Unknown:
0:37
Blythe, all right, 321, welcome
Blythe Brumleve:
0:43
into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers and freight. I am your host, Blythe Milligan, and we are proudly presented by SPI logistics. And in the show, I want to have more of a different type of episode for this. Number one, I am fresh off manifest. And if you've ever been to manifest, the future of supply chain and logistics, held in Las Vegas around, you know, January, February timeframe for each of the last four years, then you know how long it could take to recover from this particular conference. And it's not necessarily like, you know, being in Vegas that definitely helps. I think also it's getting getting older, getting up there in age. But it takes a long time to recover from this damn conference. And so I am recording this, you know, about five days later than what I originally planned. I had ambitious goals of recording this content in the airport on the way back home, No, instead, I spent it trying to catch up on some much needed sleep from the conference, because it's just so impactful in more ways than one. Had more than 6000 people that attended, you know, dozens and dozens of companies, and it was held in the Venetian and so if you've never been to this conference, this is a conference that I will never miss. I've gone to it every single year since its inception, and it's gotten it's doubled in size, both in the people that attend, and then also the square footage of the expo floor, which is just a site to be seen. It's, you know, I often have have mentioned on this show, and in previous, you know, manifest focused episodes, that it was the first place that I walked into and could see the entire logistics process under one roof. So warehousing, maritime, you know, obviously, truckload, you know, all of these different facets, technology service providers under one roof. And it just, it was a big inspiration, of, you know, why I wanted to start this show, start this podcast, and so this, this really feels like sort of a great episode to give, sort of you know, my quick hitters on the main takeaways of what I got from the show, things that are in motion, things that are happening, and then a new thing, what I did this year as I also took solicitations from other companies that were going to be at the event. And so what I mean by that is, if you're listed as a podcast or a creator or any kind of media person in the manifest app, what they have is this just insane level of networking prior to the show taking place or prior to the event taking place. So me, as a podcaster, and I'm sure other creators, in speaking with other creators, they experience this as well. Where you are added to the manifest app, you get access to it a few weeks in advance, and so you can kind of start plotting out, like who you want to meet with, the sessions you want to go to, things like that. But if you're on the media side of things, you also have your email sort of opened up to every single sponsor that is part of manifest, and it's both daunting and incredibly rewarding, because you have to sort of navigate these waters of just filtering through information and figuring out where you need to spend your time. Another thing with manifest is that you have to prioritize who you're going to meet with and why, and because of the previous experience of going to all of the other previous manifest events, what I wanted to do this year is figure out a way that I can incorporate companies that send me all of these press releases without having to, you know, I have the bandwidth to interview them and talk to them For, you know a lengthy amount of time. Any listener to this show knows that all of our interviews are at least 30 minutes long. And so if you do the math, and you're getting, I would say, probably a dozen requests every single day, from the time to manifest app opens until damn near the the start of the event, you're getting press releases from all different corners of the logistics world, and as one person, I cannot keep up with all of it. So my idea for this year was, you know, having the Okay, so maybe I'll back up. My idea for this year was for everybody that I couldn't do a long form interview with. I wanted them, a member of their team, a subject matter expert, to submit a video anywhere from one minute to three minutes long, or a quote, you know, submit them to me, and then I will feature the best ones on a manifest episode recap. And so this allowed me to have you know these subject matter experts. Share exactly what they're thinking and what they're seeing right from the expo floor, and being able to share that with all of y'all. So I'll share a little bit more about that. Well, I guess I should just talk about it right now. So let's you know I'm the host, so I can make these decisions. And so for you know, a lot of these, I have 12345, I have several, nine. Sorry, I had to count again, because my eyes, you know, again, getting older, nine videos that were submit, that were submitted, and I'm currently in the process of uploading those to our YouTube channel. Technically, they will treat YouTube will treat these videos as shorts, because they just recently changed a rule where it used to be a short, which is, you know, very like tick tock style videos had to be 59 seconds or less. Don't you dare make it a full minute, because they're not going to show it under the shorts tab, shorts are being heavily featured and promoted on the YouTube platform, either to your enjoyment or to your dismay. But because these videos are short form format, they are going to appear in shorts because now, recently, YouTube changed that rule where you can post videos up to three minutes long and they appear in the shorts tab. So typically like vertical style videos, and then you can add them to YouTube, and YouTube will determine if it's under three minutes, and they will automatically qualify that as a short. Getting some pretty good responses on a lot of our shorts lately that come from previous episodes. So I'm curious to see what these sort of like one take videos and how they perform, but I felt that it was a better way to showcase some of the conversations and some of the thought process that are happening in and around the expo floor, without having to use the bandwidth to interview each one of these people, because that would if I take it