Ken Lucci 0:00

this conference had a different feeling to me. it had a nostalgia feeling. It had a very tangible feeling of everyone happily moving forward and their businesses doing well. overall the vibe was extremely positive

James Blain 0:39

Hello everybody, and welcome back to another exciting episode of the Ground Transformation Podcast. I'm super excited. We just got back from Vegas. I have my friend with me. Finally. We are back together. We had an incredible time in Vegas. Ken, I, I don't even know where to start with this one. Vegas is like a blur. I'm still recovering. We're recording this the day after. I don't know about you, but I'm still processing it.

Ken Lucci 1:01

I got off the plane, this morning about 1:00 AM 100% some of the biggest, best activity I've seen. certainly Monday on the show floor was unbelievably incredible. Um, let's talk about the education. you had your session on Sunday, and

James Blain 1:19

Were we Sunday or Saturday? Yeah, we were Sunday.

Ken Lucci 1:21

Sunday, and I jumped, I jumped from mine, but, I will share with you. I heard some fantastic

James Blain 1:27

I.

Ken Lucci 1:27

reports from your session. It really was a nice takeoff because of the way you framed out, where we were headed as an industry. So how did you feel overall about, about your session?

James Blain 1:41

For me, it worked out really well because your session, for those of you, you don't know, your session and my session were back to back and they were literally in, like, if we would've been on stage at the same time, we would've literally had our backs to each other with a thin wall and be. Between. And so it worked out really well for me because I was able to sit and watch you and and Matt go through the AV presentation. And then what that allowed me to do, coming to the second one. 'cause the big thing on mine was we wanted to do the progression of a trip

Ken Lucci 2:10

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

James Blain 2:11

booking. To drop off to billing it out, everything in between. And I, had a couple slides on the service crisis in our country right now and how customer service is basically down the tube. And then we kind of migrated into document eight, which we have our whole episode on. And then when we started to kind of pivot and transition is this idea that autonomous is coming. And like I said, with Uber 10 years ago when I first got into the industry. if you're trying to compete with it, you don't get it. And so that's where we make this transition point to this is the best possible opportunity to really ramp up the service chauffeurs are gonna matter more than ever. And I'm actually really

Ken Lucci 2:51

absolutely. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Yep.

James Blain 2:54

Yeah. So we've got great footage. we've got that whole presentation. You know, maybe we can cut to a clip real quick.

3:01

So here's the opportunity. In my opinion, chauffeuring is gonna matter more in the next five to 10 years than it has mattered in the last 20. I want you to think about this. Your biggest VIP, the one that just has more money than they know what to do with maybe even more money than brains, depending on how much you like 'em, right? They show up in their G six, it lands. The Waymo is still trying to figure out how to get signature to open the gate to get to the jet. Right. Or one of the guys on the ground crew thought it'd be funny. They put a cone on the hood and it stuck. Right. It's the same idea we have. Are you gonna see the Honda Civic roll up right up to the jet? Right? Yeah. No, Sarah hop into my way. Yeah, no, we are the top. Matt Doss said it in the last session. We will be the last. One to get infiltrated and only if we decide to compete. The biggest thing with the whole autonomous revolution, with everything coming, with everything going on, is that you have to have a team of chauffeurs. Chauffeur matter more than ever. Anybody here taking an Uber black? Did you hear about GM's new policy? They're not gonna sell Suburbans or Escalades to Uber. Yeah, it's bs. They'll sell 'em to anybody. They don't care. They're gonna take the money. So when two suburbans pull up, which one do you think I want to be in? The guy with jeans and a t-shirt sitting in the driver's seat. Or the one that's standing there with the door open, ready to help me with my luggage when I'm getting married. Right. If you're a retail guy, most important day of my life. You think I wanna try and figure that out on the Ride Share app? No. We are going to matter more than we ever have.

James Blain 4:51

I was a little sad 'cause we didn't get everybody in your room into mine. Your session was packed. Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of people in the other room, but man, it was shoulder to shoulder in yours, my buddy.

Ken Lucci 5:03

Well, thank you. I, I, I, I wanted, uh, talk first about, the scaling, smart scaling, on noon to one 15. Did you go to that

James Blain 5:15

The smart scaling, I

Ken Lucci 5:17

Bill Gallagher, the scaling coach. Okay. So

James Blain 5:20

How was that one?

Ken Lucci 5:22

alright, so he's, he was 12 noon. I just went in to say hello to him and before he started, and then I, kind of got, trying to do my prep, for our session, which, you know, went off at one 30. So, but I will share with you, he's such an impressive guy. Bill Gallagher scaling coach.com and I said to him. I, I would really like you to come on the podcast only

James Blain 5:45

Oh, nice.

