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Twitter- @bridgestonecap
https://www.youtube.com/@ChainReaction-vh7rm
www.bridgestoneinvest.com
Instagram- @jeffdavis_bridgestone
YouTube- JeffDavis_Bridgestone
Twitter- @bridgestonecap
https://www.youtube.com/@ChainReaction-vh7rm
www.bridgestoneinvest.com
Santa Claus engrouped here. Always fun to find out you're being recorded. The radio show the other day, it was obvious I was being recorded because it's radio, Yeah, but you're being recorded all the time. That's probably right. Let's be real. I know the iPhone takes a, like a infrared snapshot of your face, like every five seconds, right? Yep. You think? Is that true? Yeah, it's absolutely true. It's doing that facial recognition stuff. And and if you Google it, you can find videos where people I don't know what they're using. I don't know if they're using like nightglasses, night vision goggles or whatever to watch. And you see this little flash, you can see little videos on YouTube or whatever about the flash going up. Kind of frightening. I don't know if Android, you use Android, you're a green guy. Yeah. It's the last question of true, um, discrimination. Oh, you saw that bit? It's Apple users going, who the hell brought the green to this group. What is your house don't function properly. What was the article about robotics? You were talking about? Oh yeah. So I've always been like. Of the mindset, I was a fan of the George of the Jetsons not the George Jetsons the Jetsons when I was a kid And i've always been fascinated by the future, you know I would doodle in class and draw all these pictures of these futuristic cities and stuff that just were probably stupid looking I if I had to go back and look at them now and critique them But at the time I was fascinated by These future worlds where we could possibly live on other planets and where this world was, was all futuristic and in I guess in the future it wouldn't be futuristic. It'll just be today But the funny thing about it is my business partner quite well, and you know that we don't vote the same yeah, I don't know how you do it. I don't know how you do it But I love him But he called me the other day and he goes, man, I just did the most Republican thing I think I could have ever done. And I was like, pay taxes. You, you funded a homeless shelter. Or did you buy a diesel pickup and cut all the depth system out of it? What Republican thing are you talking about? How Republican do you think you are right now? Because I still see a hint of blue glowing from Tucson. But no, he he's the president of his homeowner's association, which, Like who wants that one time I ended up taking all the bylaws back to the secretary and saying, Hey, I had no idea that this was going to be such a shitty position. I just, yeah I'm battling mine right now. I didn't have the fortitude to handle it. So I I gave up my position. Anyway, he's on his And they voted to zone, rezone their neighborhood as an historical neighborhood. I said, why? And he said, because he's in New Mexico, right? He's in Arizona. Same difference. Is there anything historical about it? If they're really historical, are they, so they're giving it back to the Native Americans? This is the conversation we were having. Cause I was like, dude, I've been in your house. I said, you realize, I said, it's not like he's living in an old colonial mansion. It's like a two bedroom flat. If it's in Arizona, are they living in teepees? Maybe. Solve the homeless problem. But they have like real tent cities, no, man, no, that's a reservation. It's Arizona, right? That's their deal. Partly. I don't know if that, I don't know if they have that much Native American influence there anymore, but really more Mexico, but that's a whole different discussion for a different but the, he, they voted to do this so that it would reduce their property tax. It's like incredibly low, like stupid low. He wouldn't even tell me how low. And I said, do you realize that you just. I said, that's not a Republican thing to do. I said, that's just human. I said, I think that's just shortsighted. I said I wouldn't I said, as I said, and I'm not a card carrying Republican, but that's just generally how I vote. I said, I just being a conservative person, I don't think I would ever vote my neighborhood into being in a historical district because once you do that. Then everything you ever do to that house, if you want to put a new porch on it, if you want to repair any lighting, if you want to, everything has to go according to the historical code, you have to get a permit from the historical society to get that done. It's ridiculous. Paint. And so he was saying that he he goes I think I just pissed off my developer friends. Cause he had just made friends with this group of developers that were like going all over Tucson, buying up old decrepit buildings. I'm rebuilding, I'm knocking them down, building new ones, whatever. And I was like, yeah, you just basically cockblock them for a, 50 square miles or whatever, however big your neighborhood is. And since it was. I said, I said, dude, one of these days, I said, do you remember George Jetson or George Jet, the Jetson and all, oh, here's where the robotics thing comes in. Yeah, we're getting back. I'm, it's, it was a long, it was a long drive. It was a rabbit trail, bro, enjoy the journey. so he goes, yeah, I remember the cartoon. And I said I've always dreamed of living in a world like that. I said, now, realistically, now that I'm 50, I look at the world and see, okay. I can stream any movie I want to watch, but if you go two hours out to