Blythe Brumleve:
0:05
Welcome into another episode of Everything Is Logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. I'm your host, Blythe Brumleve, and we are proudly presented by SPI Logistics, and we got a good show for you today. It's a very hot topic, a button issue, whatever you want to call it. We both have been in, you know, attending several conferences over the last couple of months. I think it's a good time to have a conversation about freight insurance, freight fraud, everything that's going on within the industry, and what better person to have that with than Jim, who is over at Loadsure Blythe, coo and co-founder. So, Jim, welcome to the show. Thanks, Blythe, thanks for having me Now. I was reading through some of your bio on LinkedIn and I just assumed you had always been an insurance, but you've been in freight, for you know you've definitely worked in the trenches here. For folks who may not be familiar with your background, how did you first get involved and, sort of how did your career evolve over the years?
Jim Heide:
1:04
It's actually a pretty interesting story. So yeah, I had gotten out of the Marine Corps and while I was in the Marine Corps I was stationed actually in Denver for a little over a year and wanted to get back to Denver and decided to pack up everything I owned. When I got out and did the drive out and was hanging out in a bar of all places as most people do, and met someone who worked for a small drage and public warehousing company, we became friends. He got me a job there and it just kind of took off from there. They did warehousing for the US Mint here in Denver. A bunch of public warehousing, everything from toilet paper to Ferraris, had a General Electric SDS contract and a few other retail delivery contracts. So got to learn both the warehousing and the transportation side of the business working for them. And that business was acquired or actually, through a series of seven or eight acquisitions, became a part of DHL supply chain and I grew as those acquisitions acquired through the ranks. My last role with them was managing third-party agents for home delivery. So on the final mile bit, if we didn't have enough critical mass volume, if you will, to support our own brick and mortar, we would contract with a moving storage company or air freight company or something in the city and I would be responsible for their performance, operations, the commercial relationship, make sure they got paid, all of those fun things.
Jim Heide:
3:05
And yeah, a colleague of mine went to become a CTO of a very large freight brokerage and they were spinning out a digital freight brokerage, if you will. A freight marketplace was 10-4 systems. He recruited me to go over there so I went to go work for 10-4, kind of running. I started out really as doing product and ended up running sales and back office and legal and pretty much everything no one else wanted to do with. The company Did that for four and a half years. 10-4 started out as a freight marketplace and ended up pivoting a few times and landing on visibility. That was acquired by Trimble in 2017. That still at the time, had TMW and people net and a few others. So we were brought into Trimble Transportation, as it's now known. That part of the organization was there until 2019.
Jim Heide:
4:25
My partner, johnny McCord Johnny's got an interesting story. He was a Lloyd's broker, london insurance broker, for almost 20 years. Recognized the opportunity to serve the underserved, the SMBs, by Lloyd's, but through automation and data. So he had his idea, his concept, built a rough prototype and realized he needed some freight and transportation expertise, supply chain expertise. We met through a mutual friend and I joined Loach Shore as employee number one and we've been building it ever since. So it's coming up to five years now.
Blythe Brumleve:
5:16
And so there was a lot there and I have like a million questions just based on that background. But did you say that you were warehousing for the Mint like the US Mint?
Jim Heide:
5:25
Yeah, so it's a very interesting business. So the US Mint ships in. It's an old building, right, it goes back to the 1880s, so obviously it didn't grow with the times. So they use third party warehouses to or at least one when I was there to warehouse all the raw metal. So we would dry it from the railroad or we had rail doors, the stuff that would come in via rail, or we'd pick up the containers from the rail yard, bring them back to the warehouse.
Jim Heide:
6:01
We'd break the containers, warehouse the raw metal and truck it down to the US Mint when they needed it. So they would tell us we needed two dime, three nickel penny, whatever the order was that day. We'd bring back all the scrap. So the easiest way to describe that if you're making like Christmas cookies or have ever seen them made, when you punch out the cookies, all the little scraps that are left, imagine that as coin right. So they punch out the coins. All that scrap came back to us. We would reload containers and then that would go back to the raw coin vendors for recycling where the process would start all over again.
Blythe Brumleve:
6:42
So I imagine what is security? Super tight on those kinds of loads? Maybe that's where, like the insurance part of your career really started.
