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Private Equity in Supply Chain with John Anderson
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In this episode of Supply Chain Connections, Brian Glick sits down with John Anderson, Operating Partner at Greenbriar Equity, to unpack the role of private equity in the transportation and logistics industry. John shares insights from over two decades of investing in and operating supply chain businesses, offering a clear view into how private equity firms evaluate companies, create value, and drive growth.
The conversation explores what private equity really means for companies and employees, how leadership and culture impact outcomes, and where technology—especially AI—is shaping the future of logistics.
Key topics discussed include:
- What private equity firms do and how they invest in logistics companies
- How value is created through growth, operations, and M&A strategies
- Why combining companies can unlock cost and revenue synergies
- The importance of leadership, culture, and decision-making in PE-backed businesses
- How employees can better understand and adapt to private equity ownership
- The evolving role of technology and AI in supply chain operations
- Why AI is more about better decision-making than just cost reduction
- How time horizons influence investment decisions and company strategy
- The long-term outlook for logistics and the role of capitalism in industry growth
John also shares his perspective on how innovation, data, and automation are reshaping the industry—and why logistics remains one of the most dynamic and essential sectors in the global economy.
About the Guest:
John Anderson is an Operating Partner at Greenbriar Equity, where he focuses on investing in and growing transportation and logistics companies. With over 25 years of experience in private equity and a background that includes leadership roles at Fenway Partners, BNSF, CSX, and McKinsey & Company, John brings deep industry expertise across operations, strategy, and M&A.
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Transcript
Introduction & Guest Announcement
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io. On this episode, we are going to have the great pleasure of talking to John Anderson.
Greenbrier Equity Investments & Impact
00:00:12
Speaker
John is an operating partner at Greenbrier Equity, their private equity firm that focuses very much on logistics and supply chain.
00:00:20
Speaker
Over the years, they've invested in companies like BDP and Seco, and most recently this year have announced an upcoming investment into AIT worldwide.
00:00:32
Speaker
So we're going to get to talk to John about what does it actually mean to be part of a private equity firm? What do they really do and what do they really look for And how can line level employees and managers inside of companies that are working in a private equity environment understand it a little better so that they can advance their careers and also participate with a deeper understanding of the process.
00:00:53
Speaker
So I hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:58
Speaker
John, welcome to the show.
John Anderson's Career Journey
00:01:00
Speaker
Thank you. It's really good to be here. I've heard good things. So why don't we start off with kind of the standard question and tell me how you got into the industry and why you decided to stay, and then we can dig in a little bit.
00:01:11
Speaker
I'm an engineer. it My degree's in mc mechanical engineering. ive have an MBA. I got into consulting for a long time with McKinsey and did a smattering of manufacturing strategy and a little bit of transportation logistics thrown in, but really not much.
00:01:26
Speaker
After 13 years there, I went to the railroad business. and was running a couple of different railroads. Did that for about 10 years. And so at the ripe age of 40, got introduced to a private equity person and wanted to do a transportation logistics investment. And I decided to jump into that. And that's really how I got into what we would call our industry, transportation logistics.
00:01:50
Speaker
And that was in 2000. So for over 25 years now, I've been in private equity, solely focused on transportation logistics, full gamut from ground-based, air-based, sea-based, forwarding intermediaries, transportation management systems. And so that's how I got into it
Understanding Private Equity
00:02:07
Speaker
in 2000. And I'm still in it in 2026.
00:02:10
Speaker
So I'm gonna share something that might be a little embarrassing. i spend probably close to a decade working for a private equity owned company And I will tell you, I genuinely did not understand what a private equity firm was, except for the scary people in New York who had a spreadsheet.
00:02:29
Speaker
And I would assume that there are people that I'm not the only person who does not actually know what private equity is and what it means. So maybe you could enlighten us all a little bit.
00:02:41
Speaker
Your reaction is very, very common. It's kind of an opaque industry. The way I would think of us is there are big pools of capital out there. Your retirement plan, ah insurance companies, banks, sovereign wealth funds, family offices, wealthy individuals.
