FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
What's Working with Cam Marston 7-27 070824
(upbeat music) - Welcome to What's Working. I'm Cam Marston. Thank you for joining us. What's working is the radio show slash podcast designed to bring you updates on the trends influencing our workplace, our workforce and our marketplace. Try to find guests who could talk about the trends in such a way that maybe you can use some of these ideas, benefit from them, do something with them. Today, the conversation took me back. Well, when I read the article in Business Alabama magazine and I reached out to the editor and said, "Hey, how can I introduce myself? How can I meet this guy?" His name is Klein Jones and I'll tell you about him in a moment and he facilitated it. So he, the editor, facilitated it. This week's show comes out of Business Alabama magazine, the June 2024 issue and it starts, let's see, I can look at it here. It's in front of me page 30 of the magazine about the inland waterways. Why did this take me back? One of the jobs that I had with a client many years ago now was with the Ingram Barge Company. They're based in Nashville, at least they were, based in Nashville, Tennessee. And they reached out and said, "We think you might can help us and work with our captains, our topo captains, to understand the next generation of the workforce. They're having trouble with turnover and things of this nature and maybe this is something you could bring to them." And I gave them my pitch and they said, "Well, we think you'd be the guy. However, before you can do this, you need to come see what we do." And I said, "Well, you know, I've seen what people do. I've been in workplaces and everybody thinks theirs is unique, but from my point of view, they all look very similar." They said, "Nope, you need to come." So I drove over north of New Orleans from Mobile and jumped aboard a tow boat. And that was when I was introduced to the inland waterways and life aboard the river on a tow boat. And it was indeed truly something different than I had ever seen before. I think the shifts were six hours on, six hours off, it was like 28 days on, 28 days off. The cook on board had the same schedule. He or she and both the boats that I was on, it was a female cook, was treated reverentially. They fed the team thoroughly, wonderfully well. They sat together around a table aboard that tow boat. Everybody had their own bed and I had my own room in there because there was somebody that was missing from the tow boat at the time and it gave me some space. But I really saw something that I had never seen before and truly loved it. It was something that really grabbed me. And I would go up and find the captain and spend hours interviewing him for the content that ultimately would go into the workshops and the seminars that I brought, Ingraham Barge, but would sit there with him and watch him steer this boat. Up and down, we started north of the Mississippi River. We went down towards Venice, Louisiana, and then we turned around and put a new tow together and went back north. And I tell you, folks, I don't know if you can hear it in my voice, I loved that experience. And I began writing a book about it called Lessons from the Wheelhouse about how to lead in these environments. And ultimately, I kind of ran out of gas on the book. It was a wonderful concept, but I never got it into fruition. And in fact, on my bookshelf, not far from where I'm sitting right now, is the very loose copy of what I had in mind for that book, an overview, a blueprint for the book. This week's show is going to talk about those very same inland waterways. I'm betting if you're not familiar with this industry, you don't understand how much volume is moved on these waterways, largely because it's not something any of us see very often. I'm on the road every day and I see 18 wheelers every day, and I think that's the primary way for moving stuff. Well, a method for moving much, much, much more stuff than an 18 wheeler is through the towboats and the barges out there. And the volume is really remarkable. You're going to meet Klein Jones in a minute. He's the executive director for the Tennessee River Valley Association and the Tennessee Cumberland Waterway Council. It's a story about him in this month's Business Alabama Magazine, the June 2024 issue of the Business Alabama Magazine. Fun conversation. We'll be back, you're listening to What's Working. I'm Cam Marston. (upbeat music) - This is Seth Churniak, Vice President of Branch Development for the Jeffrey Matthews Financial Group. If you are an experienced financial advisor wanting the freedom of independence, but aren't sure making that jump is right for you, we should talk. Jeffrey Matthews has developed a successful program for advisors who don't want to be 1099 contractors and don't want to pay for their own overhead. We're looking for advisors who want the freedom to run their business the way they see fit with the support that comes with a W-2 firm. If you're interested in joining one of our branches, or if you want to open your own branch as a full-time employee, let's chat. Our compensation plan is one of the most competitive among all W-2 firms, big or small. Reach out to us today at Jeffrey Matthews.com, connect with me, Seth Churniak on LinkedIn, or click the link in the podcast. - Jeffrey Matthews Financial Group, member FINRA, S-I-P-C. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - We're back, you're listening to what's working. Thank you for joining us. I'm on the phone with Klein-Jones Jr., resident of Athens, Alabama. He has been spending all his life, I'm tung-tied here, on and around the Tennessee River. He is the executive director of the Tennessee River Valley Association and the Tennessee Cumberland Waterway Council Klein. You are an important man in the waterways business, and it's something that I think our listeners need to know about is the extraordinary value of the inland waterways, how much volume they ship, and I also want to get to the situation of the infrastructure itself. But before we do that, tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of what your day-to-day job is, if you would. - Well, as you said, I spent most of my life in, well, I've lived all my life in North Alabama. I spent most of my life in on and around the Tennessee River. We have always been recreational boaters. I grew up with a little neighborhood about a mile from Wilson Lock and Dam, and very often my dad and I would go for walks, we'd wind up at the Wilson Lock and Dam. In the shows, as I was growing up in the late '70s, there wasn't much to do on a Friday or Saturday night, so after you took your date to the Pizza Hut or the Burger King was about all we had. There you, very often wound up at Wilson Lock and Dam, watching the Barge Lock 3, which was fascinating. But yeah, I've grown up in North Alabama. The Tennessee River Valley Association were made up of people that use the Tennessee River, commercial users primarily, Barge lines, toen companies, poor terminal operators, engineering firms, people that have an interest in the value of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. So, the listeners to this show are in 30-something markets across the country. Now, I wanna make sure they understand that this is not an Alabama or a Northern Alabama phenomenon, but these inland waterways pretty much permeate the country with the Mississippi River and all the tributaries being the heart of it. Is that true? - That's correct. You know, the Mississippi is the third largest river system in the world, and with all the tributaries that feed it, because of our Lock and Dam system, the dams create pools for navigation. We have about 12,000 miles of interconnected, interdependent waterways in the United States. They touch about 28 states. There's approximately 176 lock sites that have 219 navigation locks. In that, I mean, some dams and lock sites may have a primary navigation lock and an auxiliary. There may be two locks at some dams, primarily on the Ohio and the mainstream of the Mississippi, but we have, I think, five locks and dams on the Tennessee that has auxiliary locks at them. - When were these locks and dams created? How old was the first idea to begin using these waterways for the industrial movement of materials? Is this a works-products administration thing or does this go on well before then? - Well, there's a quote of George Washington gazing out upon the Potumba, and saying we were the country's blessed, but these amazing waterways, would we have the desire to improve them? And it pretty much, you know, it goes back to the inventions of the steam engine and the ability to move stuff in along the waterways. In the early 1800s, you had shipping in, gosh, you had them on virtually every waterway in the system, they weren't, because we didn't have the locks and dams, they weren't all interconnected. You may have had dead zones where a tow boat couldn't reach. For instance, on the Tennessee, we had a system of owls along the area and the muscles where the river fell 100 feet and divided transportation between the shows area and Paducah, Kentucky and the shows area and Knoxville. So in the 1930s, actually the 1920s, Wilson Dam was built and it created that link that the Tennessee river was able to reach from Paducah all the way to Knoxville. And the similar situations on other river systems in the country, not just rivers, but there are man-made waterways. The 10-time waterway was built in the 1980s. It brought the Tennessee and the Tom Bigby River together. So shipping from Mobile could make it onto the Tennessee river and thereby to Paducah, Knoxville, into the Ohio Valley, not from Mississippi Valley. So we have man-made waterways and natural rivers that have been improved to provide for inland shipping. - What is the volume used? Tell me, I love sitting on the levees in New Orleans and watching these extraordinarily large, barge systems, fleets, not fleets, not the right word. What is the word for all that? You got 16 toes tied up. It's called a toe, isn't it? - It's called a toe, that's correct, it is. - These massive things, they look like a football field or more of stuff tied together being managed by one toe boat. What is the volume of materials moved up and down the waterways? Any