Jim Heide:
6:51
You know it's all pretty much done on the down low, not much secure. There's like background checks and all of those sorts of things for anyone that is on mint property. So that part was pretty strict and we had pretty strict SOPs. But as far as security goes, because it's on minted coin there wasn't much of a security requirement. There was one event.
Jim Heide:
7:22
So everything came in these large rolls right. So your nickel, your dime, your quarter half dollar dollars at the time was very, very heavy, large rolls. Some of them were 8,000 kilograms and but the pennies, the pennies came already blanked. So just imagine a penny without Abraham Lincoln's head on it or you know anything on the back at the time I think it was the Lincoln Memorial, so it's just blanked and we would take those from these large wooden boxes, dump them into these large blue funnel for lack of a better term that was on a stand and they were very top heavy because these things weighed roughly, I want to say 3,500 pounds each, and we'd load maybe 13, 14 of them on the truck and truck them down at the US Mint.
Jim Heide:
8:20
We had a driver one time you had to go on an on ramp that was a curve, you know a jug handle and he was taking the curve a little too fast. He was still green. The load shifted, the trailer flipped onto its side, of course, the doors bust open and there were penny blanks all over I-70. So, needless to say, myself and a few other guys were shoveling pennies off of I-70 up to 2 o'clock in the morning, trying to find everyone that we could. You couldn't leave one behind. So, yeah, it was a fun account, though it was very, very interesting to get to see that side of it all.
Blythe Brumleve:
9:05
That's crazy. So I would imagine, did you have to, like, fight people off? That are, you know, stopping on the side of the road and trying to get some blank pennies?
Jim Heide:
9:14
So so the the Denver police that were there, they were, they were awesome. They kind of kept people away and were able to divert traffic pretty well. I did have some press come up and I just kind of explained to them I said, look, I know you need to do your job, but any names you can keep out of that are going to be safer for everyone. And I I managed to kind of keep keep, you know, the the juicy bits out of out of the media at the time.
Blythe Brumleve:
9:40
I imagine that that is especially with Denver, because I recently just went to Denver, a few months ago and you know, you hear all the, I guess, the conspiracy theories of you know, the blue horse that's outside of the Denver airport and things like that. Now this just feel like this adds so much more to that intrigue of that city.
Jim Heide:
10:00
Definitely. We definitely have our conspiracies, for sure.
Blythe Brumleve:
10:05
Okay, so you get to the point in your career where you're a co-founder of Locher. How do you? What goes into being a co-founder of an insurance company?
Jim Heide:
10:17
Oh you know we got. We got a little lucky. I'm not going to say it was easy, but you know, because Johnny's father was an insurance man as well. He he actually owned a syndicate or part of a syndicate that ended up getting sold to a major insurance company A lot of connections in London, he knows a lot of people that always helps. But it took. It took a while. You know, we started out with just getting Lloyd's paper and then we've since branched from there and we have some Lloyd's and non Lloyd's capacity. We actually underwrite all our own risks and then lay that risk off to these insurers. But getting that Lloyd's coverholder status, it's not easy. It took. It took almost a year and I think we were the only company to actually get Lloyd's coverholder status in 2019.
Blythe Brumleve:
11:18
And when you say Lloyd's, is that like Lloyd's list? Is that what I'm thinking of?
Jim Heide:
11:23
Yeah, so Lloyd's. A lot of people think Lloyd's is an insurance company. It's not. Lloyd's is actually a marketplace in London. It's. It's the world's largest insurance marketplace. It was, oh god, 18 or 1680 is when it started, oh wow. And it's actually backed by several acts of UK Parliament and there's a bankroll of security behind it.
Jim Heide:
11:52
But Lloyd's is known for insuring odd things, right? So you hear about, like Mick Jagger's lips and things like that, that it's insured, but they're typically very complex risks, right. So if you ever get the opportunity to go to Lloyd's and I highly recommend it it's pretty neat, but it's a large building. It's actually inside out, so all of the plumbing and everything is outside of the building and you can see it. It looks like that. It looks really odd, but it was designed that way so that if there is some maintenance requirements or something like that, the inside activity of the building isn't disturbed.