a step further, I another aspect of the manifest conference that I thoroughly enjoy and I thoroughly love. If you listen to our in a recent interview with Courtney Mueller, who's the President over at manifest, they have a podcast booth, and so for the podcasters and the creators, they allow you, you know, a certain amount of time on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday of the conference in order to have the podcast booth where you can tell other people that you want to interview. Hey, show up here and we can have a conversation. They usually have, you know, like a table, a nice little area, Maersk sponsors it, which is fantastic. I think they sponsor the entire time. So for this year, they had not one, but two podcast studios right next to each other. And so I was able to take advantage of three hours on the first day of manifest. And the way that I structured these interviews, which will be posted to the channel soon, they're currently being edited. It's a lot of files to be edited, but the way I structured them is over three hours. What I would do is I had somebody show up from like, let's say 12 to three is the time that I have the podcast studio. And so during that time frame, it was like 12 to 1225, 1230, to 1255, one o'clock to 125, and so on and so forth. And that way all of the equipment is already set up. I'm just ushering in the guests here and coming in and going out, quick introductions, quick setup, and then we can, just, like, hop right to it and start the discussion. So shout out to manifest for having this space and having this you know, you know, a place for for podcasters and journalists and other creators within logistics to really feel like they have a professional home. I can't tell you how many conferences that I've gone to where I'm trying to finagle a spot in, like the hotel lobby, and trying to find a good spot with good lighting that you know can make for a good conversation. And then you have to factor in that you're probably by yourself, doing a lot of these recordings, unless you have a big budget where or some kind of funding source where you can bring, you know, an entire tech crew or an entire tech team. It was just me and Lindsey. And if you don't know Lindsey, Lindsey handles a lot of our social media, all of our social media, unless it sound unless it's like a really personal post on like LinkedIn or Twitter or something, I think you can kind of tell, you know, if they're content based posts like about cargo bricks, which I'll get into in just a little bit with some updates there. But if it's like coming from an episode, or it's an email newsletter or something like that, Lindsey is the one who really helps and shines in that regards and leads that ship. So it was great to have her there to be sort of my second, you know, pair of eyes and ears, helping to talk with the guests. She also did a fantastic job with like snapping photos and posting those photos to, you know, my personal social media feeds. And then also the everything is logistics, social media feeds. Um. And so just being able to get that content out quickly, because for me, it was just non stop with with sort of the the lay of the land, as far as you know, manifest is concerned, because I flew in on Sunday, the conference starts, technically on Monday. Monday was six interviews, moderated a panel Tuesday comes up. I moderate the official manifest panel. The other panel I moderated was for vision, which is one of the exclusive sponsors on Monday. And what's great about the panels on Monday, which I'll get into in just a second with some of the details on some of those interviews and conversations, but what's great about the Monday panel is that the expo floor isn't open. The expo floor opens Tuesdays and Wednesdays of the event. A lot of people don't know that, and a lot of people showed up to manifest thinking that they would, you know, hit the expo floor on Monday and Tuesday come to find out that, you know, their flight leaps halfway through Tuesday, and then they can barely see the the incredible expo floor. So if you plan to go to a manifest in the future, make sure that you are in town for all three of those days, but especially Tuesday and Wednesday. If you want to see the expo floor, because it doesn't open until Tuesday, but Monday, because the expo floor wasn't open, there were panels that were taking place, and one of those was the women shaping the future of supply chain, sponsored by vision and on, you know, it's hosted at manifest. And so we had, I moderated that panel, and there were four other women on that panel, friend of the show, Grace Sharkey, was one of those panelists. And we got to speak directly to these women to find out, not necessarily from a, okay, you're, you know, just, you know, what's it like being a woman working in logistics, which, of course, yeah, that's the undertone of the conversation. But what we focus the panel on is the achievements of these people that also happen to be women, and I think that that was my favorite way of framing the discussion, not that these people are getting the recognition because they're women, but because they've worked their asses off and they've gotten to the top and they've dealt with a lot of bullshit along the way, pardon my French, but they've dealt with A lot of BS along the way, and they still succeeded, and they still thrive, and they're still thriving to this day. The audience was packed out, and I think it was most, you know, obviously the topic was, you know, something that resonated with a lot of people there, men and women alike. But I think we it was also very helpful to not have to compete with a giant expo floor that is insanely impressive. And so that panel was standing room only, fantastic to see. I have some some photos posted up on LinkedIn, and then also my instagram at Blythe Brumm, if you want to go check that out. But that panel was fantastic. We have a copy of that file, and it's going to, we're going to release it on the on the podcast, of course, like we've done with previous manifest, you know, episodes. So that one I'm excited to share, and one of the key takeaways that I remember from that particular episode or from that particular panel, is talking about the geographic challenges. So, you know, two of the women on the panel were from Google. You know, formally worked at Google. One of them now