idea? - Currently, nationally we move about 500 million tons by water inland and those that commerce is valued at about 186 billion. The way they do that, like you said, a jumper barge has capacity about 1,750 tons. They've got about 70 tractor trailer loads. So on the Mississippi, you may see 48 plus barges tied to one toe, one toe boat with an 8,000 horsepower may be pushing upstream on the Mississippi. Smaller waterways, like to say the Tennessee, we have 15 barge toes, which is the equivalent of about 1,000 tractor trailers. It's just amazing the volumes that they move. But yeah, on the national average, somewhere between 500 to 550 million tons per year and a tremendous value, once again, 186 billion dollars worth of commerce. - No kidding, and I think the significance of this to me is that this is, you're very aware of it, but most people don't see these extraordinary toes and this volume moving up and down the rivers because they don't have access to them. However, we see tractor trailers nearly every day going up and down the streets. For that reason, perhaps, the challenges of the infrastructure of the rivers and the dams and the locks are less front and center. Can you react to that? Is that true or not? - Well, you know, I think of this being out of sight, out of mind, unless you just happen to be crossing a bridge or a dam at a time that a tow boat is passing by, you might not even be aware of it. And even then, you might not be aware of what they're carrying. For instance, asphalt that's used on our roadways is moved in large container barges, the sand, the aggregates that goes into cement production. The best way to deliver that is by barge, where you can move such bulk numbers and keep those trucks off the highway. This gable is just kind of out of sight, out of mind. So it's difficult to tell someone and talk about locks. And then I do, very often I talk about locks. And for most people, a lock is something you put a key in. - Right. - These are massive structures on the Ohio. You have 1200 foot long by 110 foot wide structures that can lock nine barges at a time and their tow boat on the Tennessee. We have 110, 110 feet wide by 600 foot long locks that can lock nine barges at a time, two cycles for a 15-barge tow up and down the river. - Is, do you feel that the inland waterways get the federal attention that they should? Or is that also an out of sight, out of mind thing? - That's an out of sight, out of mind thing. Recently, in the last three or four years in our region, this is happening across the country. Once again, most of our locks and dams were built in New Deal era or well beyond their 50-year design life. And we're seeing a lot of failures in components in the systems. Three years ago on the Tennessee River in your Florence, Alabama, we had a failure of the Wilson Lock and Dam Godwall, which has really put us in a bad spot in North Alabama. It's been followed up by a failure on the Tom Bigbee at the Demapis Lock and Dam that took four months to repair. And now we have a failure, a near failure on the whole Lock and Dam on the Black Warrior River. So we're seeing these behind us, get old. - We'll pick this up when we get back from break. You're listening to what's working. I'm on with Klein Jones. He's the cover page article on the June 2024 edition of Business Alabama. We'll be right back. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - This is Billy Stitt. I perfected my bacon recipe. Behind my live music stage, I'm a little restaurant in Fairfield, Alabama. We have custom made smokers and small batch bacon made just for you. If you're looking for the best bacon in America, that has been cured, smoked, and even serenaded by songwriters, you definitely need to try Billy's Small Batch Bacon, www.billyspacin.com. (upbeat music) Klein Jones is on the other side of a Zoom call from me. He's featured on the front cover of Business Alabama June 2024 issue. I read it and thought this band needs to be on the show to talk about these inland waterways. I shared with Klein at one point that I had a wonderful bit of work as a consultant with Ingram Barge. And one of the things that they told me was, Cam, in order to work for Ingram Barge, you must come see what we do. And I thought, I've seen what people do. This won't be all that different. And then they took me onto a tow boat. And I spent, I think, three or four nights aboard a tow boat with them moving up and down the Mississippi River and absolutely loved it. Klein lives that business as well. You can read more about it in the June 2024 edition of Business Alabama, but Klein, back to you. Just prior to the break, we were talking about the threat to these inland waterways, the neglect and the maintenance that's needed to keep any of these things up is failing. Tell me a little bit, but the risks to the nation are, if that were to happen. - Well, once again, we move about a third of the nation's gross domestic product. Everything from gas, from sand and gravel to feed, farm products, petroleum products, precursors for chemicals, rockets that carry our satellites into orbit. - I saw that. That's fascinating that you have rockets