Jim Heide:
12:34
And essentially there's there's a bunch of boxes and they're called boxes, where you have underwriters sitting in there and you have brokers walking up to them with large files called slips, and they talk to the underwriter about the risk and get prices, and a lot of times they have to go to multiple underwriters, so three, four, 10, even more underwriters in order to cover a risk, based on the size of the risk. So if they need 10 million or 20 million or hundreds of millions of dollars of cover, certain insurers may only take a piece of that, and so they go around to all these different boxes, get it covered and away they go. So it's pretty interesting to watch, but the marketplace is phenomenal. Every major insurer has some sort of presence there or some ties to it. That's just the way the market is, and I forget what the number is, but it's something like 80% of all global risks worldwide go through Lloyd's in some way, shape or form. It's yeah, it's a massive industry.
Blythe Brumleve:
13:53
Are you in freight sales with a book of business looking for a new home? Or perhaps you're a freight agent in need of a better partnership? These are the kinds of conversations we're exploring in our podcast interview series called the Freight Agent Trenches, sponsored by SPI Logistics. Now I can tell you all day that SPI is one of the most successful logistics firms in North America, who helps their agents with back office operations such as admin, finance, it and sales. But I would much rather you hear it directly from SPI's freight agents themselves. And what better way to do that than by listening to the experienced freight agents tell their stories behind the how and the why they joined SPI? Hit the freight agent link in our show notes to listen to these conversations or, if you're ready to make the jump, visit SPI3PLcom. And so you had mentioned that you were. The Locher was the first company to get a cover from Lloyd's, or did I? Probably didn't phrase that correctly.
Jim Heide:
14:49
Yeah, no, just in the year 2019, right rolling up to COVID. Yeah, we were the. To my best of my knowledge, we're the only company that got cover holder status that year.
Blythe Brumleve:
15:04
And what does cover holder status?
Jim Heide:
15:05
mean that?
Blythe Brumleve:
15:05
means that they're supplying it.
Jim Heide:
15:07
You are, you have the right to transact with the marketplace and place business with the marketplace.
Blythe Brumleve:
15:14
This is so many things I didn't even know about the insurance market already. We're only 14 minutes into this conversation.
Jim Heide:
15:21
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's. Trust me, I'm still learning. I've been at this five years and while I some exposure to insurance, especially my last role with DHL, it's nothing like I have now and I still have so much to learn.
Blythe Brumleve:
15:38
I feel like that's the beauty of this industry is that the more you learn, the more you realize how much there is still left to learn. So this conversation is fantastic already and one of the things that I did want to learn and this is going to sound like such a dumb question, but I can't help but ask it typical auto insurance you pay for a plan a year and you don't sign it and forget it. You don't have to worry about it. But that's not the case in freight. Can you kind of break down, I guess the? Because I just assumed you paid for one plan a year in freight and it covers you up to a certain amount and then you're good to go. But from looking at your website, there's various different kinds of plans, various different insurance coverages for different kinds of loads. Is that kind of a safe sort of overall of load? No, it's very simplification of load share. But how does it generally work? Is it one plan? Is it several plans? Is it kind of a little bit of both?
Jim Heide:
16:37
Yeah, we have a few different products out there. Our first product that we started with was a very simple $100,000 worth of coverage for a load for $40. And we looked to integrate that into any platform that would talk to us load boards, tmss, marketplaces and anything that was out there. And as we grew as a company, as our platform grew, we expanded that to essentially dynamically priced up to $2 million globally, all modes and that's our transactional product. We call that TMS after the river in London. All of our products have a water name and there's a methodology behind that.
Jim Heide:
17:35
So rivers and waters that move, right Are transit related and if lakes are stock related, right, but they're all still all cargo, all supply chain coverage. But yeah, so that product is our transactional product and then we have more of a pay as you go annual right, sized policy, right. So the TMS product is out of the box pricing. It's what you get from DAT or trucker tools or any number of platforms that we're integrated with, and then we have the ability to custom pricing where we'll have a underwriter, ask for your loss history and your volume commodity mix, whether you have risk programs, what associations. You're going to a typical underwriting process, but they will go ahead and still break that down at a transactional level for you and allow you to still buy that insurance on a pay as you go basis.