00:02:59
Speaker
And they want to invest in different things. They to buy a stock market, they buy bonds. And another thing they'd like to invest in would be private companies. So they are actually looking for manager who knows how to find good private companies, maybe focused on a particular industry, who knows how to structure deals and why the company from its current owners might be the founders, might be another private equity firm or whatever.
00:03:22
Speaker
We also could take a public company and take it private. That's happened our industry a couple of times. So we raise capital from those people who want to invest. could be, and like I said, individuals or institutions.
00:03:36
Speaker
And we've got this, you can think of it as a pool of capital.
Growth Strategies in Private Equity
00:03:39
Speaker
It really doesn't just sit there as capital, but we have this pool of capital. And we decided we want to invest in a private company in transportation logistics.
00:03:47
Speaker
And the reason we want to do it is because we'll get a cut of any profits we make on the growth of the business when we sell it to the next buyer.
00:03:59
Speaker
So we'll find a nice company, let's say a good forwarder, and we have this pool of capital and we've said, you know, that would be a good place to invest capital. We think we could add value. We think we could help the company.
00:04:09
Speaker
And we think we could probably grow it either by doing some add-on merger and acquisition work or by helping them get into new markets, provide some capital. And we do that. And five years later, we say, wow, this thing really has grown. We've hopefully tripled the earnings and it's worth a lot more now.
00:04:26
Speaker
And so let's sell it to, a for example, a bigger private equity firm. And if we sell it successfully, and there really is profit made on that, the bulk of that goes back to the investors and they make their return.
00:04:39
Speaker
ah And hopefully it's well above of public market return they could have gotten. And then we get a percentage of that return and that's how we make our money. So you could think of us as we manage the capital that we raise, we add value to the companies,
00:04:53
Speaker
And there really are two gross ways we do that. One is by helping them in their operations get where they want to get. And the second is by acquiring companies to add on to it, which happens to be our specialty. And we usually do more of it than most companies do. So that's an area where we really do add value. And so think of private equity as supplying a big pool of capital, buying the controlling stake in a company, and hopefully growing and making a return.
00:05:22
Speaker
So I am curious, why does adding two companies together have more value than the way? Like, how does buying two companies make more value than if they're separate?
00:05:33
Speaker
Yes. Very good question. Some of the answers are probably obvious. They're not the big ones, but ah you only need one CEO for the combined company. So you save that cost. You only need one CFO.
00:05:45
Speaker
You might be able to combine it all in the one building and get rid of the building. You might take overlapping stations out in the field and combine them and have savings. So there's kind of that cost synergy, if you will.
00:05:57
Speaker
One of them may have a better installed operating system already than the other one does. And you can just jump people onto that. It's usually somewhat easier than trying to install the whole new operating system. saying So those are what I call the cost synergies.
00:06:10
Speaker
Secondly, you've got scale. So we now may have enough heft and size to say, you know, we should move into some international markets. And either one of the individual car companies who just may not have been big enough or had the wherewithal to do that.
00:06:26
Speaker
And third, we may now have a range of services by combining the two that either one of them would have taken a lot much longer to grow themselves.
00:06:37
Speaker
And so we could take the individual customers of each of those two companies, cross-sell, and now we've got revenue synergies. So that's theoretically how it works. And then you look at any private equity firm and see if empirically they've done that in the past.
00:06:52
Speaker
If they have it, it's a pretty good bet, probably. If they haven't, nobody's going to invest in them. And it is hard. It all looks easier on paper, right? Yeah. so Everything's
Technology & Innovation in Business
00:07:01
Speaker
hard. yeah So out of all of that, so there's the scouting, the companies, there's the working with the operators, there's the M&A, there's all these different things.
00:07:09
Speaker
What gets you excited? Like, what's the fun part for you? For me, I'm the operating partner at the firm im at now Greenbrier Equity. And so I am the kind the operating partner, but the most senior of people there who've actually worked in the industry.