works at Uber freight. One of them now works at a company called dextery. We've actually had dexterity Awana Awana Jenga on a show in the past. So go search everything as logistics to find that conversation. Because she is a gem. Also got a an awesome new palette post it from dexterity so So shout out to them, because I love there aren't many booth giveaways that I love, but I love palette post its and that's that one thing that I will make sure that I get at every conference, because I use them so much. If you looked at my desk right now, 1234, I have four of these post. Its just on my desk right now. They also, in case you're you're watching or listening, in case you're listening, I have showed this off before on my socials, but this is a, this is what a dexary robot looks like that's inside the warehouse. And they had one of these, a real one, not the Lego version. They did offer me the Lego version, but I told them I already had one, and I already built it. But if you notice all of these little sensors here on the robot itself. This is the the world's tallest warehouse robotic, and all of these little sensors have cameras on them. And so what they're used for is for accurate inventory counts. So that was another cool person, just a little side note. And then also we had Rachel levy from brooklinen. She was also on the panel as well. And then with Uber freight, we had Natalie that was on from Uber freight. And then. Sharkey, of course, from freightwave slash fire crown media. And one of the questions that was answered by the women who, you know, especially from Rachel, who with Brooklyn, and I mean, they're a global company, and she talks about being in the room with other supply chain folks, other supply chain managers from all across the globe. And, you know, I think, you know, obviously, there's a lot to be said about, you know, what's going on in the country, whether you love it or you hate it, but there are significant situations that affect women in this country, but also affect them a little bit more in other countries. You know, you can say, oh, I want to sit at the table, things like that. And you can largely get that opportunity in the United States, but if you go to some of these other countries that aren't used to speaking or working with women in that regard, that creates a very unique set of circumstances that you have to navigate. And these women talked about working through that, and I thought that was a fascinating discussion, again, highlighting the achievements of these people that also happen to be women, not necessarily featuring them only because they're a woman. And so because we framed the discussion like that, and shout out to Sammy amons from over at vision, you know, she really spearheaded this discussion and organized a lot of this panel, but this was her This was her thought concept, and that she really wanted to focus on that area, and it really rang true and and a lot of women and men in the audience really appreciated that. And from what I understand, it was one of the highest rated panels in the entire conference. So thank you to everyone that showed up and listened to that discussion. If you did miss it, it will be on a future episode of everything is logistics, so we will be sure to share those again in the future. There's a couple of other notes that I wanted to, sort of, you know, give as far as takeaways for the conference. And I would say one of the bigger ones is just how many companies have just added the word AI to their offerings, and you don't really know if it's AI or if it's just, you know, the evolved phrase of machine learning turning into AI. So that was, that was interesting to try to sort through, like, who is actually doing artificial intelligence, and then who is, you know, just has been using machine learning for a while, and then just reframing it as AI, which, I don't know that there's necessarily a problem with that, but it is. It feels a little like, I don't want to say gimmicky, but it might be gimmicky, and that's um, that that was one of my my first takeaways is just how much AI has dominated the conversation. I even moderated a panel on in the age of AI, how do you handle data security? That was my second day panel, my Tuesday morning panel. And so we were on, or I moderated that panel with the CTO of Honeywell, and then also with the CEO of Clio, and then also, I think he was the VP of sales from crisp, so two logistics companies and a shipper. And then it was me moderating that discussion on the data security aspect when you have so many different players and tech stacks and everybody's offering AI, but how do you make sure that your data, your sensitive company, proprietary data, stays sensitive, stays you know, proprietary to you and your organization, and there were a bunch of different strategies that Clio and Chris and Honeywell, all you know, implement, and there were a lot of really great tips and takeaways from that discussion. Got a lot of good feedback from that as well. So I will be sharing that conversation in the very near future, hopefully by the end of the month for both of those conversations, and then from the interview perspective, oh my gosh. So we did. We had conversations with Highway, we had conversations with overhaul, we had conversations with colaris. Oh my gosh. I can't believe I'm blanking on this. We had three more conversation Oh, Kevin from the new warehouse podcast that is for Let me hold on just a second and I will find the other one. This is me stalling for time while I find the other Oh, geo post codes. Oh, that was another really, really interesting one. So geo post codes, and then also Roger boza from clone ops. So clone ops, brand new sponsor of the podcast, can't wait for them to come up on and, you know, I guess come to the everything is logistics, sort of landscape. You'll start to see them in our email newsletters, across social media. And then we got a couple interviews coming. One of them was with Roger. Bosa. And then we also have an interview with their CEO, David Bell. They are from David Bell, you might know, from lean staffing and solutions fame, but what they are building is really fascinating. And it's, you know, I sort of bad mouth. You know, are the companies that are just changing, you know, machine learning into AI and, you know, is it a marketing gimmick or not? Well, clone Ops is not doing