Paul Hicks

Discussing Paul's Journey from the 80s with liner carriers into a niche trade into Australia and the markets that serves. Heavy equipment and automobiles. 

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Transcript

Jeff Davis: 0:53

Welcome everybody to another episode of Chain Reaction. Super excited today to talk with Mr. Paul Hicks. We're gonna talk about. One of the cooler parts of logistics, we're gonna talk about break bulk. I've been involved in a couple of break bulk projects not nearly to the extent that I want but that's because it is reserved for cool people and I'm a bit of a nerd. So we're gonna talk to somebody who. Is in this every day. Mr. Paul Hicks. Paul, please introduce yourself.

Paul Hicks: 1:37

Hi everybody. My name is Paul Hicks. I'm commercial sales with Helm and Ocean. We are the world's largest railroad carrier. We have 130 ships at sailed around the world. My job is, is to put brake bulk project cargo on the high heavy decks on these ships. So essentially our business model is. The OEMs, which is like Ford, Chrysler, John Deere, caterpillar, they drive the trades for these vessels. And then we fill out the rest of the space on those vessels with brake bolt project cargo, which typically is the highest paying freight on the ship. it's much more interesting cargo than the usual containers So every project is different. Every piece of cargo, is unique in some way. it takes a lot of a hands-on operational type sales. I spend a lot of time down at the terminal crawling all over the cargo visiting with customers, going on site where the cargo originates, that sort of thing.

Jeff Davis: 2:28

So Paul, how did you get into this business? How long you been doing this?

Paul Hicks: 2:31

Been ocean since 1988. I was 20 years in containers. And I don't know if for, for me, the container business, a lot of people liked it. I, I, I tended to bore me. It was kinda the same thing over and over again. I did do a lot of outer gauge cargo when I was with Maersk. So we did a lot of cargo to the Middle East which would be like drill rig equipment. Drill pipe, all that sort of thing. So that's when I first dipped my toe in the waters as it were. I then, after 20 years in the business, I ended up with a small break bulk broker. There was four people in our office and we were brokering project cargoes to various What we call Lolo carriers, we can load on load off traditional brake bolt ships. Did that for about three and a half years. And while we were doing that, we started loading cargo on hoag vessels, which are big row row ships. And we found that, that using what we call mafi traders, these load traders that can be towed on and off the ships, we can, we can load cargo. It's below deck. Guaranteed there is no weather deck on these ships. And we found it to be extremely effective, cost effective for the customer as well. So it worked out quite well. So I ended up working for Ho. For about four and a half years my main competitors was Linus Wilhelmsen, and then all of a sudden I ended up at Linus Wilhelmsen.

Jeff Davis: 3:47

Isn't that funny how that works?

Paul Hicks: 3:48

Competing against the customers I, I took from Linus when I was at Hogue, so had to try to get'em, get'em all back. So, so that's kind of the, the, the short story on how I ended up in the business.

Jeff Davis: 3:59

So you were doing, I, I'm just very curious. So you running a bunch of break bulk. To the Middle East, like drill pipe and all that. Yeah. That you said that was in the eighties, nineties.

Paul Hicks: 4:08

we moved a lot of flat rock cargo outta Houston. Merc had a direct service into the Middle East, so there was a lot of oil and gas equipment going that direction. So we would move what we call like Christmas trees, which is the, the wellheads. We, we moved drill rigs, we moved all sorts of equipment. And then as, as the equipment changed, we got into the frack truck business. Moving those units. We did a lot of seismic seismic boats for that matter, up into to Russia. These are these big pontoon boats that, that Drop seismic charges to, to determine where the oil is. Then using the feedback to find out where the oil is. So we did a lot of that. It was interesting. It, it kind of, the, the only issue we have with contenders is, is The dynamic of the business is it's a box business. The flat rack cargo made a lot of money, but it was never the primary business on those ships. And when the trades got tight, the containers took precedent over the flat rack cargo. Even though it paid well there was a lot of handling involved. So it was, fairly expensive to do as well. But a lot of fun. We had a lot of, good times with it,

Jeff Davis: 5:08

and did that, you know, you talked about the trades tightening up. Mm-hmm. Is, is that Middle East, obviously Russia's a different kind of beast, but. Did that trade tighten up? I know nineties and two thousands. I was in high school and college. But did that trade tighten up because it. You know, I've, I've not seen that blow up since I've been in the business.

