Scientist there. So we
do a freight vine podcast everytwo weeks. Just Google freight
vine and I'll pop up. Or you cando capital at MIT, and you can
find me there. Amazing.

Unknown (57:55):
This was I wrote down a post it note of all of the great
timestamps of really good quotesduring this conversation. So
it's quite full on my post itnotes. So thank you again.
Chris, Great.
Glad to be here.
I hope you enjoyed this episodeof everything is logistics, a

(58:15):
podcast for the thinkers infreight, telling the stories
behind how your favorite stuffand people get from point A to
B, subscribe to the show, signup for our newsletter and follow
our socials over at everythingis logistics.com and in addition
to the podcast, I also wanted tolet you all know about another
company I operate, and that'sdigital dispatch, where we help
you build a better website. Now,a lot of the times, we hand this

(58:38):
task of building a new websiteor refreshing a current one off
to a co worker's child, aneighbor down the street or a
stranger around the world, whereyou probably spend more time
explaining the freight industrythan it takes to actually build
the dang website. Well, thatdoesn't happen at Digital
dispatch. We've been buildingonline since 2009 but we're also

(58:58):
early adopters of AI automationand other website tactics that
help your company to be acentral place, to pull in all of
your social media posts, recruitnew employees and give potential
customers a glimpse into how youoperate your business. Our new
website builds start as low as$1,500 along with ongoing
website management, maintenanceand updates starting at $90 a

(59:21):
month, plus some bonus freightmarketing and sales content
similar to what you hear on thepodcast. You can watch a quick
explainer video over ondigitaldispatch.io, just check
out the pricing page once youarrive, and you can see how we
can build your digital ecosystemon a strong foundation. Until
then, I hope you enjoyed thisepisode. I'll see you all real

(59:43):
soon and go jags. You.

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