00:07:25
Speaker
And so what gets me excited is figuring out how to grow faster than a company would it by itself. Because that's really the only reason we're able to make a return ourselves is we somehow add more value than a company could do on its own, who would invest in something that could do it on its own without having to pay us a ton.
00:07:43
Speaker
So that's what excites me, figuring out how to get more revenue. I do a lot of international work. So how to take a really good U.S. forwarder, for example, and get them into Europe, buy a platform there, or just find some smart guys and open up a station somewhere in Europe and grow it, offering new services, a smaller forwarder we might buy and own, and getting them much more into the international market, doing a lot more customs, brokerage, things like that.
00:08:11
Speaker
So I get to almost shadow as a real operator of the company. but I can do it with three or four companies at one time and add the value only really is high value and important and not have to do everything that that a CEO does, for example.
00:08:29
Speaker
Well, as a CEO, that sounds like a lot of fun. So, yes. with the If you pick your spots right, you're doing the things you like to do every day with three or four companies. And the things you don't like to do, the CEOs are doing those. And kind of like kind of a neat perch to be on.
00:08:45
Speaker
I'm assuming the answer is a lot, but like how much is tech coming up in these conversations nowadays? Like when you're looking at these companies, you look at all this stuff, like how much time is about the software and the way that they're using technology?
00:09:00
Speaker
You know, it's interesting. I have been doing this, as I said, 20, over 25 years now. And I would say it's probably not much more than it was 2000 or 2011 or 2017.
00:09:11
Speaker
or two thousand and eleven or two thousand and seventeen It's always been important since I've been in the industry to have good technology. cheese you know yeah All the old cliches are right. you know It's kind of that calling card to just get in the door and so forth. And that's always been the case.
00:09:28
Speaker
And so now we have multiples of tech investment that can be made. There are multiples of parts of the business influenced by tech, but it's really not that much different than it was a long time ago. So tech comes up all the time. It always has and always will. And is AI the big transformation of the last 25 years? Maybe, but I've heard that about many things that have come up.
00:09:55
Speaker
You've probably seen them. And so that's really big and really important, but it's just like it's always been since I've been in the industry. It is something necessary to get in the door. And a tech advantage is just another business advantage you bring to your customers.
00:10:10
Speaker
You might recall that XML files were going to completely automate the air freight industry and there was never going to be a human involved in an air freight shipment ever again after cargo 2000. So and yes, it was more routine and I'm sure ai will be that way. So keep making your predictions.
00:10:29
Speaker
Well, so what are you seeing out there? Like, what are you telling your companies to look at? Or what's in your mind? You know, it's rare that we could tell our companies what to look at in the sense that, you know they're really in the industry day to day. But our advice, and that usually comes from the fact we've seen two or three other companies, how do they do it?
00:10:46
Speaker
We just have a little more time to study those kinds of things. And so I do think, I almost hate to say it, but a i meaning to me, super sophisticated automation of human tasks, super sophisticated data management that puts hundreds of millions of bits of data at every employee you've got available to them, as opposed to millions of bits.
00:11:10
Speaker
And that capability we're getting now is the biggest topic of conversation. And we're really seeing results. They're not exactly the results a lot of people talk about, which might be eliminating jobs.
00:11:23
Speaker
ah you know, automating things that humans have to do. Those happen. But I'll tell you, Brian, that doesn't yet to me seem to be the major value.
00:11:34
Speaker
The major value we've seen is, again, the automation that brings the ability to think about or have access to i don't what the number is, but hundreds of millions of examples and bits of data to let an individual make a better decision right on the spot.
00:11:55
Speaker
that's what AI is doing to me. It is taking huge sets of data and sorting through them in seconds and helping make decisions according to rules and presenting options to the humans we have.
00:12:10
Speaker
ah So they just make better options about pricing, you know up to the second pricing, make better options about take or don't take business, make better options about how to price a particular piece of business during contract logistics, for example.
00:12:25
Speaker
And the speed with which that could be done is really valuable. And that's what I see our companies benefiting from right now. It's interesting. That lines up really well with, you know, I had a conversation with a pretty, very large forwarder, top 10, their innovation team a couple of weeks ago. And they said, we just did like a little brainstorming session on ai And, you know, they were talking about how their team is still in that cost savings level.