Jim Heide:
18:49
So we have that product and we have some more traditional cargo insurance and stock throughput. So stock throughput is ensuring product that is in transit and also in storage. So end to end supply chain coverage for your cargo. We do that and we've recently been getting into motor carrier liability coverage. So cargo coverage what's commonly referred to as MTC and freight broker and freight forwarder legal liability coverage.
Blythe Brumleve:
19:23
And how. I guess I imagine that insurance coverage changes, you know, from country to country. Is that a safe assumption and how are they different if they do change from country to country?
Jim Heide:
19:36
Yeah, definitely a high level laws and taxes and filing requirements. Those sorts of things change. Some of the parlance changes but for the most part insurance is pretty consistent country to country. Lloyd's has actually done a lot to to standardize that. There's something called Institute cargo Clause is that sets up kind of a common wording for how refrigerated goods are insured and general cargo is insured and things like that. So there are standards out there that most of the industry uses. But yeah, you do tend to have to customize things wording and disclosures and stuff like that based on the country and and even the state.
Blythe Brumleve:
20:30
Yeah, I imagine, if you've been around since what would you say, the 1600s, that you probably figured out some, some procedures and standardization during that timeframe. I would hope at least Absolutely I was. I was watching one of your videos on YouTube and and they there was a stat that said 60% of freight is either under insured or not insured at all and essentially being called an under insurance crisis, and so, with some of the things that you just mentioned there, I imagine that most freight companies have a standard plan and then you know, for specialty cargo or, you know, maybe high risk cargo, that's when the the under insurance, I guess danger comes into play. Is that a safe assumption?
Jim Heide:
21:08
Yeah, it's the under insurance crisis. It's really why, why load shore is in in the market. And there's really three drivers behind that. One is education, right, so the the fact that my carrier, be it a motor carrier or ocean carrier, has has cargo insurance, means uncovered and that's. That's not the case. So carriers have what what's commonly referred to as liability coverage. Right, there, it's covering their liability and handling your cargo.
Jim Heide:
21:45
So things that happen outside of that carriers care and control aren't aren't necessarily covered inside thefts, double brokering, acts of God, right, those, those sorts of things generally aren't covered. They. They ensure the carrier, not, not the cargo owner. The the shippers interest product that load shore offers is is much broader coverage, right, so it covers acts of God, it covers theft, it's it's in the ship, that's covered. It covers theft, it's it's in the shippers interest or it's it's it's also called all risk. So it's it's a, it's a broader form coverage that covers those things. And and it's more of a shipper or or intermediary three P L product.
Jim Heide:
22:30
We do have carriers that do buy it, but for the most part it's it's for for shippers and cargo owners. So there is that gap. There's also things there's a lot of commodities that that carriers coverage doesn't cover. You hear a lot about exclusions and there are a lot of common exclusions out there. It seems to be getting more so every day, but things like electronics and alcohol and wood products and cotton and and eggs, seafood, fresh berries, a lot of these things tend to be excluded. You read some of these lists that are out there and you got to ask yourself well, all right, well, what do you cover?
Blythe Brumleve:
23:16
I was about to say that that seems like a lot of things that should be covered, but maybe they, you know, for other reasons. Food and Bev I think I read that you know that of fraud has affected food and Bev disproportionately versus I would think electronics, for example, flat screen TVs are like PS5s or something like that would be. You know the hot button commodity that thieves and you know the bad actors are after, but it's food and Bev is the number one because it's gone. You don't have a serial number on on food and Bev.
Jim Heide:
23:49
Yeah, exactly, some of some of our biggest losses have been food and Bev related. Yeah, it's a crazy world out there and you know. If you have any doubts, if you're covered, talk to your insurance broker. That's what they're there for, you know. Make sure you're educated, make sure you know what your carriers cover and what they don't. You know, if you have them on a transportation agreement, make sure you've got very clear wording in there as far as what they're covering and what their insurance requirements are. But your insurance broker that's your trust in an intermediary. You know they're there to answer those questions and make sure you have the coverage that you need. So that's the education element. You know.