that. They're actually building clones. That's in the name, they're building clones of yourself, and one of the things in order to carry out, you know, specific tasks. So it's not just, you know, handling phone calls and admin tasks and things like that, but it's also giving the ability to clone yourself, not just for like in house brokers or things like that, but also for drivers, which I thought was really interesting and a really interesting play, because for a lot of drivers that the sentiment that I see online is that they're very apprehensive to more technology, More tracking, more invasion of privacy, you know, things like that. But they're also tired, you know, with many of us tired of dealing with Bs admin tasks that take up a lot of time, then making check calls, answering check calls, and they frankly, don't really want to do it. So this is the first that I've heard with clone ops, offering a solution of AI solution that can help drivers avoid some of those annoying tasks that they have to do while out on the road. I think there's also some really cool from what David was saying, he was saying that there's also some really cool translation opportunities there as well. So what you have is, you know, drivers who who may speak another language, or brokers who may speak another language, then you have this ability for for them to communicate in their native language. So then that way nothing is really lost in the translation or lost in conversation. I thought that that was really exciting as well, and so we'll have more content from the clone ops team coming in the future. But I thought you should just know about the six interviews that we did record, especially Reed Clements over at highway. I've been trying to get highway on the show for a couple years now. We're finally able to make it happen in manifest, which is fantastic. I mentioned geo postcodes, which it was a really interesting I never really thought about how you need different location data for, you know, anywhere in the ocean. I just thought, you know, sort of latitude, longitude is, is good enough. But from what Simon, who's a CEO over at geo post codes, was saying, is that So say, for example, there's a town in Belgium that has one specific name, but then in English, it has another name, but they both mean the same thing. So if you're doing a, maybe a Google Map Search, or, you know, you're trying to find a different location, or trying to find that location, and you enter in and you're the English version, version of that city, how? How are you going to be? How is that data going to be able to to recognize that you actually mean the Belgium way of spelling it instead of the English way of spelling it? And so what geo post codes has done for more than 15 years now is that they've aggregated a lot of that data all of these different data sources, and then they sell that data, that location data, as a package, so to help folks with their you know, location accuracy, port, terminal, locations, things like that and that, free and logistics. It's just the more layers you peel back, the more there is left to learn. I would have assumed that GPS or latitude, longitude, either of those two mechanisms, would have been perfect to figure out where, you know, something, a place, is located. I had no idea that this service was even in need, but it's really, really cool to learn about something like that and then be able to, you know, share it with you guys. So I got that conversation coming. Kevin Lawton, I mentioned with new warehouse podcast, he was great, because if you were anywhere near the manifest Expo four, you saw how many damn robotics are everywhere, everywhere. And so we were able to have a, you know, a lengthy discussion on sort of the state of robotics inside the warehouse. And that was another one of my related I guess sort of big takeaways. Is that, for with speaking with Kevin, more than 90% of US based warehouses do not have any form of robotics. But if you pay attention to sort of logistics news, and you know, funding rounds and things like that. Robotics companies have been have been getting funded left and right for years, but when you hear that more than 90% of them do not have any kind of robotics, that's a massive market opportunity. So it makes sense that we would see all of these different robotic solutions out on that expo floor. I. Um, now the problem with a lot of that adoption is that it's very expensive, and then you also have to navigate the employee relationship, because naturally, you know that this is with a previous conversation with six river systems, which is another robotics company. I believe Amazon bought them out, but they mentioned that anytime that they outfit a new warehouse with robotics, they have specialized training that helps employees see the robots as their friends, as a helper, instead of seeing it as something that's going to take your job. So they with robotics, there's a spec, there's a very like specific onboarding experience that has to take place in order for the workers at that warehouse to welcome their robot overlords. But in the instances that I saw, and if you might remember a previous episode with gather AI, there are other ways that you can implement robotics into your warehouse without it having the perception of taking human jobs, one of those ways, like what gather AI or another company called Corbis with a C, they have what's called drone inventory counting, and so it's a looks like a drone that you would buy at a at Walmart or wherever. Team, wherever you're getting your drones, probably not temu, but wherever you're getting your drones from, it looked like a very normal drone. It takes photos and it scans up and down. So say, you have these racks of warehousing shelf space, and you have all of these barcodes with all of these products. Now a typical work situation would be you would probably have to have, you know, some kind of machinery around there, some kind of a ladder, some kind of a device, if a human were to want to count whatever is on those shelves, whatever and whatever is inside those boxes, it's a very tedious task. It's, you know, it's not that fun, it's not that interesting. And there it, you know, anytime you have a task like that. It's prone to human error. Now, where this helps, where like gather AI or Corvus, helps, is that these drones work alongside the