00:12:53
Speaker
mode, right? Oh, it can automate the data entry. It can automate sending the invoice. It can automate this, this, this, this.
Evaluating Leadership & Cultural Fit
00:12:59
Speaker
And the question that we got to was, OK, let's say you as top ten, number seven forwarder in the world automates and cuts 30 percent of your cost out and also number one, two, three, four, five and six and numbers eight through 100 that.
00:13:17
Speaker
are you all going to hold pricing discipline and make more money? or are you just going to still be a 9% business that just operates on a smaller revenue base because you've all got more efficient?
00:13:28
Speaker
One of you is willing to sell it for less money, and therefore you all sell it for less money. And then I said to them, so what are you going to do with this, all this new technology power to be better than the guy that's one ahead of you on the list?
00:13:42
Speaker
And their honest answer to me was, our people aren't ready to think about that yet. because they're still getting dirty in this stuff. But we kind of got to that very similar point to what you just made, which is if you don't find something unique to do with this, you're just, you know, we all got rid of typewriters and bought computers. Like having a computer is no longer a competitive advantage.
00:14:02
Speaker
Does that like match up with kind of how you're thinking about it? and It does. It it does. um And I think, first of all, you have to do it to keep up and keep your place at number seven. You know, otherwise you'll be number eight and then nine and 10 and slip. So I think that is true. And it, you know, it just comes back to leadership and the intellectual strength of the thinkers that are driving your business.
00:14:29
Speaker
And that's, one of the biggest value adds there are. And that's what we look for. When we, as a private equity firm, when we buy companies, that's one of the most important things we can find is somebody who, and a lot of times it's just for a period of time, will think ahead of the competition. Right.
00:14:48
Speaker
AI can lower costs and AI does this and that. and as you said, all the top 10 are doing it. But that one company that thinks, you know, I can use it this way and they get a lead. They probably can't keep the lead for the long term. But that's what we're looking for are leaders who can think about how to use these tools faster, better than somebody else can for a period of time.
00:15:11
Speaker
How much do you guys think about culture and leadership? And so like, how do you analyze company? And like, it's very easy to look at the numbers or it's not easy, but it's, I'm sure you've looked at 50 of them. It's pretty easy to go. Okay. Well, they're BSing that number, but that's real.
00:15:25
Speaker
But the soft skills and the like, can this team or can a portion of this team, do we, is our hypothesis that they can carry this forward? Like, how do you guys talk about that? What's the language? Yeah.
00:15:37
Speaker
So I think it's a subject that common sense applies pretty well to. If you or any other sophisticated or experienced business person thinks about it and uses a common sense, that's kind of what we're doing.
00:15:51
Speaker
We're doing what you would do and what other people who've been through this. We have kind of memory templates that are very helpful. You know, we've bought 250 companies in last 20 years. in the last twenty years And so that really helps. We've had some winners, we've had some mediocre, and we've had some losers.
00:16:08
Speaker
And so you start getting some templates. You know what to look for. The other thing that we spent time doing is what I call profiling success. So we've explicitly, we've done this some with consultants and some ourselves, but we've explicitly said, okay, here's a company where they just do things better. It's been one of our big winners.
00:16:27
Speaker
They were ahead of the industry. They competitively you know had a great place and just always seem to be ahead and earned. In the end for us, it's all about, and they earn super normal returns. So what would we say made the difference with that? Was it IQ? Yeah.
00:16:42
Speaker
Was it analytical capability? Was it being a nice place to work? Was it being a place with sharp elbows and kind of driving people hard? And we explicitly look at the leadership factors that make a difference. And we, in some cases, subtly or informally, but in some cases, formally look for that in the management teams that we're evaluating as we look to buy.
00:17:05
Speaker
So culture, if you will, or style, or leadership characteristics are very important. And we don't have one model that we always look for, but we can look at an existing company and a model and kind of fit it into our templates.