Jim Heide:
24:33
The other two things that contribute to that under insurance crisis is really accessibility and price. So accessibility Typically you know your traditional insurance broker, you call them up, you explain what you need and if you're lucky, you look at back to you in 24, 48 hours, right, you know, before companies like Loach or came along, you know, and we make it easy for that intermediary or you directly to go and get the coverage that you need. And we have. We advertise 40 seconds and I have gotten it done in less than 40 seconds. Nice. But if you're getting it through through your integration, through a TMS or something, you get it instantly just by by clicking a button and that's all that contributes to price right.
Jim Heide:
25:24
So we, we dynamically price our risks. We're always we look at all the attributes of the load and then we're also looking at things like market conditions and the everything from from weather and carrier performance and a myriad of other things to make sure that our prices are our right priced and sustainable. We're not looking to undercut the market. We want to make sure that the risks are priced appropriately, but we also want to make sure that the insurance is is attainable. So there isn't this big swing in in the soft market, hard market right, feaster famine sort of thing, right, and that's where dynamic pricing really comes in.
Blythe Brumleve:
26:15
And what was the third one? So you said education, accessibility, and then is that pricing is the third one?
Jim Heide:
26:21
Yes, ma'am.
Blythe Brumleve:
26:21
Gotcha OK. So how? I guess you know because you kind of brought it up so I guess it's a good place to start with. You know sort of the fraud side of things. I mean, obviously it's been, you know it's always an important topic, but it feels like you can't, especially at the conferences that we've been to recently, that if fraud is just the dominant topic of choice among everyone, what is your kind of layer of the land of what companies should be paying attention to? And maybe you know some fraud that's under the radar a little bit that they should be paying more attention to?
Jim Heide:
26:56
Yeah, absolutely. You know the double brokering. It's interesting, it's what you hear a lot about and it seems to seems to be hurting everyone. You know you have companies or bad actors out there sending carriers fraudulent rate cons and you have carriers posing as other carriers either you know buying an MC off of someone or we're posing as someone else to get the load and get in advance on the load. And yeah, it's chaos out there.
Jim Heide:
27:41
You know there are a lot of tools out there that are coming on the market or recently on the market that are doing well to combat this right and insurance is one of them, obviously. But being able to get ahead of these things, you know the telematics devices that are out there by guys like Tive and Overhaul and those sorts of IOT devices that you can drop in a load so incredibly hard to detect and find, but you're able to track that load in case a bad actor does get it and run off with it, right, and making sure you know who is picking up that load and guys like Highway that are out there and there's a few others that are able to do that. Fraud detection. You know these are definitely important tools, but you know again, I go back to the talking to your insurance intermediary and making sure you're covered in these events around fraud. You get ahead of it with the tools that are out there education and then insurance for just in case right.
Blythe Brumleve:
29:05
And then because you had, I'm curious as to you know, with a lot of you mentioned something to the effect of you can quote a load or get covered in a load in under 40 seconds, and so I'm wondering if there are other I guess sort of variables when quoting a load that affect that, that it would almost turn into a situation where you got to talk to somebody to get further underwritten. Is it maybe like an expensive seafood shipment or something like that that would take a little bit longer? Are there commodities or maybe lanes that are a little bit more of a higher focus than sort of, I guess, a run of the mill load, if that exists?
Jim Heide:
29:48
Absolutely. Yeah, our technology automatically underwrites anything under $750,000. For the most part, I think there might be a commodity or two that are lower than that. But the limit you can go up to in the portal is two million. So there's that gap between 750 and two million where an underwriter will want to look at it and make sure you have product handling in place and if it's theft attractive, they'll want to ask you some SOP questions. But still pretty quick turnaround. We average there roughly 45 minutes in that response. So still way lower than the 24, 48 hours that has historically been out there, right.
Jim Heide:
30:35
But yeah, loads above two million, then we underwrite them outside of the portal. We still do them. But yeah, we'll want to take a deeper dive in that. There are other things outside cross border into Mexico we do a lot of cross border but we're generally taking a little harder look at those to make sure that the logistics companies or shippers have the right security and procedures in place and you are doing the right things to make sure that the load doesn't get hijacked or otherwise stolen, which is unfortunately a problem with the cross border stuff, right now and I would imagine for a lot of these shipments, that and a lot of these data points that you've been talking about, because I saw the word AI used on the site as far as determining what the cost of coverage will be and things like that.