Paul Hicks: 5:33

Now. It, the, the container business, it was fairly depending on the trade, the, the part of the world you were going to. It it got pretty tight in, in a couple places in the Middle East was booming at the time. What was driving that? Usually oil and gas. Those ships were always full. And then the ships going to the far east, were, were usually fairly full with synthetic resin and that sort of thing. And of course, way back then, the container lines had what we called conferences, which is where several carriers would work with at a conference structure and have set rates that they all abided by. And they would have committees that would then set these rates. So it was fairly controlled. When they deregulated the container business, all the conferences disappeared, and then it was a free for all. And then when the free for all hit, that's when the rates began to drop. That was in late nineties, early two thousands. And then that, that whole market became just everybody was trying to build ships as fast as they could. Their rates never could seem to recover before somebody put more ships out on the market. So the the supply of vessels and containers always outstripped the demand, and so most lanes in the world it was difficult to make any money, quite frankly. I, it fluctuated, it just depended on, on the global economy, but it was a tough business to be in for quite some time except for 2021. When that hit that affected every mode of transport for the ocean, including us. We, we got a ton of, of overflow from the container side of the business. When those ships filled up with containers like I said, they would, they would push all the flat rack out of gauge of cargo off the ships. So all of a sudden our phone trays, we were already fairly full, began ringing like crazy, and everybody was trying to push a lot of that cargo that had formally moved on. Container ships onto our vessels. Then we got a lot of overflow from the, what we call the Lolo side of the business, the true brake bulk vessels where they, you know, lift cargo over the rail with the crane the old fashioned way. Those guys after the pandemic about 10% of the global Lolo fleet was tied up moving containers. Yeah. The container carriers were chartering those Lolo vessels and filling them with containers. So that pulled about 10% of the global fleet out of, of the global market, which then. All of a sudden we had that overflow as well coming in our to our doorstep. So Yeah, we, the pandemic, when it hit us, our, our O E M business, which is what we call it, which is the wheeled cargo, which is the forge, is the General Motors, the, the caterpillar that dropped off about 30% during that first year of the pandemic, which was probably what, 2020 the following year. It recovered immediately and then skyrocketed. And all of sudden our, our We were 80% over the targets for, for the previous year on particularly on break bulk project cargo.

Jeff Davis: 8:15

To, to clarify, when you're talking about Ford and gm Are you, are you discussing their, their automobile division or is there another

Paul Hicks: 8:24

division? Yes, they're, they're automobiles. Automobiles. We, we really have the, the, what we call the O E M business, the original equipment manufacturer business. There's two, two subsets of that. You've got the automobile manufacturers, which is four General Motors, Chrysler, all those guys. Then you've got what we call a high heavy cargo, which would be John Deere, caterpillar link belt, all those guys. What we do is we sign big contracts with all these, these big customers. And and then they're given certain allocations on the vessels in the trades, and it essentially drives the trade. It tells us how many ships to put in any particular trade. And these are regular liner services. So our, our service to Oceania, for example, Australia, New Zealand might have, you know, seven ships in the trade that go on a rotating basis, hit the same ports over and over again. So what happened with the pandemic when, when the, the market dropped off? The biggest issue was the microchips, if you recall. Those big plants in China shut down. And so they couldn't put, couldn't get any microchips to operate the vehicles, but they didn't stop building the vehicles. They built, built them, and, and then put them all over the place in storage, waiting for the microchips to come back. So when the microchips came back, all of a sudden we were flooded with all the contract car contracted customers with all this cargo way above their, their usual allocations. And it continues to this day. We are still playing catch up on a lot of the trades for for that for that pandemic slump as it were. Yeah, so it's been interesting for sure.

Jeff Davis: 9:47

Yeah, I imagine, and, and it's like you said, it's. Not your normal containerized cargo that, you know, a, a lot of the US consumer. Kind of think of, think so. Right? Right. You as consumer, we order something on our phone and it shows up at our doorstep. This is the opposite. This is what drives economies and so let's talk about ocean. Mm-hmm. What is ocean? Mm-hmm.