Ken Lucci 5:46

only because there are a lot of people in our industry, well, let me, let me back up there. There are some consultants that, there are consultants that, that try to be jacks of all trades that talk about, let me help you scale your business. But fundamentally, I believe scaling expertise is like financial expertise. And he really nailed it. I was so impressed by the fact that, the industry brought him in. Didn't try to job it themselves, right. Have an operator go up there and talk about scaling because, there's a hell of a science to it and it's an interaction play between the owner of the business who's usually the one who's, standing in the way himself. But, yeah, so I was very happy with that. to be honest with you, you know, the EAV session was the first one that was done at the conferences. So I think that accounted for the PACT audience. I wasn't happy with it. not important to go into the detail, but it was the first one

James Blain 6:53

you can't drop a bombshell like that and be like, nah, that wouldn't happen. No, I mean, Let me ask you, what, is there any one piece? 'cause I, I gotta tell you, I thought you did great, Ken.

Ken Lucci 7:02

I think that we failed to come to a crescendo. We failed to come to the, the final act of the play where the entire plot was exposed and the audience left with the wow that, and they left without the actionable items. I have a pet peeve about that. I'm not up there to give my opinion. I'm up there to say, This is what the data shows and this is where my opinion on the subject is based on that data. And we spent a lot of time on the current data. I don't think it's such, I don't, we try to pack it in, tried to pack in a ton of stuff. And I think that the entire subject of AV is, is very complicated. And the biggest difference that we did not touch upon, and I think we failed miserably at it, was the connection between AI and av. And I think things, some things were brought up that were, you know, 10 years old. The data was 10 years old. Um, and. The convergence of AI and av, those two things are creating a strategic inflection point that makes this a matter of when, not if, I don't think we failed to deliver the message. I just think it was probably mixed in there, a little bit too much. Like Okay. Um, I, I just think, I think we missed the crescendo. That's just my opinion. Yeah. Am I tough, tougher, uh, on myself? you know, somebody told me they took a video of that and I said, don't show it to me.

James Blain 8:43

Well, and it's, it's interesting that you mentioned ai. 'cause I don't know if you heard about the news for Anthropic. So for anybody that doesn't know Anthropic owns the Claude model. It's a competitor to chat GPT, right Open AI owns chat. GPT Claude is owned by Anthropic, so I, I listen to a great podcast called The TechMeme Ride Home. The Techmeme Ride Home is literally just everything that's happened in tech. And one of the things that happened is even though the government has essentially shunned them, they have become the fastest growing software company in history by revenue. So I think, I think if that's something that you're gonna be able to tie in, because to that point. At least in my perspective, I think that AI is what is allowing the autonomous to move at warp speed. I, I, I can tell you like we we're redoing, right?

Ken Lucci 9:35

And we, and that and that point, that point was lost in translation.

James Blain 9:40

Well, and I think one of a few things happens. I think, one, we have covered this so extensively on the podcast, just the breadth and the depth of how much AV has and what's going on and what's going on. There's huge,

Ken Lucci 9:53

You know something. Let me stop you there.

James Blain 9:55

yeah.

Ken Lucci 9:57

I think the reason people may see me as quote pro AV is because we've covered it so much and I, I am absolutely concerned, but I think it's going to skim, it's gonna be a skim off market share of our industry. I think it's gonna be a tranche off market share in the taxi space. But I think any skim where it's taking a little bit of our market share, It's going to be three XD by opportunity eventually. And it's interesting to me how when you talk about a subject extensively and you try to learn it, excuse me, master it. someone can say, wow, you, you really think this is a positive thing. No, I, I just think it's something that we need to, constantly monitor more than anything. And you hit the nail on the head. the ai, the rev AI revolution and, and its impact on av. That is what's hitting the accelerator pedal.

James Blain 10:59

Oh, it's, it's everywhere. Look, I, I think it's no secret at this point that internally me and my team have been revamping. We've got a whole new version of PAX that's coming out in the fall in terms of our software platform and some of the stuff that we're doing. Couldn't have even dreamt of it seven years ago before AI hit the scene. And you're, you're seeing it everywhere.

Ken Lucci 11:19

Look what your platform is it, you know, and I'm just going to, 'cause I am extremely proud of you, and I don't say that often. Maybe it's 'cause I'm emotional because I'm tired. Um,

James Blain 11:31

like a, like a proud dad moment here. Like, thanks dad. Like, thanks

Ken Lucci 11:34

you know, when you and I first met with Bruce way back in the day, your platform has come so far and the fact that you are such a techno nerd to me, everybody should be constantly looking at PAX and what's changing, what's moving, where are you going? and you've done a great job. But anyway, the other session on Sunday that I thought was fantastic was capitalizing on the emerging leisure travel. Athena, you know, she moderated. And then, there's a couple, a couple of speakers there. And what overwhelmingly to me, Athena kept going back to is diversification of client. And, it's like our industry's a, well, we're a five star restaurant, great, but there are only so many corporate dinners. How about you? You open your five star restaurant to other celebrations, other things that's going on, what they hit was extraordinary. And the good news is to me, is once you do the work of capturing or designing bleier experiences, concerts, the, the wine tours and the brew tours, which by the way are exceptional high margin business, once you design the program and you design it properly and you tweak it. It's the gift that keeps on giving. So, yeah, I, I thought that was an unbelievable session. I think the education was extraordinarily strong.