Blythe Brumleve:
31:33
So I imagine those are all of the different data points that you're taking in and constantly learning and being able to quote these things more accurately in the future. Is that a safe assumption?
Jim Heide:
31:43
Yes, absolutely. So yeah, we don't want to introduce a lot of friction in the front end to get a quote. So we require pretty minimal information your mode, origin, destination, the commodity and your limit, and then, as you'll get a quote right there, and then as you're going through and filling out the information to buy it, and there isn't a lot of information that we require, but we take that information and then that goes into a rating model with with other information that we've gathered from third party sources so weather and hazard and traffic and lane and carrier performance and a myriad of other things and the machine learning looks at that and it's as well as our own data, our claims data and everything else, and kind of creates this feedback loop to where we go back and update that, that initial rating model. So, yeah, that's essentially how it works and that's how we were able to dynamically price risks.
Blythe Brumleve:
32:51
So what happens, I guess, when the, the unfortunate does happen, when you know maybe something is double brokered, maybe the freight is actually stolen? What happens during the claim process? If I'm, you know, the, I guess, the driver or the, the shipper of record, am I calling you first or am I calling law enforcement first? Like what does that, I guess, process look like?
Jim Heide:
33:13
Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on circumstances, you definitely want to call law enforcement right away because that's your best chance at recovery. And then, if you're using some sort of third party active risk management, if they aren't already aware of it, definitely make sure they're aware of it. But yeah, from there, once the kind of dust has settled and you've reacted as they use the term in the industry prudent uninsured. So you should always act as if you don't have insurance to try and recover and take those steps to try and minimize the impact of a claim Reasonably. I'm not telling you to go after. Think you can put yourself in harm's way or anything like that.
Jim Heide:
34:09
But yeah, you should always act as that, prudent and uninsured. But yeah, we ourselves have a link on the certificate you can access through the portal. We even have a QR code on the certificate you can scan with your mobile phone. It will automatically pull in information from the certificate. It asks you for a couple of questions around cause of loss. You'll upload some documentation so your commercial invoice, packing list, bill, elating, maybe photos if there's damage or something like that and then we have some optical character recognition OCR on the back end that will validate those documents, pull some information out, feed that into a decision management engine with the information you provided around the cause of loss and the information from the certificate. And while it's still learning, the system has settled claims in under 10 seconds. So yeah, it's pretty interesting and it has been a lot of fun to build and we're really only getting started.
Blythe Brumleve:
35:21
I was about to say, I mean from the quoting, under 40 seconds, and then you're able to settle a claim so quickly. It sounds like you have a really lean and agile operation.
Jim Heide:
35:33
We do absolutely yeah, and you need that agility to be able to respond to our customers and continue to build a, I like to say, elegant, human-centric product.
Blythe Brumleve:
35:47
So yeah, what about from? I guess? I'm not sure if you can talk about this, but any of the crazy insurance claims or anything like that, is it any weird freight or interesting insurance stories you can tell us?
Jim Heide:
36:03
One of my colleagues, taylor Walker. He's our chief insurance officer. He's got a lot of great stories. We've had claims where someone went to go take a shower, had a truck stop and came out and the truck was gone and the keys were I don't know conveniently or what it left in the ignition, but we've paid the claim Definitely.
Jim Heide:
36:35
Actually, one of our first major claims was some televisions that were double stacked without really being lashed or tied in there and there was four different parties involved there was the freight broker, there was the buyer, there was the seller and then there was another warehouse third party warehouse involved in it. That was a mess to get through and we still resolved that claim. I think it was only 12 days, which just deciding who actually owned the cargo at that time was half the battle. Yeah, claims can be fun and interesting for sure, and that's where the technology and the data really really come into play to help cut through that and really cut down the time. So people aren't waiting 30, 60, 90, 120 days to resolve a claim. It should never take that long.
Blythe Brumleve:
37:43
Especially for some companies, especially when you're kind of the cash flow is a little troubled at this time. So maybe you need some of that money a little bit sooner than waiting that typical insurance claim time. Going back to your LinkedIn, I saw that you took a ride in one of the Waymo cars, one of the robo-taxis. I'm curious how do you think insurance is thinking about coverage for autonomous?