Paul Hicks: 10:20

Oceana would, is, one of our biggest trade lands is it's Australia, New Zealand. Yeah.

Jeff Davis: 10:25

What's, what's going on there?

Paul Hicks: 10:27

It's a difficult trade to operate in because it's such a long way from anybody. And the highest cost on any vessel is the bunker fuel. So when you, when you have trades that go long distances you spend an extremely large amount of money on bunker fuel, so, You have to be committed to it, and you have to, to be able to have rates that will support vessels in that trade. The other thing with Australia that, that is, that is difficult for a lot of carriers to operate in is they are very conscious, conscious of any non-indigenous. Plant life or animal life being introduced into the country? If you go back into the history of Australia I, I want to think there was a, at some point, the, the entire island is where did not have rabbits I think is, is what it was. And somehow rabbits got introduced into the, to the ecology of, of, of Australia w with very little in the way of natural predators. And they It, it just destroyed a lot of ecosystems. So a Australia has, has such a, a, a different ecosystem than the rest of the world that they're very strict about certain things getting in there. So, for example this, there's a, a, a stink bug that you've probably seen in your backyard. Mm-hmm. It's very common in Europe. It's common in the United States. They do not have them in Australia. So we, we have is what we call a stinkbug season that runs from April to September where we all the cargoes have to be fumigated before they go on a vessel to make sure that no stink bugs get transmitted to Australia. If then when the ships get to Australia, they inspect them before they are allowed to To pull up to the dock. When that happens, they if they find any stink bugs, then the ship has to be essentially quarantined at anchor and the entire vessel fogged to ensure that none of these stink bugs get Unsure. So the, the short story is that, that it, it causes, you know, if your ship is in a regular rotation, it's sitting seven to 10 days at anchor waiting to be fumigated again. You've thrown your whole schedule off. And now that on top of that, we've had this year a case where if cargo isn't cleaned properly, it can have non-indigenous seeds for plant life that's not indigenous to, to Australia. And they found several vessels with seeds on them. And so now there's about, we have some severe problems in Australia. All the poor terminals have About 80% of their capacity is taken up by cargoes in quarantine while they cleaned them to make sure that no seeds. So that's causing severe delays at all the ports from Australia now for vessels waiting to get into the terminals at it each, you know, if we call'em Freemantle, Brisbane. Melbourne you know, a couple other terminals. Each port has a delay of, of four or 5, 6, 7 days or longer. So now you've got the whole system thrown off track. So yeah, it's, it's difficult part of the world to do business in. And, and of course our, our business is booming down and we've got people begging for space that we simply don't have because we can't get enough ships to operate with all the delays that are, that are being caused by,

Jeff Davis: 13:33

I can remember going, and this is several years ago just trying to, to network and meet some people going to the, the Houston Australia Chamber of Commerce. There was a Chamber of Commerce meeting and we hosted some folks from Australia. And they were doing their presentation. On business in Australia and Sure. They, held up a document and just be sure to fill this out. we're a little particular. About some things that come in, so we just wanna make sure you check all the boxes. Right, right. I, and I had not done anything to that point, but afterwards I remember shipping something to Australia and it was a nightmare. Yeah. And I, I was thinking those people misled us a little bit. I felt like they, they were, they were. A little bit underestimating how difficult that procedure was and not discussing how difficult it was gonna be, if it, to your point, if seeds were found or mm-hmm. I'm curious. What is, what is your, do you have any stories, and maybe it's not Australia, gimme a nightmare story that you have. This is tales from the supply chain Frontline. Oh Lord. The nightmare story. A nightmare