James Blain 13:05

And that ties into something, you know, a couple years ago I had someone from kind of the more traditional motor coach space that I knew that was at CD/NLA and we were talking and they're like, how are they moving in so quickly? How are these companies doing it? And I think one of the superpowers that people forget that this industry has. Is the sedans and SUVs, because your CEO of a major company is probably not riding the bus. They're probably in the back of your sedan, your SUV. But once you sell that person, once you have that person sold on it and you build that relationship, you now have the opportunity to move up. You know, I was, I was lucky enough before we left at dinner with Maurice, you know, I got invited out by

Ken Lucci 13:48

I saw Maurice Brewster. I didn't have a chance to stop. I was at my boo booth and I was up to my ears and people, and he goes by, first of all, he looks fantastic. Maurice Brewster from Mosaic. I mean, the guy just doesn't age.

James Blain 15:07

Well, but think I, what struck me as I started thinking back to our episode with him, right? He starts in the smaller vehicles, he starts absolutely killing it. He starts building up to the point where, he's got a major tech company coming to him wanting to run buses and he's gotta say, Hey, we're not ready to do that yet. when we had dinner, he told me, you know, I'm not gonna share the number 'cause that's private. But the size of the contract that he just got, that he was going to work on, again, I think part of that, and I think Bleier probably struck on this, we have this superpower in those sedans and SUVs, and so I think as we start seeing the industry move more towards those larger vehicles, at least in my mind, I see an opportunity to keep that high-end, high touch, you know? Servicing the C-suite through the sedans and SUVs, and then that basically is going to make sure that you are keeping all the other contracts. It's one of the things I learned early on in sales. You know, I would always try and sell the person, you know that was gonna use it. It took me a while to figure out if I sell the owner, they just tell them, Hey, this is what we're doing. And I think we've had that superpower in our industry.

Ken Lucci 16:20

and the diversification, the ability to diversify as opposed to just being a bus only company, which, listen, we have tons of those and I, I stepped back this morning to someone who we did the valuation on their motorcoach company, and they called me like. There's another motor coach company and tour company that's for sale and I want to buy it. You need to help us. I'm like, no problem. But my whole point is that diversification to those guys, if they just have the motor coach, you can, sure, you can go do line runs, you can do tours, you can do a bunch of stuff. But because we have diversification of service, diversification of fleet, diversification of experience, we have an unbelievable ability to grow. It's just putting, the work into creating that diversification. Somebody said to me, we have a great client, very profitable, who says, I just don't want to do weddings. I don't wanna deal with brides, on the weekends. And I said, I understand you completely. I'm not gonna talk you into that. But there are plenty of things on the weekends that you can do that are not all encompassing. And we are moving them in that direction of diversification. Again, you have a five star restaurant, but your seats are not full Saturday night on date night. Right. they're moving their entire fleet like Mad Men Monday through Friday. But I, I, I, I think that that really opened a lot of minds that session. And, you know, she Athena's just such a class act as a moderator.

James Blain 17:51

well, and. I will tell you right now, and, and I think it came up ironically enough, um, I wanna say it, it came up in her husband session when he was on a panel a couple days later. But, um, one of the neat things that, that I heard come up was kind of that same idea. Somebody said, Hey, I had this large corporate client, they asked me to do a wedding, guess what? You're gonna figure it out. And they actually brought up an example where they had somebody on the other side of that. So somebody got asked to take care of somebody's wedding, they literally got the call, Hey, you know, we need help with a wedding. We have a a limo provider. But I guess they said they don't do retail, they don't handle this. Can you help us out? And they ended up taking that entire client because they knocked the wedding outta the park, which to me is obvious because there's the emotional attachment, right? There's the emotional attachment, or

Ken Lucci 18:42

trust me. I love the, I loved the wedding business. It was very profitable to do it right.

James Blain 18:47

Yeah, but, but to the point, you don't have to be in the wedding business. One of the big things that came up, and one of my favorite sayings that I've coined is when transportation's done right, it's transparent. The big thing with this is if your best client calls and says, Hey, I need help taking care of my wedding. I don't care if you don't do retail. You figure out how to take care of it. 'cause if the CEO's daughter's getting married and someone else knocks it outta the park, just like in this story, that company ended up taking the work and eventually becoming that trusted partner. So I think there's some lessons in those different pieces as well.

Ken Lucci 19:26

A absolutely. So let's switch gears a little bit. uh, managing risk, controlling costs and protecting your brand. Tim Flanagan from, uh, Lancer was the speaker. so I stopped in, I tried to stop into all of them. Right. Get a taste, get a flavor. And I was in there And they gave you a shout out.

James Blain 19:43

Oh, uh, it's, it's no secret that we are partners with Lancer and we

Ken Lucci 19:47

They gave you a shout out by name. It was really good. It was solid.