Jim Heide:
38:12
vehicles. I thought about that a lot after that ride. Yeah, it's very interesting. If something happens, you're driving, I'm driving down the road and God forbid I hit somebody, I'm the one who's responsible. I'm culpable, it's my fault and my insurance handles that. That's been clear for the last 100 years, since people have been driving cars and having car insurance.
Jim Heide:
38:44
Yeah, a robo-taxi hitting someone. Who's culpable? Is it the developers, the company? Yeah, I suppose it is, but it's not really as clean as far as getting back to how all that handles and I think regulation is going to have to do a lot to kind of keep up with these things but I'll tell you what that taxi ride was just incredible. Yeah, if your subscribers haven't seen it yet, definitely check it out, and I think they're running in Phoenix and San Francisco right now. But I felt 100% safe in it. Really, one part I think I had in that video where an ambulance is approaching an intersection and the light turns green for me, but the car still stayed and waited for the ambulance to go by. It was very impressive. It drove very human-like, it wasn't very juddering about or anything like that. It was very clean and speedy and, yeah, it definitely made me feel like that's the way the future is going. So, yeah, insurance and regulations will have to keep up, because I don't think that's going to be stopped. I think it's how it's all going to be.
Blythe Brumleve:
40:14
Yeah, I think I've said for a while now that I think we're going to look back in 40 or 50 years. We're going to look back on people driving cars and think how the heck did we allow this to happen, where so many idiots are allowed to control behind 15,000 pounds or whatever However much a car weighs or a truck weighs To allow them behind the wheel and just drive crazy? So I do think I agree with you, even though I know some drivers are going to have some words to say about that. But for the everyday people, I think that it's probably best that we leave driving the big semi trucks up to the experts, that the veteran drivers and then maybe some of the other people can be replaced by the robots. That would definitely make people feel safer.
Jim Heide:
41:02
I think it'll be a slow process. It's one thing driving a little Jaguar crossover that Waymo has to compare to an 80,000 pound rig going 75 down the road that could do a lot of damage if something goes wrong. So yeah, I feel much better having humans drive those, at least for right now, right.
Blythe Brumleve:
41:26
Yeah.
Jim Heide:
41:27
We'll see what happens to your point 30, 40, 50 years in the future. But yeah, it's not quite apples to apples, but it was a very interesting demonstration of the technology, I think that's so.
Blythe Brumleve:
41:42
speaking of technology, you know you Loachure and you guys are, I feel, like, at every conference, and so, with being at all of the conferences this year, have you seen any technology, any advancements, improvements within the industry that really strike you as something that you want to be paying attention to?
Jim Heide:
42:02
You know that there's been this kind of overall trend over the last 10 years. You had the concept of the digital brokerage right. That was going to replace freight brokers.
Blythe Brumleve:
42:15
RIP Convoy.
Jim Heide:
42:15
Yeah, we all know that that didn't quite happen. Now it's more moving towards really assisting brokers and shippers and carriers for that matter make their lives better and prove their productivity and increase the volume that they can do. Right, and I think that's where the industry needs to continue is get our transportation facilities more efficient, whether it's automation, warehouses or helping with dispatch, and being prescriptive and adding AI to help with risk and you know if loads are running later in jeopardy and how you respond to those things, how you respond to carrier capacity issues and those sorts of things. I think that's where technology is really going is going to make all of those processes more efficient or even eliminate the risks associated with them. Right?
Blythe Brumleve:
43:33
Yeah, for sure I agree, because there's so much emphasis, I think, played on a lot of these digital freight brokerages replacing the broker, and now we've learned or some of these companies have learned the hard way that it really is.
Blythe Brumleve:
43:48
It's about your people and your relationships and then using technology to enhance that, and so I still think, hearing everything that you've talked about on the insurance side of things, there's definitely some of those same philosophies and processes that can be applied to freight as well, and I think it kind of forced a lot of these brokerages to adopt technology faster, which is a good thing, and I guess, depending on who you ask, is a good thing. I'm curious, as we kind of round out with the interview are there ways that companies can be paying attention to when it comes to insurance, to save money on their premiums, or is it? I've heard of companies BCB Transport is one of them in particular that they very much preach a safety driven culture. Is that still possible, to preach safety driven or be highly focused on safety, or maybe there's other ways to save money on insurance?