00:17:26
Speaker
Oh, that's generally a culture or style or a leadership or just a lack of experience as a team that we've found hasn't worked out very well for us in the past.
00:17:36
Speaker
And part of that is, remember, we had a very short horizon. We plan on five years needing to have that company be worth much more than when we bought it And that's our horizon. So that leads to a different type of leadership template and so forth.
00:17:50
Speaker
And that's how we do it. So I think that brings up a really important lesson that I didn't understand when I worked inside of a private equity firm.
Aligning Investments with Private Equity Goals
00:18:00
Speaker
And I reported to a CIO at the time. So You know, I was re I had the largest capital budget in the company because I ran all the data centers besides the warehousing guys. And as a technical person, and I would see the same thing in trade compliance and in operations, I was like, this is a good thing.
00:18:17
Speaker
And over the next 10 years, this is going to be amazing for the company. And then it I kept getting shot down. and I think it's important for people to understand when you work inside of a company where the owners have a timeframe that something that is going to pay back in nine years is a bad investment, even if it's a good investment for 30 years.
00:18:37
Speaker
Right. I think you're right. I'm oversimplifying, but yeah. Yeah. No, no, you're right. I think It's rare that we can do something that is bad for the long term that makes us more money in the short in the five years, let's say. And I'll tell you why.
00:19:00
Speaker
Think about who's going to buy the company and pay the top price for it. It's somebody else who knows what they're doing. And if we've done something that damages the longer term prospects for a company,
00:19:15
Speaker
And five years from now, my counterpart in another firm is in looking at it, they're going to go wow, this thing was kind of mismanaged or that is a big gap or a hole we are going to have to fill in our five years.
00:19:28
Speaker
And so that's that's a check on the the raping and pillaging that you hear about with private equity firms you know while they own it. That is a fool's chase in many ways because the next buyers are just as smart as we are, and they're going to catch us if we've done things that do anything to hurt the longer term, even just the next...
00:19:48
Speaker
Yeah, and I think one of the things that I saw at the time was, or didn't understand in talking to my boss and talking to the executive team was, it was less so about like doing a bad thing as, okay, there's two good options on the table.
00:20:02
Speaker
One's gonna hit the bottom line in two years and one's gonna hit the bottom line in in five and we're already three years into this thing. We're gonna take the one that's gonna hit the bottom line inside the window, like, you know, of two good options.
00:20:16
Speaker
yeah That's when that's I so would see the time horizon conversation come in pretty quickly. Kind of. But remember, the next guy is looking at the history, what we did and what we did in two years, years and that looks like growth. of But they mostly are saying, what's going to happen in our five years, which is the next year? So,
00:20:36
Speaker
I hear what you're saying. I think you're worth it now, but it's not that cut and dried. If we do something and we only reap a year or two of the value out of it at the end of our hold period, but it is going to go gangbusters after that. But we just want to sell it for some reason because we need show an exit or something.
00:20:55
Speaker
The next guy is going to highly value that and pay us more for that for that company. So in the spirit of education, let's say I'm working, you know, I'm a director, or a manager, at you know, in a company and I'm getting acquired by P firm and i don't know what all this is. Like, what's kind of the most generic piece of advice you can give to someone who's not in the boardroom?
00:21:17
Speaker
I would say if I was middle of my career and starting out to look at the longer term things of a company and advising the C-suite and that kind of thing, I would just go ask and try and get my boss or my boss's boss, if there were enough people interested, to explain some of that thinking to me.
00:21:37
Speaker
Because you can't just, you can't see it from the outside. You've got to learn from people who are feeling it, who are in the boardroom, who do know what the private equity firm is is pushing for, and who do know what the realistic options are. and You know, you can't have every employee in the company doing that.
00:21:56
Speaker
But as far as being a, somebody reporting to the C-suite to go to your boss and say, hey, World looks pretty new now. Private equity owns us. What's changed?
00:22:06
Speaker
What do you think I should be doing differently? What's going to help you when you're in that boardroom with with a board that is private equity guys? How do I think a little differently than I did two years ago when the founder still owned us?