James Blain 19:51

I'm heartbroken. I wasn't there now.

Ken Lucci 19:53

Yeah. well, I mean, you guys are the gold standard of, chauffeur training. I mean, just like, I like to think we're the gold standard of financial analysis, valuations and, data analytics now. So I guess what I'd like to hear from Tim is, does he think they actually got it? Are they listening now, or are these guys, or the operators still, They're almost like in denial that managing safety every minute that, they're open. They have a vehicle on the road. Managing safety is, oh yeah, I have telematics, click, you know, I check the box. If you ask me what the threats are to the industry, service to me is number one, service, a lack of service. And, we, we've gone down that road, but that's number one. But number two is we gotta get this insurance crisis under control. And the operators think it's the insurance company's faults. And it's not, you and I have had conversations with, Tim Delaney from Lancer.

James Blain 20:58

Michael Gaddi from cable was on.

Ken Lucci 21:00

and Steve re bird from research underwriters. And,

James Blain 21:04

the list goes on.

Ken Lucci 21:05

and, the list goes on and they all say the same thing. You know, commercial vehicle is a loser and a lot of it is out of their control. The insurance company's control, it's, tort reform, et cetera.

James Blain 21:18

Well, but they talked about did you make it to Association Summit?

Ken Lucci 21:21

I did not, that was right

James Blain 21:23

All right so.

Ken Lucci 21:24

my session.

James Blain 21:25

So I bolted. As soon as I got done, I ran straight to Association Summit. I, I got there a little late 'cause I had so many questions for my session, but I literally ran straight to association Summit 'cause I'm lucky enough, I serve on the board in New Jersey and I serve on the board in California. And so I wanted to make sure I was there. And one of the things that comes up every time is what's going on with insurance. And one of the biggest issues that we are having is you have this cost per incident. Problem. So completely devoid, completely separate from how you feel about insurance. The one thing that I think we all agree on is the cost per incident has skyrocketed. And one of the Absolutely, and one of the biggest problems we've had is predatory litigation. You have all of these attorneys, right? I, I won't name names, but all of these attorneys all over the country.

Ken Lucci 22:19

can we please leave attorneys names out of this episode?

James Blain 22:22

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, don't we, we will, will smith it. Keep your name. No, I'm just kidding. Um, we, we will leave the attorneys out. Um, all of them. All of them. All the attorneys. All the

Ken Lucci 22:32

names out of this episode

James Blain 22:34

So the big,

Ken Lucci 22:36

to stay calm

James Blain 22:38

but here's the thing. The cost per incident is rising, and one of the things that I've all but preached is that the problem with that becomes that even if you were doing good, just one accident now is like having three or four before that. Right. It's, it's multiplied in intensity. So whereas before, yeah, you have a couple issues here and there. I go back to trunk guy. I don't know if I've, I've told this on the podcast, but I'm, I'm that, there's two instances that just absolutely stick in my mind. So the first I call trunk guy, so you have, you have an operator, trunk, Trunk guy? So, so you have an operator who has somebody run into the back of the vehicle in front of them. The operator decides, oh man, I'm gonna get in front of it. Hey, I'm just gonna give you money. You just sign off right here. We'll be done with it. We're not gonna tell insurance. We're not gonna get him involved. A week later, a guy shows up at his office, Hey, I was in the trunk of that car, you hit, I need $5,000 too. 'cause I was in the trunk. When you hit it, you just didn't know. 'cause the trunk wouldn't open

Ken Lucci 23:46

Is this anecdotal or does this

James Blain 23:47

No, it's literal. It's literal. Like this literally happened, and then you've got salmon diving, right? We literally had an operator salmon diving, right? So you literally had an operator who had someone at the airport in an SUV. They see what I can only imagine in my mind as a crack head walking down the line where all the black cars are. This person is looking in the windshield of every vehicle. We found out later what they were trying to do was figure out which vehicles didn't have a dash cam. As soon as they found one that looked like a black, you know where this is going? Soon as they found one that didn't have a dash cam whoop, he goes like a salmon upstream flops onto the hood, and then, oh God,

Ken Lucci 24:34

my God, that's, you

James Blain 24:35

you hit me. Call 9 1 1. Help.

Ken Lucci 24:39

that's an unbelievable analogy to show it. But, but,

James Blain 24:42

But it's real. These are

Ken Lucci 24:43

but, but this is wacky because this is wacky because I was on the flight back, um, and I, uh, an operator sat down next to me. I'll just give him a shout out. It was Sean Glasgow from Peak

James Blain 24:56

oh yeah, I love

Ken Lucci 24:57

and, and and I was talking to him about a conversation I had had with a New York operator, Robbie from TTCI, town Car International. We're gonna have Hi Ravi on the podcast. Anyway, so I said, you know, Sean, I'm really naive. Ravi from TCI was telling me about. The scammers in New York that stop short in front of you and then they demand, they crash like

James Blain 25:22

Oh, dude.