East Texas, they're still using Redbox because their latest technology is Blu ray or DVD player. Like they don't have, you don't have broadband networks in Rosebeck, Texas. It just, it just hasn't made it out there yet. And I don't know. It helped me realize that in the future, we are going to have those futuristic cities, but those are like, it's New York City, it's L. A., it's Dallas, it's Houston, it's the big metropolises that'll actually go that futuristic direction. You're still going to have people driving the 1965 Plymouth down a two lane highway in rural East Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, whatever. And you're never going to be able to get a society that's 100 percent on board with Future. Just look at it now. Look at the cars going down the road, right? You've got a Tesla next to a 64 Impala and it's Yeah. And it's crazy, but it's all here. And and so it all happens in different phases. Robots not gonna lie, scared the crap out of me because I've seen too many movies. Have you? I'll let you finish and then I'm going to go on top of that. Okay. So there was a movie that came out a couple of years ago Terminator. No, that's a pretty scary robot. I'm not gonna lie. But then you realize it's just Arnold and and it's like not that scary anymore. Isn't that funny? But but no, there was a movie that came out uh, me, robota me something, I don't know. It was a guy that was trying to build the first, he was like some eccentric billionaire and he was building the first ai robot. And he invites, he has this contest of all his employees and brings brings one of his staffers in to test it. Like he's going to have conversations with her. He's going to interview her and all this other stuff. And we're trying to find it now. Yeah. And it's. It's terrifying because she manipulates the kid into thinking that the creator is evil, doing evil things. And so he ends up killing his boss, spoiler alert, and and she ends up Either killing the kid or locking him in a room or something like that. And then she takes off to the new world goes out into like general society. That's the end of the movie is she's taken off on a company helicopter because the helicopter operator doesn't know she's not a real person. And it's and so that kind of stuff scares the crap out of me. And so I saw this article that was posted on LinkedIn about the future of robotics. And it started talking about. How it's getting really scary good, especially with AI, because if you and I go, we have to go learn a task, right? Whether that's building widgets, I go learn to build the widget. I get certified to build the widget. Now I get certified as a trainer to build widgets. So now I've got to come to you and now you've got to go through the same cycle I went through so that I can build widgets. We're in the future of humanoid robots. I think that is. Did you get that from me? No, I just looked it up on LinkedIn. I emailed it to you. Oh, did you? Yeah. It's in your message, but that might be it. I don't recognize it. No, they didn't talk about Star Wars. Ah, Ex Machina. That's the name. They'd mentioned the movie. Ex Machina. Look at that, Ex Machina. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. If you want, you can look that up. Yeah. Scary as hell, but I've watched it twice now because it's fascinating. Just the whole thought of it, but the Holy grail of robotics now Oh, so back on topic. So instead of robots don't have to recertify each other, if they're on the same network, once one of the robots learns that whatever function is, they can immediately share it across the army of robots if they're on the same network. So now they all have that skill immediately. That's scary. A little bit. It's cool. If you've got, if you own a Ford manufacturing plant. Yeah. And all your employees are either striking or retiring, and you need to replace them real quick. All you got to do is teach one, one robot how to do it, that robot shares that information and now you've got a whole fleet. But the holy grail of robotics is to create one that people can use as a personal assistant at their house for less than 50 grand Yeah you just you know, I have five kids so that helps me. That's why I don't need that personal assistant They're not less than 50 grand that's why I can't afford the 50 grand but they're mouthy. They're real mouthy Do talk back a lot. Yeah. So here's where you're, here's what you hit on like the humans with that gap of how we process information is that's what Musk is. working on with Neuralink is he's trying to bridge the gap between the humans and how machines, machines are super fast, right? Lightning fast at processing information. Humans are slow. Neuralink is going to bridge that gap. Not in our lifetime, probably, but it is the start. That's scary stuff. Dude, you should hear him talk about it in an extended interview or two. It is pretty daunting. It is a daunting situation, what that Neuralink is. Going to do where it is legitimately the humanoids, right? Like we're it's breeding our next race. So I don't like to think about it too much. Let's talk about shipping. Where do you think they're building these robots and can we get them on airplanes? So here's where my mind went when I read the article was let's talk about finance. Finance. Let's underwrite these 50, 000 robots. Yeah. Of your payment plans. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So what bank is going to finance them? And 50 G's is not going to, the McDonald's worker, which I'm sorry, if you're not no more McDonald's worker, because McDonald's is outsourcing the robots now. And robots, because if you could pay 50, 000 one time, 25, 000 a year, your ROI is two years. Hey, and now you run your, there, there's already a robotics run. I want to say it's in Austin. I ran into a guy in Miami yesterday that told me that Austin was cleaned up. Yeah. They're saying that a lot. And he goes, yeah, man, they like, I said, what'd they do with the whole, the tent city and everything he goes, they cleaned it up. In Miami, the guy in Miami is saying that about Austin. He's from Austin. He was at a trade show next to my trade show. I was just there. I was just in Austin. I would say it looked pretty good. It was cleaned up the parts that I went to, and I went to some industrial parts. It didn't look bad. I told him because he was like, uh, where you live, I said, Houston, and I said, where are you? He said, Austin. And I was like, Oh, no kidding. I said, I spent two decades there. And he goes. Why'd you leave? And I said purposes of starting a shipping company. Yeah. It was mostly a oil and gas centric project centric, which happens in Houston, not Austin. But I've stayed out of Austin now that I work mostly remotely because it got too expensive. It got to California. And too bougie and too dirty. And the last couple of times I've been there, just going to dinner with a friend was like easily a hundred bucks a piece. And I'm like that's not necessary. We used to go to P Terry's buy a burger and fries for 499. Oh, it's a food to pay taxes on for anyone is expensive, bro. Oh, there's your messages. Yeah, I see it. Yeah, there you go. Humanoid robots. So it's projected to be like a trillion dollar industry by like 2030 or something ridiculous. That's why I was saying, let's get into the financing side. Yeah, you got some money to lend somebody defaults. On the robot you get the robot reset We like being a car dealer, man. Yeah I like it just be that middle man. Come on, man Why is it not over dude? Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. Why is technology hurting us right? Yeah, man Bitcoin to 68 000 again is loving it It's because I got out of it. It's because you got out of it Every time I get out it goes to 100 g when I get into it. It goes to three dollars I'm like i'm done with this You can't do that. You gotta hold. That's the trick. I was ready to jump off a bridge last year. Into oncoming traffic. Home life, man. We were talking about Bitcoin. Just kidding. Yeah. Yeah, I can't. I'm the cooler when it comes to investing in stocks, bonds crypto. David, what are you getting into? Whatever you get into, I'm gonna get into six months later. Exactly. I'm basically your short sale, right? So that's what I need to learn to do is I need to learn to short stocks. Cause that's where I'm going to make a fortune. It's Ooh, I like this stock. I'll be like the kid from Reddit. I just like the stock. So if I like it, it's going to fail, probably go out of business within a month. So I'll short it, invest all my money in, and then we'll do that. I can't find this guy's fricking article in my LinkedIn thing. It's like it posted and then he took it down or some nonsense. Oh, you think that's what's happening? There we go. It wouldn't open from your message. That's the deal. Abundance 360. I'm not going to lie. He seems like a bit of a cheese ball, but there's, and he's writing many articles about this. This was just one, there's going to be a series of articles about it. So I subscribed to him so that I could see the next ones that are coming out. But it's, if you look at what is it? Boston. Dawson Scientific that has like the dog, the robotic dog. Yeah. And the dude that looks like a spaceman, or it's not a dude, the robot that looks like a spaceman or something that can do backflips and stuff and like they can shove it and it won't fall down and because it has all this, these, servos and whatnot for balance. So where's the regulators on this, right? You've had some recent some recent run ins with local regulators and entrepreneurs. Where do you think they come in on robots taking people's jobs? I don't know because where's, where is Salem, Oregon officials going to stand on robots? If it's going to endanger the revenue of the trash haulers in the area, they're going to be a straight no. Robots. Insane. There's gonna be a hard line and yeah, it's, yeah. Very hard, hard line on robot purchases. Hard in Yeah. And also in, what was that You're dealing with New Jersey? Oh yeah. Robot. Robot sales in a couple of counties in the US will be low. Would it be too much of an expensive venture to put dust suppression equipment on your equipment? I'm like, ah, I've demoed this service with this equipment thousands of times, possibly tens of thousands of times in seven years, and I've never really seen a dust problem. That's not what I'm worried about. And they were like what if you hit like drywall? And I'm like okay, man, that could be dusty. If it's, put in there all willy nilly, I said, but but we have to be careful with things like that because if you put too much drywall in a bin, they won't haul it. It's too heavy. I said, that stuff's super dense. So anyway, I was like, you can come up with, my best example was the one out of Oregon where they said, do you check the container to make sure there's not a homeless person sleeping in it? Because we had a trash truck pick up a front loader and he heard a scream as he was dumping it into his truck. And I was like okay. Did this happen once or is this happening like daily? It's just the once so far. And I was like, then I'm not worried about it. I said, I call that an anomaly, but yes, part of our safe. Check