Paul Hicks: 14:51

story. Just, well, one of the most recent stories I could, I can tell you is These vessels, you know, our railroad ships, the, the ramps that are on the, the, the stern quarter ramp is what we call it. It's, it's a ramp that lowers, that allows us to load cargo on and off the ships. A as you know, certain particular items on vessels, if that item isn't working, the whole ship shuts down. If the rear quarter ramp isn't operational, that ship cannot function. You can't get cargo offer on the ship. She's outta commission. So we had a case here while back where a vessel doesn't happen very often, but we had some problems with this, with the Stern quarter ramp. So as, as the vessel set sail from Galveston, she, she got out at Anchor and got a report back when that they'd done some testing while she was working. They did, they do testings on a lot of the systems and they found that, that the ramp had some serious issues with it. So they had to bring it back into the port. To work on that ramp. So that vessel had to pull back into Galveston. It was delayed, probably a good two weeks waiting to get repaired. In the meantime, we had loaded southbound for Brazil on that vessel. Two of these ROVs, the remote operated vehicles that the oil companies used to send down to the seabed floor to work on wellheads these offshore platforms. These Essentially robots that they're, that are tethered to the vessels, I think you've seen'em on TV before are worth i, I don't know, 10, 15 million each. And we had two of'em on the ship and the customer decided that they wanted to get'em off that vessel. Problem is we couldn't get the ramp down and she was at a dock getting repairs where we couldn't put the ramp down. There wasn't space to do it. So after about three days of, of going back and forth with the client, the client. Going to a magistrate in Houston had the arrested. So typically that only happens if a vessel owes money at a terminal. And is, is, is deep in deep, deep, deep in debt. I've never seen a vessel arrested for any other reason other than non-payment debt. I,

Jeff Davis: 16:54

I've never even heard of

Paul Hicks: 16:54

that. I, but the, you could, you could literally have a vessel arrested and that's what happened. They arrested the vessel. So then what happened was we, we it stirred up a, a huge S storm chain of events? Yeah. Big S storm. We, we ended up having our legal department, Stockholm on the phone with us trying to figure out what to do. Those guys said, look just move the ship to another location and figure out how to get that cargo off. So, We moved it to another BER that we found, we ended up finding a way to lower that ramp and pulled those two pieces off the ramp and then put it back up the cost to our company to do that. For, for those two small ROVs would probably took the, the space of less than a 20 foot container. Yeah, they're not

Jeff Davis: 17:39

big, they're not big items.

Paul Hicks: 17:41

No, no. Was probably at least 200,000 or more, maybe$250,000 to deal with that issue. Mm-hmm. So so yeah, sometimes you can come up against something you've, that you've never seen before and it can be super expensive. So that one had me, had me nervous, so. Wow. Yeah, that was, that was nuts. That happened probably, I dunno, three, four months ago if that happened. Really. Yeah, that this was, this was a recent a very recent mishap that we had with that ship. Of course, then they repaired the ramp and she's in service now. I was on her actually about three weeks ago. She was back in Galveston, and I was on board with the customer showing'em the vessel. So yeah, it worked out in the end, but, but yeah, it cost us a, a pretty penny to do that. But it's just, you know, the cost of doing business. Sometimes these things happen and there's nothing can do. But, but shipping is an expensive proposition. A lot of people think it's, I think we spoil a lot of customers. They're so accustomed to like container lines with their weekly services or, or our, you know, our, our twice monthly services. And they usually move pretty well, almost like clockwork. Then when something happens It it, it create, it could create a huge problem for those clients when they're, when they're used to getting such good service. But it's still, it's a risky business. I mean, storms in the Pacific and you name it, we've seen it. And then I, we still get things happen that, that we've never seen before that pop up like this, having this vessel rested. So That's crazy,

Jeff Davis: 19:03

man. Yeah,

Paul Hicks: 19:04

it was nuts. It was nuts. We had a, we had a situation on the West Coast, south America, San Antonio, Chile, where vessels were being delayed for two weeks because last summer there were several huge typhoons in the Pacific. These typhoons would cause a century like a, a. A bathtub, if you're sloshing that water around the entire Pacific Ocean starts sloshing around with all this, this wave action. It causes such a heavy swells coming into the west coast of South America. We literally could not get the ships into, into the terminals in San Antonio, Chile, which is one of our biggest ports. It, it's not a very protected Port. So the ships would have to wait until the ocean, the motion of the ocean calmed down enough to get the ships in and out, and it caused massive delays as vessels tried to get in and out of the port. And that lasted for about six weeks. So that was something we, we had not anticipated. And then we ended up doing this. We, we just shift the vessels to another port called Eureka. Chile and discharge there Instead. When we do that, the customers are, are simply at the, it's force majeure. They're simply at, at the mercy of of the sea. And they have to take receipt in Enka, Chile and then truck it to wherever it needs to go. If it's going back to San Antonio and then they have to truck it back to San Antonio. So that's sort of the. Unexpected things that could happen out of the blue.