Ken Lucci 25:22

10, right. They do. Right, right, right. They'll, they'll stop, they'll back into you and then they'll demand money on the spot. Okay. So it's unbelievable to me that Ravi tells me that I sit next to Sean, Sean's like Ken, that happened to me years ago. I was going around the corner, the lady was there, she slammed her brakes on and no damage, but the cop comes up and says, listen, I hate to tell you this. She's, she's gonna be one of those people. your lawyer's gonna get a phone call. but my, my whole point was, without going into that much detail, this subject has had come up. I just didn't realize how many scams there are out there.

James Blain 26:00

Well, I mean, there's, there's scams all over the place. But the other thing is, and I, I don't want to go too far into the weeds, but we've, we've reached an environment. A entitled lottery mentality, right? I

Ken Lucci 26:14

that again.

James Blain 26:15

An entitled lottery mentality, right?

Ken Lucci 26:18

But yeah,

James Blain 26:19

we, we've reached a point. Well, you hit me, I should get a million dollars.

Ken Lucci 26:22

right. But you know, at the end of the day, you just made the case for every single vehicle. And Sean said this to me, Ken, you need your cameras front and back in your own personal car, and you, you just made the case that, that you absolutely have to, everybody should be investing in the telematics. And And it's funny, I was with a huge, this dovetails I was with one of the biggest operators in the, in the industry, offsite. We had a meeting and I, and he said to me, we have front, we have cameras in the front, inside the vehicle. Facing back. I said, what do you do when a client says, I don't want that vehicle, I want, I don't want the camera inside. It's, it's on every profile.

James Blain 27:03

Oh, this comes up every time we discuss the platinum safety program.

Ken Lucci 27:06

Right. It will, we'll, we'll put, we put a cap on it. Okay. Or we assign that guy, we say, right in the special instructions, take the camera, take that camera, the inside camera and take it out. Okay. And I said, well, how often do you think that comes up? He said, in reality, about 1% of the time, maybe less.

James Blain 27:26

And, and I'll tell you what

Ken Lucci 27:28

And they hammer on it, by the way, they hammer on the safety aspect

James Blain 27:31

but that better be a damn valuable client because I'll tell you what, there's an instance where a lady was in a wheelchair. She gets into the vehicle and the person says, Hey, we need to secure you to be able to transport you. We have to secure the wheelchair. We have to go through the procedure. And she goes, no, I'm not comfortable with that. I'm not gonna do that. It's fine. It's not a big deal. And guess what happens? They get in an accident, she gets ejected, she turns around and sues them. Guess who they found at fault right? Now? Imagine that you have a situation where you take an indoor inside camera out of a vehicle and now they make a claim on you. Um, what, what we talked about a lot with the platinum safety program. Um, we 'cause because part of that we, one of the big things was, hey. You know, platinum safety, if you're gonna be part of that program, it's gotta have cameras in the vehicle. You're required to do defensive drive. There's a whole things list of requirements to be part of that. And one of those things was, well, what do you do? And the answer was, you tell 'em flat out, you say, Hey, this is something that we have to do to be able to protect everyone in the case of an accident. No one is watching these. These are purely for insurance purposes. And guess what I, I foresee a future. Where if you have insurance, you're gonna be required to have a camera because it's just too

Ken Lucci 28:49

uh, I, I think it's gonna go beyond that. I think you're gonna, I think you're gonna become a very, very wealthy man. I believe that it's going to become mandatory at some point. Uh, you know, the Platinum Safety Program will have to be mandatory, and they'll have to have periodic and, and constant supervised training. Um. I just don't think operators get it. I, I don't think some, some operators don't take it seriously because they've been, and the worst ones are the ones that have been in the industry forever, and they don't realize that this is 1000% part of your life now, managing safety every minute of the day. All right, let's leave that subject for a second. I do wanna tell you, I ran into Billy Pier from Commonwealth. He's, he was with another company, let's not name names, but he was an affiliate manager, director from, uh, another company. He'd been doomed affiliate for a long time, and I ran into him. He was on the art of affiliate etiquette, which was Tuesday morning. I didn't go to it because I had offsite meetings, but I caught up with him afterwards. I said, how did it go? He said, it went well. but Ken, I I really, some of this we shouldn't have to say. I'm like, yeah, I get it. I get it. You shouldn't have to, you

James Blain 30:03

but we have a lot of new entrants though I will say a lot of it, you shouldn't have to say, but I talk to a lot of new people.

Ken Lucci 30:10

that guy delivering that message for the Commonwealth brand, these operators that are newbies better understand that's the one of the most legacy brands and the most coveted assignments you can have. And Commonwealth pays and Commonwealth pays fast. they're just a great, a great network. They're probably one of the highest touch networks out there.

James Blain 30:34

Yeah,

Ken Lucci 30:34

So, and Paul was on that, on that. It was great to see him from

James Blain 30:38

Paul, Paul is, is really found a unique niche. Paul was, was on the podcast, uh, I, I don't know how long ago, but they really found a unique niche in finding what the market they served wanted, and a lot of the stuff that he's doing with car seats. A lot of the stuff that he's doing with the families of wealthy individuals, I think Legends is doing some really great work there. do. I think that works in every market. No, you couldn't just adopt that and do it in, you know, Kansas City or you, you gotta have the right market and the right clientele.