on the barges. That's pretty dang cool. - Well, they do a specialized barge back in the '60s for the Saturn program called the Pegasus barge and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama had the only place you could test components for the Apollo program. So in the '60s, we saw the Apollo program come by river to Marshall Space Flight Center and was instrumental in our attempts to get to the moon today. Until recently, the Delta 5 Atlas rockets and are now a new line of rockets are being built in Decatur, Alabama, and a specialized ship called the rocket ship. It actually comes in where inland draft is nine feet of water. It can offload water and set up high in the water, come take the rockets on, traverse down the length of the Tennessee, onto the Ohio, onto the Mississippi, out of the Gulf of Mexico, take on balanced water and continue on around the nestle of Florida, it's a Cannaviral, or it can transit the Panama Canal and go to Vandenberg. So I tell everyone, if you've got it this morning, it had a weather report with a satellite, or if you made a cell phone call across the country, you did so because of inland barge transportation and the ability to move these rockets from their construction, from their assembly size to their launch sites. - That's fascinating to me, it really is. So what are the threats to these things? I didn't know that a third of the nation's GDP is shipped on the inland waterways. That's a phenomenal number. That's a big, big number. What is needed on most of these locks and dams, is it they need to be destroyed and rebuilt? Is it that they need ongoing maintenance that can't happen? Tell me what the exact threat is to these things. - Well, you think of the volumes of water, here we see 50, between 35 and 50 million gallons of water per lockage so you can imagine the stresses on the system. In a navigation lock, there's no pumping or anything. The, let's say that a barge is going downstream, the gates will open, it'll move into the lock and these huge valves, the gates will close and these huge valves will open and the water will drain out of the lock to the next level of the leg below. And likewise, when that's the gates open and they pull out, another boat will pull in, those same valves will be closed and move the upper end at the dam site with the upper leg, valves will open and water will flow in and fill the lock up to that site. So wear and tear, huge volumes of water moving in and out, the stresses of that volume of water, age and time, once again, approximately over half of the nation's locks and dams are beyond their design life. So Band-Aids, Balenwire and duct tape, is only gonna go so far. So some serious reinvestment has to be done and that's one of our jobs is to identify the most critical areas and make sure that the Corps of Engineers has what they need to initiate those repairs and modernization. - Are the repairs happening or is this a budgetary issue that they say, sorry, we just can't find the money? - Well, much like the highway trust fund, there is a inland water waste trust fund that tow boat operators, the ingrams of the world pay 29 cents per gallon fuel tax into. That's cost shared with the federal government at a 65-35 ratio. It's generating about $400 million per year now for modernization, construction, major rehabilitation. Unfortunately, a 600-foot lock to replace it is, as we're learning at Chattanooga, we're trying to replace a old aging lock. 600-foot lock's gonna cost you a billion dollars about 12 to 15 years to complete. - Oh my goodness. - Is that $400 million has been spread over three or four projects as they are prioritized and it's just taking some time to modernize, it really is. - Did you say 10 to 15 years to complete a new one? - Yes, sir. I took this job in 2007. We had just got started. I think the Chickamauga law replacement was authorized in 2004. We are hopefully gonna see the last contracts led on it between now and the first of October. That should finish that project up in 20, 26, 20, 27. - That's, that seems like a long time. You know what it reminds me of is these stories about building a nuclear power plant. How long they take and how many times they have to restart things. Why does it take, is it safe to say that the water downstream due to the greater volumes of water that the locks and dams on the downstream side of each of these waterways are in worse shape than on the upstream side? Is there any logic to that? - Not necessarily. On the upper reaches of the Ohio system, we're just completing a new lock and dam system on the Menanga-Hailar River and that's the Menanga-Hailar River and that's about as far upstream as you can get. Chickamauga is upstream on the Tennessee. It's just where they're failing, the older they are, the more likely they are to fail, the heavier the use they get, they're more likely to fail. So that's how we're trying to do it. The issue, the reason it takes so long and it's so hard to do is the way the Congress appropriates the money. If you're gonna build a battleship, they appropriate all that money, put it into account until the contract you build it. We work off annual appropriations. So