00:22:21
Speaker
And that's the best advice I could give. I will tell you as someone who went through in-chain, kind of went through you know venture rounds, there was never a time when somebody on my team asked me what it what that meant or how that was gonna impact us that I wasn't excited to have the conversation. Like, because after all like everyone who's sitting in that CC, like, you're kind of like holding it all and you're like, it's like you're dealing with it.
00:22:47
Speaker
When somebody asks you, like, awesome, I can talk about, like, it's actually, it's really, have a lot of interest. Like, it's a little, oh, this is the person who's actually invested in understanding the company.
00:22:59
Speaker
Exactly. And if I tell them what is going to help me when I'm in the boardroom, maybe they'll do that. Yes, maybe. And then they really will help you, you know? So it's a good investor of time.
00:23:11
Speaker
What has you excited about the future? Where's your optimism for the industry or for anything really?
The Future of Capitalism and AI
00:23:18
Speaker
Well, I guess it starts at the really fundamental level, which is I'm really excited about capitalism and especially about American capitalism. I've lived capitalism, I guess, since I was a kid or whatever, but since I graduated from business school and that's coming up on 50 years ago and I,
00:23:38
Speaker
It can see nothing that is not still positive about the entrepreneurial spirit, starting companies, managing them, growing them, expanding.
00:23:50
Speaker
I've dedicated my life to being a capitalist and learning different aspects of that. so So I start with that. And then I can zero it down into transportation logistics. I remember when transportation logistics was much more complicated, much less efficient, much lower um in terms of standards that we had to meet to kind of be ah be a good player in the business.
00:24:15
Speaker
Those standards keep going up, the costs keep going down, and we just do so much more now that is is efficient. and gets the job done. And that lowers the overall cost of goods. That increases standards of living in ah in a very micro and macroeconomic sense.
00:24:32
Speaker
And that's what excites me, is being part of the the biggest capitalist economy in the world and being one of the in one of the biggest sectors, which is transportation logistics.
00:24:44
Speaker
You know, they're just never going to, it's not going to go away. Every time I think I understand how big this thing we call an industry is, i am constantly reminded that there are aspects of it that I don't even know exist.
00:24:57
Speaker
Exactly. Right. Like the first time I heard about people who do studies on this size of the cardboard boxes that you should carry in an e-commerce where it's like, that's their whole job. Yeah. Or the time I was assigned to run a duty drawback department. Right. I was like, what is duty drawback? Right. yeah These are things that are on such ah opposite ends. of We all call it all this one thing.
00:25:19
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's on and on. I still, after all these decades, I'm still amazed by some things that, you know, how do you how do you get a little that,
00:25:30
Speaker
five dollar package to someone at the cost yeah that it currently takes in the market, knowing 30% of the time it will be returned for free. And yet somebody sells that piece for $5 and makes a profit.
00:25:43
Speaker
This is not just all startups and money losers. These are the big e-commerce companies and things like that I'm still learning. It's what gets me excited is it's, I still think it's more complicated than the internet. Like the actual physical economy is,
00:26:01
Speaker
unbelievable that this thing doesn't fold in on itself every 20 minutes. right so Yeah, it's great to be part of it, really. is So in that spirit, I want to test the theory on you that I have, because I'm just curious to hear hear your take on this. When it comes to this AI stuff, one of the things that people keep saying online, and you know I take all of it with a grain of salt, is, oh, we're going to have less labor because we've made everything easier.
00:26:30
Speaker
And when I got into this and I worked for my first supply chain software company, we had a huge global wearing apparel company that was a customer of ours. But essentially, they were U.S. company. They brought everything into Los Angeles. They put it on a truck. They brought it to the East Coast and they distributed to Macy's and JCPenney.
00:26:49
Speaker
And then everything else was licensed outside. And the only people they bought from China was one supplier who aggregated all that. Now that company manages every country in the world, they move things in every direction possible, an e-comm channel and multi-channel, because the tech made it easier.