Ken Lucci 31:09

you do, but you know what Paul, we're talking about Paul Passi from Legends Limousine in New York. Okay? He's in charge of affiliate and his niche is wealthy families with young kids. Okay? that New York market, he's dealing with bankers who get paid extraordinarily well, who have young families, and that's a great niche that he found. There's a ton of different niches out there from an affiliate perspective, but I was just happy to see him up there because I really enjoy him and putting him with Billy and you ask Billy Placer anywhere in this world that you need an affiliate, he'll rattle it off on his head. Oh, by the way, you also have to ask him about hockey stats. If you ask him any hockey stats, it's two things Billy knows, right? Affiliate affiliates in every market and hockey stats.

James Blain 31:52

So so it sounds like, it we need to get with Billy because whe whether you realize it or not, Paul is a hockey player like myself and at one point, so I'm gonna put this out there 'cause I'm all for reviving this. At one point we were going to have a charity hockey game. Before one of the shows, and the whole idea was all of the players, we would play the event, we'd charge a small fee to watch the event, all of it would go to charity. And we were wanting to do a hockey event before the actual

Ken Lucci 32:19

Hey, I'm just gonna go out there. I'll, I'll sponsor it, driving transactions, we'll sponsor it. I want those on uniforms, but I, I'll just sponsor it just to see you out there falling all over the ice and say, and, and I might even pay somebody to check you, but that's, I'm only kidding you. Um,

James Blain 32:36

that's, that's okay. I'll drop a shoulder.

Ken Lucci 32:38

so I do, I do want to talk about, let's get, we'll get to the, to the speaker. The keynote. 'cause we, you and I have divergent opinions on that and, and recently I've been, recently I've been chastised because I've been told I don't like people who have divergent opinions. And I said, no, I just don't like people who talk out their asshole. Oh, sorry, John. I, I don't like people that talk out their ass. I like people that actually know the data and give opinions,

James Blain 33:04

Yeah, so so having, having actual ways to back your opinions instead of

Ken Lucci 33:07

Yes. Exactly.

James Blain 33:09

I, I can respect that.

Ken Lucci 33:11

what did you hear about the AI session? Did you hear anything?

James Blain 33:15

so I'm a little different, right. You know, uh, obviously

Ken Lucci 33:17

You say that again, you're a little, uh, you're,

James Blain 33:20

I'm very

Ken Lucci 33:20

different. I'm still trying to figure out how you, beautiful wife is still married to you and seems extremely

James Blain 33:27

So, so for anybody listening, I keep her laughing so much that she's always smiling and happy. That's

Ken Lucci 33:34

She is, and you make the poor lady work your booth. It's incredible to

James Blain 33:40

I would say she makes me work the booth and, and sends me on errands, right? I, I was, I was jokingly introducing her as my boss. I mean, director of marketing. Uh, no. So for me it's a little different because, you know, VO Con's been on the podcast. He's doing a lot with ai. I work closely with Sam.

Ken Lucci 33:57

to see him.

James Blain 33:58

Sam does a lot with ai. If you haven't seen Sammy Mam, I mean, dude, he's just, he's dumping all kinds of AI generated stuff. So for us, if it's not really high, like it's, it's, I'm not gonna say it's difficult, but I, I mentioned the tech meme ride home. I mean, I, I know cutting edge what came out this morning, what came out today, we're staying ahead of it. So I think one of the pieces of feedback I had from the AI at this show was that it was a little, it wasn't. Up to date enough. It wasn't like, and, and again, I think that depends on who's in the room. If I go to a session on chat, GPT, I'm probably gonna leave. If you've never used chat GPT before, it could be right where you're at. And I think what we're seeing is the speakers did a great job with ai, but you've got such a variance on where people fall on the usage because it's a new technology.

Ken Lucci 34:51

probably gonna get us in trouble here.

James Blain 34:54

You get us in trouble. Yeah. What have you ever got? Yeah. Yeah. No,

Ken Lucci 34:59

Well, when the invitations to speak, stop coming. I'll know I went too far. Um, I, I, I'm, I'm, I am really, and I'll. I am really enthused and impressed with the team at Full Steam that owns most of the software