there's repairs, repairs, an annual budget. This is the money that we expect to have. These are the priorities and the Congress has to appropriate the dollars. That's where it gets kind of iffy. We've had some successes in recent years with some of the stimulus programs that we've seen. We've seen some dollars go toward the program, but not nearly enough, but not nearly enough. - Doesn't seem like there's ever really enough for these things. What is the one that is in most danger of failing right now? And what would be the impact? Would there be a flood downstream or would it just be the product would have to go over land at that point? Tell me what happens when one fails. - Well, that's what happened with Demopolis in early January. I think about January the 16th, the lock operator heard a boom and went outside and water was pouring through the, from the upper lake into the lock chamber. A huge segment of concrete had failed and water was just running uncontrollably in the lock. So the Corps of Engineers did a great job on getting the lock gates closed downstream, equalized the water. So the water wasn't rushing so bad. When they got the lock gates closed, the levels were able to equalize. And the flow was such that we could get, let's call it a temporary dam upstream of it in place, a copper dam upstream of it in place, stop the flow and drain that water out and do the repairs. That was on January the 16th. It reopened four weeks ago. It was down for four months. So everything that moved north of Imopolis, Alabama to Gulf was interrupted for four months. Huge volume of coal exports out of Alabama were disrupted, a sanding gravel that moves in North Alabama for the huge construction industry was disrupted. It's just been, it's just a terrible disruption to the system. - Let's talk about that more when we get back. You're listening to what's working. I'm Cam Marston. I'm on with Klein Jones Jr. He's the executive director, Tennessee River Valley Association and the Tennessee Cumberland Waterway Council. We'll be right back. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - This is Seth Churniak, Vice President of Branch Development for the Jeffrey Matthews Financial Group. If you are an experienced financial advisor wanting the freedom of independence but aren't sure making that jump is right for you, we should talk. Jeffrey Matthews has developed a successful program for advisors who don't want to be 1099 contractors and don't want to pay for their own overhead. We're looking for advisors who want the freedom to run their business the way they see fit with the support that comes with a W-2 firm. If you're interested in joining one of our branches or if you want to open your own branch as a full-time employee, let's chat. Our compensation plan is one of the most competitive among all W-2 firms, big or small. Reach out to us today at Jeffrey Matthews.com, connect with me, Seth Churniak on LinkedIn or click the link in the podcast. - Jeffrey Matthews Financial Group member FINRA, S-I-P-C. (upbeat music) - When we're back, you're listening to what's working. Klein Jones is on the other side of a Zoom call with me. He's the June 2024 cover page model for Business Alabama Magazine. When I got my issue, I said I'd like to talk to this guy. More from his bio, in addition to being the executive director of the Tennessee River Valley Association and the Tennessee Cumberland Waterways Council, he's the executive director of Energy Fairness, serves on the state of Alabama's Water Resources Commission and has been selected to chair the next term of the Tennessee Valley Authority's Regional Resources Stewardship Council. I tell you what, Klein, they don't give you a short title with short pithy names of the organizations you work for. They're all hyphenated, multi-syllable words. Anyway, he's an important guy in the world out there of moving a third of the nation's gross domestic product over these in inland waterways. Klein, what's the future of this? What's, are there new technologies? Are there new things, you know, shipping stuff over water is as old as history itself? What's the future look like? Is it anything different? Well, there's a lot of R&D going on now, and new engine technologies. Of course, you know, it's as we've become more environmentally aware you need to reduce any levels of emissions that you can. And so there's hybrid engine technologies. There's electric engine technologies, of course, that's limited because of the huge volumes. But there's innovation going on as in any industry as we're looking at new ways to do things. Containerization is a huge thing. Talking about what's looking at the future. You have these 20 or 40 foot boxes literally coming in from all over the world into our seacorts, and primarily they moved either by truck or by rail. Well, we know about congestion on the highways, and the rails are equally congested. So we're trying to come up with ways to be able to move these things by a barge inland, whether it be to just inland to a point where that can be easier distributed, less congestion. It's just technology, it's just a handling, and it's just something that has