humans, where they are doing the inventory counting. Just literally, they have a base station, three or four drones that are charged up, ready to go. You deploy one of them, and it goes through and it counts all through the from top to bottom, from left to right, it scans all of the barcodes, sends that data back to your your WMS, and then you have more accurate inventory counts without having to worry about your workers. You know, being having, you know, strenuous jobs or getting overworked or probably underpaid as well, and it's also a lower barrier of entry for the more than 90% of warehouses that don't have any kind of robotics. And so you have that, you know, a lower barrier of entry for these warehouses to use a tool that's going to help them not be as much of a burden as far as onboarding and especially investment is concerned, and then the employees within the warehouse are more likely to look at, say, a drone like that as a companion versus something that's going to take your job. So I thought that that was really interesting observation out on the X I mean, obviously it's an interesting observation to me, because I'm the one who came up with it, but it's one of those observations that I saw very frequently. There were several warehouse counting drones that were on the expo floor, and so I thought that that was a really interesting display of what may be coming for the future of a lot of warehouses that don't necessarily have to be the super expensive pick and pack robotics, where you're replacing damn near everyone within the warehouse, except for, you know, maybe a couple of engineers. Okay, um, a couple of last ones, overhaul highway. Of course, I already mentioned them, but overhaul on Highway, talking cargo, crime topic, talking fraud prevention, things like that. Lindsey recently, our marketing manager, she recently put out a poll on everything is logistics, asking what topics that you guys wanted to hear from or hear about more and freight fraud. And you know, the cargo crime was the far and away, the number one topic. So I'm when I see those polls, when I see those results, I listen, because I want to, want to be able to cover the topics that you guys care about. And so two out of the six interviews are covering those topics. So we got more content coming soon. And then we also have collaris, which is a visibility platform for shippers and a port terminal owner. So that was an interesting conversation as well, with Renee al varega And yeah, so that does it for the interviews that were featured. Okay, I just sorry I had to take a quick sip of something to drink, because hoof we are talking. We are talking and I thought this was going to be a quicker type show I need to probably work on, you know, making these a little bit quicker, but I got so much stuff to talk about. So because I want to make this a little bit of a quicker show, I am going to briefly mention some of the takeaways that you can find over on YouTube. I mentioned earlier about the different shorts that companies submitted. So we have videos over there, and I will link to them in the show notes, just to make sure that you guys don't miss them, and that you can check them out if you're interested. But we have semantic visions. We have BlackBerry radar, which is rad. I love Blackberry. I begrudgingly switch back in the day for the folks who remember, or old enough to remember, Blackberry made the best phones on the market and their messaging where you could just type on your phone and you don't even have to look at your phone. Oh, beautiful. I miss it so much. If BlackBerry wanted to ever come back out with a regular phone, I would love to replace my iPhone with a Blackberry phone, as long as you know you still have the full keyboard. But Blackberry has evolved, company wise, into BlackBerry radar, and so we have a quote from them as well. And when I say quotes for these videos, I asked, What's one key takeaway or trend you're seeing shaping the logistics industry in the coming year, all of these people recorded their videos on the expo floor. I kind of wanted that vibe, as you know, sort of like a tone setter. The energy of an expo floor is just different than, say, if you're sitting in sort of an office. So we will have semantic visions, Blackberry radar. We also have tint voxel. We have destia. We have auto tech ventures. Barack has been on a previous episode. He talks about, you know, sort of the VC landscape. And you know, VC and the relationship to logistics, which is an interesting conversation. Highly recommend going and listening to that previous everything is logistics episode. We also have video from in orbit. We have the CEO of lvk, her video, I think, was probably my favorite. And then we also have another video from Ryder talking about their prediction of what they think they're going to see this year. And that's actually humanoids. Humanoid robots in the warehouse is what writer is predicting. So you can catch all of those over on our YouTube channel. Just search for everything as logistics, and you go to the little shorts tab, you can watch whatever ones you like, or you can click in the show notes to find them much easier. Now, I do have a few different of the text based so I wanted everybody to submit a video, but not everybody is comfortable being on video. So I said text is fine too. But I just, you know, I'm, frankly, I'm, it's just tough to display these types of quotes on an environment like this. So what I think we're going to do is we're going to, what I was going to do is just share my Google Doc and show you guys what these quotes are. But what I think will look better presentation wise is to take these quotes, put it on a nice little Canva graphic. Lindsey is going to hate me for this, but we'll put them on a nice little Canva graphic, and then we will share them in a Twitter slash x thread, and then also over on LinkedIn, so you can catch all of them. But for the text based quotes, we have a we have submissions from A to B, we have roadie. We have Who else do we have? We have 01, 100. We have E post global. Who else do we have? Ambi robotics, just reading through that, ambi robotics where, yeah, it does, yeah and be robotics. We're leaning into tech, and can't wait to continue innovating ways that humans and robots can work together. Probably need to do a show on how, you know, a lot of these robotics