Jeff Davis: 20:19

Yeah. You know, you're always on your feet, right? Yeah. Or on your toes. Yeah.

Paul Hicks: 20:23

Yeah. We do a lot of dancing.

Jeff Davis: 20:25

So you went into Covid and kind of the effect Yeah. On, on Will, will Henny and Will Helmon, I hope I say that right. Yeah. What do you foresee? I mean, I know that there's some backlog. You and I talked, I think, at the event last month, right? About the, you know, your guys kind of business right now. What do you see is the next year, three year, five year, how do you foresee maybe the industry on the great bulk side or, or maybe just you guys.

Paul Hicks: 20:54

It seems to be still pretty robust. We had, we had thought that with that we would clear out the backlog that we had. We were hoping that would happen. By the end of last year, we were still experiencing the backlog of cargo. We keep hearing that the global economy is gonna slow down, but it doesn't seem to be one of the things we're seeing is particularly a equipment. The precious metals markets when they, when they when those prices start to go up and the mining activity increases. And, and what you find is that the, the, the shelf life of equipment for particularly oil and gas and the mining equipment just isn't very long. I. When you buy your automobile many times, you, you, you can keep it 10, 12 years or longer without any problem. These big mining trucks and, and dredges and all that stuff, it doesn't last near as long as, as, so what happens is if, if you've got an interruption in the supply of that type of equipment, which we had with Covid backlog, You've also got a market that's, that's starting to boom again, both oil and gas and, and minerals. So so yeah John Deere and Caterpillar and all those guys are making record profits because they're building their, their, their machineries fast as they can and trying to get it out. And it looks to us based on forecast that's gonna continue through the end of 2023 and into 2024 at this point. We've not seen any slow down really on on much of anything at at the moment. It may a little bit of a plateau in the AR markets, just a little bit uncertain.

Jeff Davis: 22:21

Well let's, let's kind of put that together, right, Uhhuh, what are the precious metals being used for?

Paul Hicks: 22:29

Well, one of the biggest things being used for is these is the batteries. Oh. For electric vehicles. Oh, okay. So,

Jeff Davis: 22:35

yeah. So we have to, we have to. I'm just, yep. So we need,

Paul Hicks: 22:41

yep. That

Jeff Davis: 22:42

market is boom. Yeah. So we need to mine that because there's, yep. A mandate. Mandate. So you gotta, okay, so gotta

Paul Hicks: 22:50

heavy of the equipment. One of the new, yeah. One of the new commodity sectors we're looking at for imports from Asia is lithium ion batteries, lithium for vehicles, and for these, what we call mega packs. They're, they're building these giga farms, I think they're called, where Instead of when the wind turbines, when the wind's not blowing and you then you draw your power from a gas power plant. They're putting stacks and stacks of batteries on, on these farms, as it were, that store electricity as, as the wind is blowing. And then when the wind stops, these things then put the, the, the, the power back out into the electric grid. I think Tesla's at the forefront of that. And we're, we're doing a lot of work on putting some contracts together to move these, these mega packs inbound from Asia. I, I, I believe they're building a big plant near Corpus Christi, one of these gigga factories, whatever. So wow. That's, that's the next big thing. And of course, all those things require those batteries require a lot of expertise and materials to, to build them and, and all that good stuff. So yeah, that's the next big, big push in the global market is battery powered vehicles mega packs. You know, the, the whole changeover to electric power that we're seeing coming in the next 20 years is, is changing the face of shipping just like everything else. So how so? Well, the other thing that we're seeing is, is all the carriers are, are trying to move to zero carbon emissions.

Jeff Davis: 24:10

Oh, I, yeah, you're right.

Paul Hicks: 24:12

You're right. That's, that's the next big thing for us is trying to figure out ways to to reduce our carbon footprint. Because we're being, I've,

Jeff Davis: 24:19

I've seen, I know c m A has, has been begun. Mm-hmm. I mean, they've already got several vessels out that are They're burning a different fuel, right? Yeah.