Jim Heide:
44:42
Absolutely yeah. As far as the auto and general liability, I'm not an expert in those areas, but have seen the impact that vehicle telematics and cameras inward facing and outward facing cameras have done to really save a lot of trucking companies out there from really significant claims. Your drivers are the experts, they're the experienced ones out there, but having that backup so it's not a she said scenario in the event of an incident is incredibly valuable and definitely investing in your drivers. As far as training and education, that's very important as well For shippers and brokers knowing what your coverage is, knowing what exclusions are and engaging with your insurance broker or feel free to reach out to us we're always happy to help you do coverage review, look at where potential gaps might be and where you can save money so you're not paying twice for insurance that you don't need or there aren't any holes in your coverage that could be a significant risk for you.
Blythe Brumleve:
46:11
Yeah, that's such a great point to make, because I think you don't know what you don't know, and sometimes you learn these lessons the hard way. So why not be a little? It's getting close to the end of the year, so why not be a little proactive and have somebody who's experienced take a look at these things and just make sure that you are crossing your teeth and dotting the eyes. So, jim, what else can we expect from, I guess from Loadsure? What does the product roadmap, I guess, look like for in the near future that you can share with us?
Jim Heide:
46:41
Yeah, absolutely so. Loadshare is all about holistic freight protection, and we have a number of more risk management products coming down the pike. So insurance is part of a risk management Sweet of products and a risk management strategy, but it's risk transfer right. The idea really is to get ahead of the risk and of the potential incident happening in the first place, and so we have a number of partnerships and a number of our own technologies that we're developing and rolling out that are going to help our small, medium-sized businesses and even enterprise customers Better manage their risk. You shouldn't have to be an S&P 500 company to have a comprehensive risk management program, and we want to make that attainable for everyone.
Blythe Brumleve:
47:48
I think the tagline from the website, the future of freight insurance is a perfect synopsis of what you guys are doing. I've been a big fan of LoadShare for a while, so I'm happy that we finally got to have this conversation. Jim, where can folks follow more of you, your work, check out your robotaxi photos and videos on LinkedIn all that good stuff.
Jim Heide:
48:10
So LoadShare is LoadSharenet. If you go to the About Us page you'll find myself and my colleagues on there and our LinkedIn's on there. You can reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. It's just Jim Hyde, h-e-i-d-e and LoadShare. I'll come up, feel free to connect with me and let's have a conversation.
Blythe Brumleve:
48:39
Yeah, and especially review those insurance premiums and those insurance bills and have LoadShare help you out with that. So, jim, I appreciate your time today. I'll be sure to list all of that in the show notes just to make it easy for folks. But thank you again for coming on the show. This was awesome.
Jim Heide:
48:54
Yeah, thanks wife, this is great. I really appreciate it.
Blythe Brumleve:
49:00
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Everything Is Logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight, telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff and people get from point A to B. Subscribe to the show, sign up for our newsletter and follow our socials over at EverythingIsLogisticscom. And in addition to the podcast, I also wanted to let y'all know about another company I operate and that's Digital Dispatch, where we help you build a better website. Now, a lot of the times, we hand this task of building a new website or refreshing a current one off to a co-worker's child, a neighbor down the street or a stranger around the world, where you probably spend more time explaining the freight industry than it takes to actually build the dang website. Well, that doesn't happen at Digital Dispatch.
Blythe Brumleve:
49:43
We've been building online since 2009, but we're also early adopters of AI, automation and other website tactics that help your company to be a central place to pull in all of your stuff. We're also looking to pull in all of your social media posts, recruit new employees and give potential customers a glimpse into how you operate your business. Our new website builds start as low as $1,500, along with ongoing website management, maintenance and updates starting at $90 a month, plus some bonus freight, marketing and sales content similar to what you hear on the podcast. You can watch a quick explainer video over on DigitalDispatchio. Just check out the pricing page once you arrive and you can see how we can build your digital ecosystem on a strong foundation. Until then, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll see you all real soon and go Jags.