companies, how they approach the, you know, the psychological aspect of training humans to work with robots and vice versa. I think that that's, that's really interesting topic, so I'll mentally have jotted that one down for the future. We also have quotes from Outrider, and then finally, we have panda. So look for all of those. Those are the text based ones. So you know, kind of find them on YouTube shorts, unfortunately. But what we will do is just make sure that each of these are featured in another way that's slightly more appealing than just me just sharing Google Doc, but overall, 10 out of 10 show. Like I said, I'm still recovering. Vegas is a monster to attend, and I was actually fairly good this this event. Previously, I'd go out every single night I'd be up, you know, late into the wee hours. It's the thing with Vegas, they pump oxygen to all their casinos, and then you can't find a damn clock anywhere, because they don't want you to know what time it is, and they want you to keep going longer than you think you can die. Is stocked up on so many, you know, liquid IVs and ginger and turmeric, little drink mixes and things like. Like that, and I was still worn out. I still got the conference crud, which is just the congestion and the sneezing and just the your body is worn down after 1000s and 1000s of steps every single day. But we did, we're able to close it out manifest another. Another thing I love about this conference is they always have the best close out conference, and they wait until the end of the conference in order to have it. And it makes people stick around a little bit longer than they probably would typically at. You know, other conferences, they'll have their main party, their main event, on the second to last day, and that's because they know most people are probably going to skip the half day of the the next day's Conference, which is typically, if you've gone to conferences, you know how it goes, but manifest does it a different way, where they have each day is jam packed, and then they have a concert at the end. The first year they had ludicrous. The second year they had Nelly. The third year they had Neo and this year they had flow rider. Now for me, when I first heard flow rider, I was like, okay, like, I get it. Like, he has a handful of songs that I like, it'll be fun when I tell you this man put on a top three performance I've ever seen. He had bottles of champagne out blasting into the crowd. He made sure that all of the audience felt like they were seen. He gave out a dozen long stem roses. He also had bottles of patron that he's just him and his team are just pouring shots into people's mouths, and then he's playing great music. And then he also, I don't know if you've seen any videos that have been posted to LinkedIn, probably not appropriate for LinkedIn, but he also calls a bunch of people up on stage. He calls girls up at first, and the girls get on stage and they dance and they do their thing. Then he calls guys up on stage, and then they dance, and they do their thing, hilarious. Lots of, lot of the guys, like, ripped their shirts off for some reason. One of the craziest moments that I saw was this woman who she had a leg injury, and so she wasn't going to go up on stage, but the team, the flow rat, a team, pulled her up, then pulled her scooter. Was wheeling her back and forth on the stage. One of the greatest things I've ever seen. I had no idea was going on, but just a fantastic experience, um, and he also got the guys up there. I mentioned that made them feel and, you know, included as well. The guys like they did not hold back. They danced their little behinds off. There were, there are some people, especially the girl on the wheelchair. There was also, yeah, separately, not the girl with the scooter at the injured leg. There was another girl in a wheelchair that I don't know. We were theorized and maybe she was a plant or something, but she showed up in a wheelchair, she got down, and she danced a lot too up on that stage. So I hope everybody still has their job. I personally did not get up on stage. I have been up on stage plenty of times in my lifetime, but I do that in front of my friends, in front of my girlfriends, and, you know, in front of my close knit people, not where there's, you know, 40 to probably 100 camera phones that are on you at all times and filming your escapades. So I did not get up on stage, but I do not begrudge anyone for getting up on stage our own. Greg Sharkey got up on stage. She also got a signed shoe, which I don't know how this girl does it. Last year she got Neo's towel. This year she gets freaking a signed shoe for flow rider. She's probably just going to at her house. At this point, she needs to just dedicate a section of her house to just the trophies that she gets from manifest conferences, because she gets all of them. So that was really, that was hilarious to see. She got up on stage, but she behaved. So she wasn't like doing anything that's like Job threatening or anything. But it was a time, and if you ever have an opportunity to see flow right alive, go, because it was such a good concert, such a like top three all time for me concerts. And I never thought that these words would come out of my mouth. But yet, here we are. Another part of that big Monday was we officially launched cargo Rex. As if I did not have enough going on with six interviews in a panel, I decided to launch a business on the same day. So you might have heard, you might have seen the episode that dropped on that same Monday. Cargo. Rex is off to a fantastic start, with more than 1000 sign ups in the first week. I think we have close to 340 businesses, logistics, all logistics listed on the site. I believe we also. Have about seven or eight creators, logistics creators. We got to work on that. I am working on that adding more creators to the site. It's not as automated as I would like it to be. But as if you didn't listen to our cargo Rex debut episode, please go and listen to that episode to get the full back story of how this project came to be. But if you didn't listen to that episode, essentially, cargo Rex is my new venture. Digital dispatch in the podcast is not going anywhere, but cargo Rex is what I am trying to build, is the Google search of logistics. If you ever tried to ask Google the difference between a freight broker, a freight agent or