00:27:05
Speaker
And so my theory is that all of this AI is going to make the things we do today easier. And then all of our customers are going to make the world more complicated to fill that vacuum. That it's never actually that we're going to have less work to do.
00:27:20
Speaker
That it's that we're actually just going to... find ways to make this economy more complex so that we end up with the same labor base doing more things, that it's always about efficiency, on the but that the labor is actually fixed and we just do more with it.
00:27:38
Speaker
I'm really good. you Really good, good theory. And i as you can tell me, I'm an engineer, so I like empirical evidence and I like templates and and so forth.
00:27:49
Speaker
it So let's take ourselves back to 1600. sixteen hundred how many people did it take to make a hundred square yards of cloth?
00:28:04
Speaker
So um let's say, I don't know, but let's say a hundred, you know, spinning the thread and putting it on the loom and all that kind of stuff. So then water power comes along and then steam power comes and electricity comes. And so now it takes a hundredth of a person instead of a hundred people, it takes a hundredth of a person to make that cloth.
00:28:24
Speaker
ah And yet the unemployment rate in, take even England is, you know, 6% or something or 4% or whatever it is. So every single person in England in 1600 was employed and 40% of them happen to be making square yards of materials.
00:28:39
Speaker
Now, every single person in England is employed and they're doing all kinds of stuff and they have a better economy. People have a hundred times the standard of living that those people did. And that is my vision for the next 300 years.
00:28:52
Speaker
it's it's an it's a variation on what you said. And it may be that it may be that the logistics and transportation industry supplies the entire world's deeds with fewer people than we have today.
00:29:05
Speaker
So that, as you said, the complexification or the complication of the world does not always have to be in one industry, but now there'll be four times the the number of leisure and lodging workers because you and I take nine weeks of vacation a year or 16 weeks of vacation a year.
00:29:24
Speaker
And we still have a better higher standard of living. so the So the world to me, especially in a capitalist system, will reallocate the labor because everybody wants to get more. A hundred years from now, when they have unimaginable things to us, when everybody has a standard of living that's much higher, people still will want more. So they'll still work and they'll work hard.
00:29:44
Speaker
And so AI is just an automation tool. That is, I believe, going to be no bigger of an influence than the the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, and so forth. I don't think that we will have more unemployment or anything like that. Again, you and I may only work 40 weeks a year instead of 50 or whatever it is, but everybody will be working and trying to get ahead and doing more with less.
00:30:11
Speaker
John, I'm going to tell you that the only outcome of me working 40 weeks a year would be that my wife would divorce me because I would be driving her crazy. yeah No, I think before we talk ourselves into more trouble, that is an excellent place to wrap up.
Episode Conclusion & New Tool Announcement
00:30:24
Speaker
Thank you so much for chatting. This is a lot of fun.
00:30:27
Speaker
I've enjoyed it. Thank you very much.
00:30:36
Speaker
Thanks so much to John for just an amazing conversation. After we stopped recording, he and I actually chatted for an extra 45 minutes on the side. So just a pleasure to talk to John always and get some insights from somebody who really has a deep understanding of the industry from a really unique perspective.
00:30:54
Speaker
If you're interested in some of the AI we were talking about and how to make it a little more practical, I would suggest you go to checks.chain.io, C-H-E-C-K-S chain io c h g c k s dot chain dot IO. And take a look at our new tool that helps operators, whether you're working from a spreadsheet as a shipper all the way up to deep integrations with your systems to look at your SOP.
00:31:17
Speaker
and have a babysitter for your shipments that's going to sit there and look for SOP compliance, look for all those things that are really hard to dig up, like a forwarder forgetting to put a key reference field in that you need in order to pay them, or from the forwarder side, looking at those unique customer KPIs like this customer prefers this carrier on this lane, or we're not supposed to move this commodity via air freight for them, or all of these special rules that are so hard to build into TMSs.
00:31:44
Speaker
When you use Chex, you can run the data through. You just type the rules in plain English and out from the other side comes your results. So check it out, Chex.Chain.io. Again, I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io, and I will speak with you next time.