to develop over time. But we're hopeful that that technology is going to catch up, and we'll be able to move a lot of these container boxes by barge inland and alleviate some more traffic on the highways and on the rails. Wouldn't a container barge be much lighter than a barge that uses so much of the aggregates and the materials and the sand and the asphalt? Something like that. Wouldn't it be more environmentally efficient to push a barge full of containers versus dirt? Absolutely. You know, you can push a one ton of cargo 319, I believe 318 miles by barge on one gallon of fuel, and that's nothing compared to this. It's numbers by multiples over what you can do by a truck or by rail. Yeah, it's much more economically feasible to move any item by barge. It just becomes a handling thing at the effort that we've ran into is when you get that barge inland, when you take it off that barge, you have to have that chassis for it to go on to a truck on. There's just a lot of details that have to be worked out to make that feasible. But yes, it's absolutely more efficient, absolutely. It's amazing to me how more efficient it is, how less of an environmental impact it is, how much these things hold. So I think you relayed this a little bit ago in one of the previous conversations that we've had one barge holds as much as how many 18 wheelers? - 70. - 70, it's in a slow industry. - A flatbed truck with a steel coil on back, with one steel coil on back. You think about we can put 63 of those steel coils on one barge. - Yeah, unbelievable. Yeah. When I worked for Ingram years ago, one of the challenges they had was recruiting people because it's a difficult lifestyle. It's a non-traditional lifestyle. It's, let's say, 28 days on, 28 days off. It's, you work in, I think it was, when I was there, maybe six hour shifts or something like that. Do, what is your awareness of the recruiting challenges of getting people to work for these barge companies? Are they still struggling with that? - You know, it is, we've seen labor shortages across the nation. It is a fantastic job for someone to say, and I've done this, but I have a daughter in this, a senior in university now. And I was talking to some of her friends when those kids graduated. Hey, you can go get a job with the towing company. You're 28 days on, 28 days off. And the starting pay is, you know, close to $200 a day. And your food, as you probably, you ate pretty good when you was on the-- - Very good. - Yeah. - Very good. And so when you get off that barge, you've got that money for a nice new vehicle to take care of your family. - It is a challenge. We are able to keep folks on the barges, because it is a good pay, the wage is there. The companies treat people very well. They have great retirement, health benefits. It is a really good place to work. And yeah, they're challenges, but it's just something that the wage is drawing people to it. - Yeah, well, it was. It was eye opening for me, and I truly fell in love with it. I started writing a book about it, never finished that book, but started writing a book about the things that I saw sitting in that wheelhouse late in the evening at two a.m., going across underneath the big bridge in New Orleans. I'll never forget any of those things. It was a charming way of life. Of course, I was hanging out with the captain in an air conditioning room, and all those guys, they were out on the toe, making sure all those straps were right, were having a different experience than I was. So the inland waterways, so very important to the country, not only because of the stuff that they move up and down, but there are ancillary businesses that they support as well. For example, you gotta build these toe boats. You gotta build these barges. What are the other ancillary businesses supported by the inland waterways? - Well, if you think about the end users, so just about every product, once again, we see a lot of sand, the tremendous construction industry that's going on in the South East, Nashville, is just exploding, places like Huntsville. And they're able to do so in large part, because the low cost sand and aggregates that come in. So ancillary businesses, ancillary joggers, talking about construction companies, from the chemical industries, the chemicals that come in, the chemical jobs, the end users, we have on the upper Tennessee, we have an old and chloralkali. They're produced as a chlorine products that may wind up in Clorox, or some of the products from across the region. Shoreside jobs, wherever there's a port and terminal, it has to be people there to handle product, move it on and off. You have to have truck drivers to move it from the ports to the final end users. There's a lot of product handling that goes on in ports and terminals, requires a lot of folks, a lot of industries are direct-served, a lot of steel industries are directly on the river, so those jobs and those steel industries that support off of their properties are pretty huge. - Yeah, it's a spider web of connections out there. Tell me, Klein, a little bit about yourself, we got less than two minutes though, but what is it that you like so much that's kept