the content. What so where were you this week? You said you were in Miami. Yeah, that's right. We talked yesterday. You were in Jacksonville. No, you called me from Miami. Yeah I was literally sitting in Miami at a some cafe or whatever on south beach. I was having a pre flight Cocktail, Jeff. I could be confused with my during flight Yeah, it was getting wherever you were. You were rowdy It was a rowdy situation. There was a lot of people. A lot of things going on. A lot of activity. Talking. That's where I met the guy from Austin. Yeah. You were in a rowdy situation. Virginia Logistics. Filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. That won't be the last. I think there's a lot of logistics people that are having a hard time right now. Q1 is always the suck hole for freight forwarding. I'm gonna guess that's a domestic provider. I'm guessing you're right. Because, called reefer and oversize loads you just weren't doing your job right. TBL Requisites. Are they doing They didn't have good salespeople, David. They did not. Or good route planners, or good pricing analysts, or. 49 creditors. No funds available for unsecured credit. Yeesh. I'm guessing those creditors are probably the actual trucking companies that they outsource to. And apparently loves travel stops as well. Why don't they just And the IRS. I'm gonna guess they're gonna get theirs. That's the That's a tough predator right there. I've had them as a predator before. I think the IRS, they're gonna find you. Yeah. Or your family. Or your assets. Yeah. Or You told the IRS you're filing bankruptcy. Good luck. They've had two bad crashes in 24 months. Is that what it said? That's what you highlighted. Oh, two injury crashes. I did highlight that. It wasn't intentional. That'll do it. Insurance prices are going up anyway. Oh, my gosh. So those two injuries. I don't know. The insurance game. Personal injury attorneys are known for enjoying court battles with trucking companies. Yeah, they do love to tout how they like to destroy trucking companies. So last night I was at a real estate event and I met an attorney, a commercial litigation attorney, young kid. I really liked him. We hit it off. He wants to partner on some deals there. Anyway, he was explaining he's a commercial litigation guy. So I confirmed it's just like the guys on suit. If you've ever seen suit, that's his deal, but he told me that the personal injury guys like the ones that make it the ones we see like the hammer and basically the TV guys, the top 5 percent when you make it in personal injury. You're not making millions. It's billions. I was like, are you kidding me, dude? He said, yeah. In the commercial litigation, which is him, he said basically I'll always have a safe, reliable income, right? I'm not gonna be a billionaire. But I will always have a very good income and a very powerful network. Like he's already got judges in his network. I'm like, Oh, okay. I like you. We, we ran into that issue what a year and a half ago when we had, um, the vessel that was at anchor. And we were getting detention and dead freight charges and all that. It was off the coast of Bangladesh. Yeah. And we had that issue where we ended up having to call. And this is why I'm fascinated about how many types of attorneys there are. It's crazy, right? Because we have a bankruptcy attorney. Crazy. We have a litigation attorney. We have A maritime attorney who referred us to another maritime attorney. And then some other kind of attorney, I can't remember what the other one was, but anyway, so there's four different kinds that we have, and we're a tiny little company and it costs us extra with a letter written and to just look through our files to prove that we didn't have any liability, that we weren't, it wasn't our fault. We did what we were. And, we ordered the vessel that they wanted and we got it there on time and dropped anchor because their paperwork wasn't completed. Their export paperwork wasn't completed. And and it was ugly. It was the most uncomfortable situation I've ever been in my 32 years. I'm obviously older than 30, but 32 years in logistics. So I was literally like sick. Couldn't eat couldn't hold on to anything, couldn't sleep. That all worked out though, right? It all worked out. It all worked out. Once we paid six grand to have this guy look through our correspondence and write a letter. And he wrote the letter and said I didn't do anything wrong and it'll be way more costly to try to get this mediated because you have to go to London. It's not, you can't do it in Houston. And And that's, that's according to the Maritime Law and the booking note that you've signed. It's a contract. It's a Maritime contract. So it was very dicey. We got through it. Ended up not losing the client. That's the biggest miracle. Yeah. They accepted responsibility for the things that were wrong on their side. And the thing about that is, Jeff, you guys, this is why, I would advise anybody to do. You heard the term eat the frog. Oh, it's a book. It's on my list. Yeah, because do the hardest thing first and then everything else is easy. Yeah. And if you are faced with something that is just so tense and it's just eating you alive, eat the frog. And I reached out to them, hadn't heard from them. We resolved the matter, but hadn't heard anything from them in probably two months. Called them up and I said, Hey, I'm coming to your neighborhood. I want to know if you'll sit down with me. I want to come to your office at the conference room. Like we always do. And they accepted. That was the first surprise. And I went out there. I literally sat down in