James Blain 35:14

I thought you were gonna say all of the industry,

Ken Lucci 35:16

No, I mean, listen, there's reason, right? They own the major software providers in the industry, and I've had some terrific discussions with those guys. I, I'd like to get to the point where we talk about ai, it's not just generalized ai. I'd like, the industry to have an a true AI roadmap. And I, I think they're the guys to deliver it. I think they're the guys to talk about it and deliver it. That's what I heard from people on the AI session. I heard them say it was a little higher than AI 1 0 1, but it didn't, it didn't tailor it, it didn't tailor to use cases in our indu in our industry. you know, Simon Curtis is working on Agen ai. Uh, look, Gina, you know, I'm a huge fan of Amir. Amir is working on a agentic ai. You know, I heard the heard in the NLA meeting. The NLA is working on NLA ride ai something on affiliate a right. By the way, I flat out said I can't be an expert on the ai. That's why I've delved into thousands of hours of learning, av reading every possible research report. By the way that was written in this century, not last century. sorry. but I've already said I can't, I can't be an expert at ai. I can barely use my phone. But, but,

James Blain 36:37

AI is a sprint, right? Anybody that's an expert in AI is sprinting to stay an

Ken Lucci 36:41

there's no, there's no question. And I really have faith. Maybe it's misplaced that, but I have faith that the full steam guys are on it. I do.

James Blain 36:50

Well, but here's, here's, I, I think the, and, and I've had this conversation with a lot of people in tech. I still have a lot of connections back in the tech industry, and one of the big things that we've had the chat of is AI is the feature, not the product. and I'm gonna say that again because people don't get this. AI is the feature, not the product. Okay. So, so for example, AI by itself doesn't really do anything. It's like if you took the entirety of human knowledge and shoved it in a toddler's head, the toddler's just gonna sit there and drool and babble, and every once in a while you'll ask for something and then there's a, it'll be done. 50 50, whether or not it's done right now, I'll give you a great example. I can go to AI right now and I can say, Hey, I need a drug and alcohol policy, and it'll spit out a drug and alcohol policy. But if I didn't tell it that I'm in the transportation industry and I'm operating motor coaches and I need it for my CDL drivers, it's going to just. Puke up

Ken Lucci 37:51

Oh, by the way, and I, and I need it in this state specifically for this industry,

James Blain 37:56

Yes. So, yeah, so, so to my point, vocon actually, I, I believe is the one that said this. You're talking about it, it's like having an engine.

Ken Lucci 38:04

his whole company name, please.

James Blain 38:06

Yeah. Limos four, by the way. Great episode. If you haven't listed the episode with

Ken Lucci 38:10

I, I, he is such a, an interesting guy.

James Blain 38:14

Razor sharp, extremely

Ken Lucci 39:21

he's on another level, IQ wise,

James Blain 39:23

But one, one of the things we talked about is imagine ai. AI is like this V 12 Ferrari motor. It, it's just, it's there, but if you got nothing to put it in, you can put it on a stand and it just free revs and does nothing. That's what I, so for example, in our world, what we're looking at in AI is how do we get it to understand what's there? I'll give you a great example. we are actually working on some AI things and one of the things that came up in testing is you would ask it to create a course on something and it wouldn't stop and ask questions. It would just go puke something up, like I said, So for example, the other thing is getting it to be able to do stuff. One of the things that we've seen happen in apps over the past year is they have a little AI you can talk to, but it can't actually do anything. You'll say, Hey, I wanna do this, and instead of taking it to the page and doing it, it does nothing. So I think, I think that's the big opportunity.

Ken Lucci 40:21

Alright, so let's, let's, let's unpack that a little bit. What you're saying is specific use cases

James Blain 40:26

it's got to integrate into what you're doing,

Ken Lucci 40:30

a thousand percent. And, I think it was great that the AI session was there. I think that a lot of the audience without question is still at the 1 0 1 stage. Right. But we at very short order as an industry. Have to get the software guys, the existing software guys, their tech team above them because that's the way full steam is structured, right? Is all of their assets have tech infrastructure and we have to get them together and talk about specific use cases. I mean the a agentic AI where an agent can take a specific reservation, a simple reservation, Hey this is Ken Lucci going from my house, only have one house going to the airport flying outta Salisbury. 'cause it's the closest to my house. Right? the Agen ai, I think is the first use case. The second is, you know, I see all the chats out out there. But to your point, I think you're gonna have a wedding planner chat. I think you're gonna have a corporate group and meeting chat. I think you're gonna have an airport. A global airport transportation chat. Right. So to your point, I think now it's not just, Hey, let's talk about ai. Let's just tailor it down to the feature sets that we

James Blain 41:46

Feature, not the product, but, but we still have the car wash problem. Okay? We still have the car wash problem. And the car wash problem is when you tell ai, you say, Hey, I need to go over to the car wash. It's about a hundred feet from where I am now. What's the best way to get there? It says, well, the best way to get there, if it's only a hundred feet, you should just walk there. And you say, great, how am I gonna wash my car? And it says, well, you're gonna put the car in the car wash. And you go, okay, ding-a-ling. So if I walked to the car wash, do you want me to go back and pick the car up and carry it on my back? Or how do you want me to, and they argue with it. It is one of the funniest problems that they have right

Ken Lucci 42:24

argue with AI regularly or I think you, I think you should continue to argue with AI because if you argue with your wife. You better keep making funny. Make funny, make her laugh. Make her laugh. But I think you ought to, I think you ought to, um, argue with that.