you in this business for so long, beginning with those walks with your father, where you'd go watch the lock and the dam operate today? - Well, I've always been fascinated by the barges. It's just, I could recall going camping when we were really young and at night I'd be awakened by barges being re-the toe being made up or toe being broken and hearing that those sounds of those barges rattling together. But it's great people, like you talked about the anger from folks, from the front office, all the way down to the guys that work on those barges, they're hard working great American patriots, our Corps of Engineers folks at our locks and dams are doing all they can with limited resources, they have to keep it up, it's pretty amazing and to get to work, as I do, part of one of the things that are my responsibility is to communicate to our decision makers, the needs of the system, and what we need to do to keep this thing modern, reliable and providing the benefits of the nation that we have now. - I'm grateful for your work, Klein, it's, I would never exactly describe it as a sexy industry, but from the outside looking in, it's a man's man's world and it's, like you said, my experience, it was full of wonderful people. Klein, thank you so much for your time. - Thank you, I appreciate your interest. - We'll be back after this break, you're listening to what's working. (upbeat music) - I'm Joey Mason, for four years, my goal has been to produce the best farm-to-table products I'd ever eaten. I've done just that at our own site, USDA Facility in Grand Bay, Alabama, allowing us to ship directly to your door. This is true farm-to-table. Visit us at masonheelsfarm.com to see all that we have to offer. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - We're back, you're listening to what's working. I'm Ken Marston, wanna thank Klein for his time. He was absolutely prepared with all the numbers and the data that I was looking for to get a sense of the significance and the volume of the stuff that moves up and down these rivers and infrastructure. Once again, I kinda went on a rant a week or so ago about our political environment out there and one of the things that seems to be consistently overlooked or addressed haphazardly, not thoroughly, is the infrastructure needs. We had a conversation, a national conversation around that in one of the, I think it was a big legislative push out of Washington to update the infrastructure, but it sounds like it's still woefully negligent. So much of what put this nation on the map was our attention to the infrastructure and it railroads and the locks and dams and the things like that. The highways, it's not too often that we, there's a bridge that goes out of service because it's suddenly become unsafe. It's just that infrastructure. And I remember hearing an economist one time, I'm kinda rambling here, hearing an economist one time talk about the investments in infrastructure and how you look at the cost of these things and they are a costy and getting a, as Klein told us, replacing a locking dam is not cheap, not cheap at all, and it takes years upon years to do. But these investments in these infrastructure tend to pay off significantly over time. It doesn't happen immediately. One of the examples he gave, and I thought this was interesting, you've probably seen something similar, is when you, on the side of a highway, when you will add an intersection to a highway, what often happens is a gas station shows up. And if it's a busy gas station, then a second gas station shows up to take some of that business. Once you get two gas stations there, you're gonna get a fast food restaurant there. And these things begin to grow with an intersection onto the interstate. Another example, relocate an airport and watch the business grow in the relocation of the airport. You're gonna have the airport relocated and think about Denver, if you've flown in and out of Denver for a while. They moved the airport of, and the Denver airport way outside of town. Well, the last time I flew into Denver, there was a town surrounding the airport that didn't used to exist there. So these are the infrastructure growth items that come from a very expensive process of, let's say, relocating an airport. You're gonna get services to the airport. You're gonna get hotels, you're gonna get new rental car locations and new rental car companies. You're gonna get all kinds of things. So these, the point was, infrastructure investments yield economic gains over a period of time. Problem is, it's a hard pill to swallow to pay for that infrastructure investment. And Klein pointed out some that are very helpful to our nation, and that is these inland waterways. I'm a great fan due to my time I spent with Ingraham Barge Company. That'll wrap us up this week, everybody. Find us on social media, Cam Marston. Email me directly, Cam@cammarston.com. Let me know what you think. And if you got somebody you think I need to know, need to interview for the show, I'd love to hear who they are. Again, C-A-M, Cam@cammarston.com. That'll wrap us up. Have a good week, everybody. 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