Paul Hicks: 24:29

Alternative fuels. Yeah. There's a lot. L

Jeff Davis: 24:31

n G, they're l

Paul Hicks: 24:31

n G, right? Yeah. L and g. They've got some vessels running off ammonia. They've got all kinds of new plans in place. We have a, what's called the Orel project, which is believe it or not, after all of these years a new way of putting sails back on ships so that they can be powered by the wind as they were back in in the old days. That's nuts. Yeah, on my emails there is a, a, there's a link at the bottom of my signature line. If you click that link, when I send somebody an email, it'll pull up this Orel project and what these, these ships look like. And the, the sails are not what you, you expect to see. They're, they're different and they're retractable because of course when you're at sea, you extend your sails all the way up, but most, most ports in the world now, you have to get under, you know, bridges to get into several ports. So you're what we call the air draft on a vessel has to be low enough to get those vessels back in, into the ports that currently exist. So you have to have ways for those, those towers as they are on the ships with the sails to, to lower back down. So yeah, that's one of the big push now is to figure out a way to make that a viable alternative. They would continue to have, you know, regular power, but but if we could, if we could harness 30, 40, 50% of the ship's power from the wind instead of from Fuels or anything else that, that is, is a huge impact on the footprints we're being required to do this chiefly driven by our customers. We have huge accounts like, like Bechtel for example that has, has come to us and said, you know, they're, when they do their global bids, they're having to put in that bid a carbon footprint for the entire project, which means then they have to reach out to every single vendor they have and find out what the carbon footprint is from that vendor. So they can do the math and put it all together. Yes.

Jeff Davis: 26:25

I had to do the same

Paul Hicks: 26:25

thing. Yeah. And all the carriers are, are

Jeff Davis: 26:28

every, well not just all the carriers, every supplier. It has to do with the E S G. Yeah. The, the E S G throughout the supply chain. Yep, yep. Meaning just all over in your e s G score. Mm-hmm.

Paul Hicks: 26:44

So that's good. That's changing the face of shipping as well. So changing the

Jeff Davis: 26:47

face of

Paul Hicks: 26:48

everything. Everything really. Yeah. At the end of the day yeah. Does that mean costs will go up? Likely. Yeah. Absolutely. I. These new technologies are not cheap, and, and shipping wasn't cheap already. So so yeah, it's, it, I think it will have some impact on the cost to move goods around the world initially until these technologies become,

Jeff Davis: 27:10

well, I would say, I mean, since you just asked for my opinion that's, it's. I think it's going to be, you know what? What did everybody talk about during Covid, right? Is this the new norm? That that's always the thing, right? And they talk about inflation. Is this the new norm? I think that will be a matter of putting the frog in the boiling water. I. And mm-hmm. Is there, there's gonna be some expense normalization. We don't know what it's gonna be, right? I don't know how high. And then you're gonna have your market disruptors who come in and they figure out a way to reduce some costs somewhere. Right? But nobody knows anything I know at our organization, they were ahead of that, that, that carbon footprint thing, right? So when companies come to us and ask, we're ahead of it. We're like, we got you covered. So it's, that's one benefit we have of well, that I have of working for a massive organization. Yeah. Yeah. So last question. Sure. What movie do you watch over and over again? Oh, Lord. It doesn't mean you just watched it, it just means, you know, several. Yeah. Oh, me too, me too. I, I, I

Paul Hicks: 28:28

tell you, there was one I watched the movies that surprised me the most, that I, that I, you know, I, I turned on the TV one time and there's a movie that had come on called V for Vendetta. I'd never heard of it, and I, it's, Two minutes into the show. I just started watching this, this, this is that a Clint Eastwood movie? No, no, no, no. It's not. It's, it's a, it's essentially about a guy. He wears a guy, Fox Mask guy. Guy Fox was the guy that tried to blow up Parliament back in, I don't know, 1480. I don't when it was several hundred years ago. They have a guy day in England now where they kind of celebrate this sort of anti-establishment Guy that, that tried to blow up a part of it way back in the day. As, as a protest against, I guess the monarchy. I, I don't know all the details, but anyway, the essential, the essential story of the movie is the guy wears a mask because he, he was horribly burned and experiment at, at some point. As you go through the film, he, the world, it's sort of an alternate universe where, where the world has become very authoritarian where England is being run by a dictator essentially. And this guy leads a revolution against that, against that, that dictator. But it fascinated me because the guy wears a mask through the entire film. You never see the actor's face and how that actor could, could, could flesh out a character like he did. So thoroughly and convincingly with how you've ever seen his face just fascinated me. That's a movie I I, when it comes on, on, I, I have to, to sit and watch it again and again to, to, to watch this, this performance from this one particular actor that, that that yeah, it, it still fascinates me. So yeah, when I come across it, I watch it every single time. No kidding? Yeah. To get a chance. Watch