a freight forwarder, it's very confused. It doesn't know the difference. Neither does g2 and so for this platform, I really wanted it to, or I want it to be a platform where we can go deep in logistics and not rely on these massive data platforms like Google, like Bing, like all a G to, you know, a Capterra, all of these different sort of software review sites. I wanted cargo Rex to be an informational website, so helping creators get exposure to their content, content matching the episodes that they're already creating to businesses that are already on the cargo Rex website. We're adding dozens of businesses every single day since our launch, and so that it's been going great. However, there are also some technical challenges as well. Anytime you're dealing with a site with this much data, like I have built data heavy sites before, a publicly traded home builder for one, you know, with gosh, you know, homes that are were in like half a dozen different cities. Talk about, you know, sort of APIs data. That was a lot. This one is just as much, and we are planning for even more than that kind of, you know, data integration, that kind of data flow. So it's been, it's been a challenge since, especially getting back, because for so long, or especially since the fall, it's really been about getting cargo Rex to the launch point. Now the launch point has happened, and now I kind of have to figure out, and this is where I am personally struggling, is like, what does, what does normal site work look like daily? So right now for me, I am in there responding to support tickets, user requests, if so for some of our listings that we have on the site, we manually added them so they do not have a verified owner. We, my team, are technically the verified owners of that listing page. And so now we're running into a couple of different issues where, you know, someone will create their account, and then they go and they claim their old business, and then it's not, this is just one, you know, sort of minor tech thing that happened today, but their email wasn't linked automatically to the listing page. And that, to me, it's like it's earth shattering. It shouldn't be earth shattering, but it is because I just want things to function properly. And anytime you've launched a, you know, a tech tool or SaaS based tool, you know, these things just happen, and it's super annoying. You want everything to work perfectly. But that's also the lesson in launching a business is that you have to launch to learn, and the only way you're going to learn is by just putting it out into the world and then seeing how people interact with the site, and then noting what things you should adjust and what things you should change based on the user experience. And so that's what I'm kind of knee deep in right now and but I have so many ideas for this site, and I can't wait to show you guys all of them. There is just one of the things that we launched today, is it's a premium feature, but it's still really cool. So anybody can create a free account. You can add your business for free. You can also add any kind of logistics events. You can add those for free as well, but we do have additional features on your listing page that you can upgrade and you can take advantage of. One of those is being able to list all of your tech integrations. Maybe you are a TMS and you integrate into, you know, seven other different companies. So we have an integrations tab, and the thing it's programming, is so fascinating, because you would think that when we first launched in a VP version of this site, it was just a text box, and I wanted people to just list the companies in a bullet format of all the integration partners that you have. Well, what I learned is that people don't pay attention to formatting as much as I would like them to or as much as I pay attention to those types of things just to make it look nice, make your profile, make your listing look nice. So what we had to do was kind of scratch the just the regular text box. And instead, what we have now is, if you're part of an association or charity, that's one section, and then another section is your integration partners. And so your integration partners, it programming. All you have to do is just type in, you know, the first few words, maybe an integration partner that you have on an association that you're a member of or a fan of, and if the listing is already on the site, which you know, if it's not, we will fix that in the future. But if it is already on the site, it auto fills. It auto populates. It shows it pulls up that you know, Sister listing, and it shows it on your profile. So someone, from a user perspective. If they're doing research, let's use a TMS example. If you're researching a new TMS, you can go to get a quick snapshot of all of their latest, you know, sort of white papers and news. You can see the associations that are part of so maybe you can meet them at a future Association related event, or you can check out their integration partners. And if you are already using a certain amount of those companies within your tech stack, then it probably makes more sense from a buyer perspective, that you may want to book a call with this with this company if you're looking to make a shift in your TMS anytime soon. So that's one feature that I'm really pumped about. Another one that I'm super pumped about is that for all of our approved creators, we're going to have more research papers that are going to be coming out in the coming weeks, in the coming months, really, this is going to be a very strong focal point for cargo Rex is having these different research papers that pulls in content from a variety of different creators within logistics. And then we'll be able to pull in all of these different quotes from, going back to the TMS example, say you have, you know, at least a dozen podcasts that have created an episode on how to, how to, what to look for in a new TMS partner. You know, that kind of valuable insight from a variety of people is extremely valuable. And so we're going to be making research papers based on that content, so that can help the buyers in their research journey, so that they can see sort of a too long didn't read in a research paper. And then they can choose if they want to listen and they want to hear more. Then they can click on those different shows and go and listen to