the conference room. And I was like, what you got? Whatever you want to say, whatever you want to throw. If you want to like, waffle house this thing and throw a chair at me. Whatever it is. Let's do it. Let's do it. I grew up in a rough neighborhood. I can take that. And and they, we, I just, I had to do it. They weren't going to reach out. And because there was a whole lot of stuff said during that period of time that you can't take back as a, as Andrew and Richards would say, you can't put that shit back in the bowl. And it was it was it was a very tense time for everybody involved and it cost a lot of money. And it costs us all a lot of money. We ended up not going out of business. Thank God. Cause if they'd have settled us with the whole thing, I would be history. But that's, you have to do that. You have to hit tough situations headfirst and just say, give it to me. What's the worst thing you could say? The worst things you could have said, you said four months ago when we were fighting over this. So I'm not afraid of anything you can say now, but but that's just sales one on one anytime, Mistakes are going to happen, right? We've told how many people that we told us, Hey, things are going to go wrong. It's logistics. That's what happens. Especially. That's why I want five shipments to tests. Not one. Yeah. Statistically, only three of them are going to go well. Yeah. Yeah. And statistically, the first one was going to go poorly. That's the very first one we'll never see again. So make sure you ship something that wasn't that important. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're probably going to lose it. Just I'll give it to SIA or forward air. And we'll never hear from it. How it works. Run it through the UPS sort center and it'll come out the other side. And we always tell people, things are going to happen. What we do about it is what differentiates us from the competition. And what we're going to do is talk to you. Got to communicate. That's the key. Yeah. You have to communicate. Yeah. I've been writing these weekly articles for this company's customer of mine and I post on their intranet and it's generally sales related, but Do you want to say who it is? Are you allowed to try and get them some traffic and it's a company called Crusher Jeff. It's a oval compaction company. You might've heard about them. Yeah. Taking the world. Where could anybody find would they be able to find these insightful articles? You won't find the articles because they're all on the intranet. They're only shared within the the Crusher organization, but I can't bring them to the table because they apply to just about anybody. And and I can bring those to the table in future meetings of ours, because I think it, I write them. So of course I like them. I think they're pretty insightful though, on a lot of things that you run into in sales and whether it's overcoming objection or how to manage a salesperson, salespeople are very different people from operations people. Yeah. Yeah. Which is always, blow my mind why operations managers want the salesperson to write the SOP. I'm like, are you crazy? Oh, I love it. I love it. Yeah. I'll write it. You want us to don't come to me for questions. It's yeah, it's going to be like five bullet points. There's your SOP. There you go. Yeah. Why do you have questions? I wrote the SOP. It's but if you wanted, it's stuff like that. I think we'd probably get some traction talking about some of those things. I think that's a worthwhile set of topics and so far I've written about 30 of them. Cool. This has been fun. It has been fun. Thanks for the invite, pal. Yeah, we'll do it again. Let's do it again in like next week. Are you out of town next week? Mobile, Alabama. I'll be there until Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday evening. OB. Gulf Coast, baby. Oh yeah, Floribama, man. Although I won't get near Floribama, I'm actually going to be in Mobile proper, which is pretty boring. All right, I'll put your email in the show notes in case one of my few subscribers wants to see your cool sales newsletter. And if they want to learn more about Crusher. We'll talk again next week. We'll do this again. Cause this is fun. I'll be around. Maybe we'll make it next Friday. Same bat time. Same batch. Yeah. And then of course, everybody should know how to reach me. Jeff. Davis at Bridgestone invest. com. We'd be doing some real estate. That's some deals in the pipeline, man. I'm excited dealing Hempstead and then a storage facility in Conroe. Ooh, storage money printers. Oh man pretty stoked about that one. And then I got a pretty hot one in Hempstead, a 32 unit apartment. So could be coming together. I just want, one or two deals a year for 10 years. So maybe our next maybe our next thing we in vibe and some good bourbon and we get a little bourbon review while we talk about sales and whatnot, Eagle rare. I've got a gallon of it. Actually, when we did that expo, one of the sponsors gave me a bottle of bourbon. I gotta try it. I don't even know the name, but I'll have to give them a shout out. So I'll do that. Yeah, I'll sample it out. I'm not opposed to doing a bourbon sampling on a Friday afternoon. I've only ever not liked one major brand. No there's a couple. I don't like the rise. I can't drink. Too sharp. To me, a rye is more like a scotch. Yeah, I I'm completely off a scotch. Wow. We're going to get into a whole other thing and my time is going to run out. We'll save it for next week. Yeah. We'll save it for next week. We'll, we will get this thing going. All right, man. Have a good weekend, brother. You too. Later.