Jeff Davis: 30:03

that. Oh, all I hit was v. Did it pop up? And it popped up. That's amazing vendetta. Yeah. It's, it's a good, well, they're, they're, obviously everybody's listening. Yeah.

Paul Hicks: 30:14

Yeah. There you go. Not

Jeff Davis: 30:16

a lot of big names in this, but you're talking about Hugo Weaving? Yeah. Hug. Oh, Natalie Portman.

Paul Hicks: 30:22

Natalie Portman in, yes. Yes. She does a she gives a terrific performance in it. Yeah. So I will, and I, I think Gary, I think Gary Oldman's in the film, he, he plays the the dictator, I believe.

Jeff Davis: 30:34

I don't know, but I don't see Tim p Joe Smith, Rupert Graves. Mm-hmm. I don't recognize any of the other guys. John

Paul Hicks: 30:42

Hurt. John Hurt. I'm sorry. That's what it was. Not, not. Yeah, it was John Hurt was the one that plays the plays, the the dictator as it were in the film. Mostly English. It's an English film. It's English actors. Oh. It's

Jeff Davis: 30:52

farewell. Done. I don't know that I could wa I can't watch, I can't watch movies with English accents. Well, they're, it's not, they're not real thick. I'm purely

Paul Hicks: 31:00

American. Yeah. They're not real thick English accents. It's, it's not like it's like, not like Downton Abbey, you know, you kind of like have to turn the subtitles on to make sure you can follow. That's a

Jeff Davis: 31:08

joke with me and my kids. I tell'em they're not allowed to watch Harry Potter.'cause I can't handle the, the accents. Oh, the accent.

Paul Hicks: 31:15

That's funny. I'll confess, I've turned on the subtitles before in a few English I have

Jeff Davis: 31:21

to, I have to, yeah. Yeah. What's going on, guys? Right? What are they saying? Yeah. Yeah. They, they,

Paul Hicks: 31:26

yeah, they talked about that help to speak American. Yeah.

Jeff Davis: 31:29

Yeah. Right. I just lost any potential audience I have from my UK brothers. Your uk? Yep. Yeah. No oil and gas for me. Yeah.

Paul Hicks: 31:37

There you go.

Jeff Davis: 31:39

So well, awesome. Hey, Paul, appreciate it, man. How do, how do, how do folks get in touch with you?

Paul Hicks: 31:46

They can reach me Paul dot Hicks at waal. It's w a l w i l.com, which stands for Linus Wilhelmson. You shoot me an email to that address that's the quickest, easiest way. Or we can go to linus wilhelmson.com and look at our website. Put up all kinds of information about our ships and where we go and how we do it. If you have any que anybody has any questions about shipping, just in general, or ro I mean, I'm happy to to chat with you on, on any subject.

Jeff Davis: 32:11

Yeah. Well, awesome. And we'll put your email in the show notes and, and make sure everybody knows how to get in touch with you. I appreciate Now, I feel like I learned a lot talking with you. You, you're an encyclopedia.

Paul Hicks: 32:24

I'm just, I've just been around too long. That's the problem.

Jeff Davis: 32:28

And will I see you next week? Yes. Awesome. Look forward to it. And as always, we are sponsored by Bridgestone Capital. Mm-hmm. If you guys are interested in passive income opportunities and commercial industrial warehousing apartments, any kind of commercial real estate, we do passive income for supply chain professionals. That's Chain Investor Pro. Go ahead and download that ebook. For supply chain professionals, that's chain investor pro by everybody. So listen, you're gonna be on a huge audience today, Uhhuh. You've got my mom? Mm-hmm. Maybe my sister. Okay. Neither of which are in, neither of which are decision makers. Right. So be excited. Okay