that specific episode that talks about that specific content. And then, in addition to that, then we'll have an expert commentary section where, you know, the people who mainly post on LinkedIn, for example, maybe they don't have a YouTube or a podcast, but they're still, you know, a very insightful creator or a consultant. Then we'll add them as a creator to the site, and they can submit their commentary, and it'll show up as as a comment directly under the post. So it's not, we don't allow for, you know, comments in general, or you know, things like Google reviews or Facebook reviews or anything like that. Just think those are too gamified, especially in the A in the age of AI, where a lot of those things can just be automated away. And, you know, frankly, just bots where we're I'm taking a slightly different angle in that regard, is that it's going to be commentary from approved creators, which, if you're making content in some shape or form in the industry there, there's really no reason why you shouldn't be an approved creator. So if you are one of those creators, or if you have an existing podcast or YouTube channel and you cover logistics, I want you to submit your information to team at cargo rex.io, that way we can create a creative profile for you. We can add any of your content that you're already creating. We can add it to the site. And then one the most important thing is that if we have an RSS feed from you, which, if you have a podcast or a YouTube channel, you have an RSS feed. So we can pull in that RSS feed and any view or listen on that content on the cargo rec site counts towards wherever that show came from. So say, for example, YouTube, you have a YouTube video that covers going back to the TMS. Example, if you have a YouTube video covering, you know, the things you want to look out for when you're searching for a new TMS, then that video we would have on cargo Rex, and if somebody views that video, that view still counts as if you were watching it on YouTube. So creators, you don't lose any data. You maintain ownership rights of your data. You're just using us as a syndication partner because we have that content matching algorithm that will match your content to relevant searches that are taking place on the cargo rec site. So if somebody is looking going back to the TMS example, if somebody is looking for a TMS solution, they'll see all of the business listings. They'll see relevant events, and then they'll also see relevant episodes that covers that particular phrase. And so these are things that we're going to further refine in in the coming weeks and in the coming months, but I'm super excited. Out those particular, you know, profile enhancements, and then also creator enhancements. Those are just launched, you know, this week. And so super pumped about a lot of this. And it's, it's really, you know, it's a, it's a nervous, it's a nervous thing to to launch a new business. I even had on one of my notes right before I left for manifest, because it was I wasn't sleeping well, you know, we're trying to get a couple, you know, these features over the finish line, making sure everything's working properly for launch day when we do go live. Because, like I mentioned earlier, my Monday that we went live was fully packed. I wasn't going to be able to stop what I was doing and address any kind of support issues or anything like that. So it was really important to have these things set up in place and, you know, tested and making sure they're working properly and functional. But on my my little post, it that I mentioned earlier, all it says on this post, it is so nervous I couldn't think of anything else to write on my little post. It my little shower thoughts, except for so nervous. And I'm glad I have this little note, because it is a, it's a reminder of how, how quickly, you know, things can change. Just a little overweight now I'm feeling great the products out there. We're getting feedback. We're getting user testing. And it's really cool to build something and to see other people gravitate towards it, give compliments to it, sign up for it and use it, and then also give me feedback. And that's the biggest blessing that I could ask for right now, is if any of you have yet to sign up for the platform, or maybe you haven't had your business yet or added an event. We have events now live on the cargo rec site too. So any logistics event that's going on, I want you to promote it on cargo Rex, because we got email newsletters going out. We got, you know, with social media, there's so much opportunity for social media promotion with all of these different companies and commentary and creators and events. I'm just, I'm really excited. I'm really excited to put this product out in the world and take it from an idea to fruition, and then hear the feedback from all of you, and then be able to continue to build upon it. So lots of cool stuff. I just, you know, I meant for this episode to be a super quick episode, but here we are about 52 minutes in, and I am continuing to blabber on, so I will stop blabbering on, and instead, I will point you over to the cargo Rex website. Please make sure that you are added as a you know, even if you don't have a business, add yourself as a user. Find relevant content that may be of interest to you. If you see any kind of glitches or anything wrong with site, please tell me, because I can't fix it if I don't know about it, and I can only test it myself. So many times, it's crazy to be able to look at a site and be like that looks weird, but you're not exactly sure why it looks weird, and you don't know until someone else can, kind of, you know, point it out in front of you as well. So lots of good stuff going on, very challenging, of course, but this is why we do it, right. This is why we this is why we launch and learn. And so thank you guys for all the support, all the compliments, and all the, you know, the great feedback. Keep it coming, and I'll have more updates to you soon, I'm gonna do more episodes like this, you know, sort of the solo shows I can really quick. Just sit down and hit record and then get these messages out to y'all a little bit faster, especially now that I'm recovered for the most part from manifest year four. So thank you guys again for all of your listenership and your attention, and hope to see her again real soon. Okay, go jacks. Bye.