James Blain 42:41

But. But, the problem, the problem with that, and the problem that they're having is the accountability problem. So they had a similar instance to what I'm talking about of the car wash problem up in Canada. There was a chat where in the chat a person argued with. The AI chat on the airline's website and said, well, this is bold. This is horrible. Why would you do this? I deserve to be compensated. And the AI went, you absolutely should. A fair compensation amount for us to provide you would be about a thousand dollars. So we're gonna get that taken care of for you. 'cause that's the right thing to do. Even Anthropic, who I mentioned, is now one of the largest tech companies in the world. They put their AI in charge of a vending machine and they let people talk to it and they let it set its own prices. And at one point it literally ran out of money because they had convinced it to buy car parts and all kind. So the, the. The biggest problem with AI isn't ai, it's the people on the other end of it. And so I think we're hitting a point where you have to be able to balance it. You have to be able to use it. You have to be able to guardrail it. And to a certain extent, I think it's a little bit like autonomous. You have a lot of people that are afraid of it. A lot of people that don't understand it. A lot of people that will take what I just said and use it as an excuse to be like, oh, that's horrible. We're not gonna use it. Instead of understanding that it's an emerging technology and you've gotta learn everything you can about it to figure out how you can use it to build business.

Ken Lucci 44:09

I, I agree with you and I think AI is gonna be definitely be a subject matter. It shows that's going to be almost like, here's the current update of what's going on. But I think it begins, I think it begins by bringing the software providers. The operators and true AI experts. Which, which I gotta tell you, I think, I think full steam's on top of, I think it's bringing 'em all together because, you know, the common use cases are what's gonna move the industry forward. Right. And I, you know, sometimes I think we're really self-defeating. I think that we don't have to worry about the TNCs. We don't even have to worry about AV except identifying the opportunities. But we are really self-defeating because we're, we, we, we keep ourselves behind the eight ball. Which seg which, which, let's get to the final, the final session. To me that and, and the pe everybody on the session was, was tremendously. I mean, they're some of my favorite people in the industry and a couple of 'em are clients. But it was the session. Did you get into the increasing booking without adding staffer time? What did

James Blain 45:19

I did. Uh, so shout out for us. That was really cool because it was an all packs member panel, right? You had Charlie, you had Jess, you had Lennon, you had Becky. All four were Pax members, which just for me, I was like, oh, that's so cool.

Ken Lucci 45:32

And, and by the way, I won't say say who, but their, their clients as well, which is

James Blain 45:37

and and I, I think for me, the neat thing about that panel was kind of hearing the different perspectives and the different visions and kind of the different areas that they found. So, um, I, I was really kind of bumed. Because they didn't actually plug Charlie's podcast. Um, Charlie and Athena have an incredible co podcast. It's called the Raise Up Podcast. Um, you could,

Ken Lucci 46:04

It's, wonderful.

James Blain 46:05

absolutely incredible. Athena's been a guest on our podcast here. I've been a guest on their podcast and theirs. They really hone in on what it takes to understand culture and business development. And, and I, I wish they would've plugged it.

Ken Lucci 46:21

those two are holistic. Two, those two have built a company based on a holistic res, companies based on a holistic recipe and culture is at the foundation. Um, you, you know, and listen, uh, big admirer of Becky of Boston, one of the most understa. There's two, two very understated people. Lennon is very understated, very humble.

James Blain 46:48

out in Miami, American Transportation.

Ken Lucci 46:50

he's built a fantastic company down there.

James Blain 46:53

He is diversified as well.

Ken Lucci 46:55

has diversified as well. And then Jess, I'm just gonna brag on Jess. Jess, his dad, Harry, Jess Sandhu, and Harry from a NA limo of Seattle have such a dialed in organization. First of all, he knows add-ons better than some of the developers.

James Blain 47:14

well, and leave quote close. I mean, he brought that

Ken Lucci 47:16

close.

James Blain 47:16

of the tools he uses.

Ken Lucci 47:18

massive amount of revenue. It's not up to me to tell you is revenue, but the amount of revenue he pumps through that organization, and I credit Harry for this and the smallest overhead. Okay. They're an incredibly successful company from the only measure of success that matters, which is, which is profitability. they're

James Blain 47:39

know, I.

Ken Lucci 47:40

people.

James Blain 47:41

would say, I would say there's another metric that matters and that's important and that I can say about Jess. I think Jess genuinely enjoys what he does. He enjoys working with his dad. He is happy. I see so many people that forget to a certain extent, that you know, if you are working a 40 hour a week job and he quit to be a business owner and you're working 80 hours a week and you're miserable and you're not making it financially right, and I see, I see guys that are, that are bringing in revenue and aren't happy. I think that someone who's generally in a good. Very good point in his career. I love going to dinner with him. He came out to the GCLA event. We got to go to dinner. Jess is generally one of those guys that's always laughing, always happy, Always in a good mood You're just ha, I mean, I don't know that I've seen Jess in a bad mood. Jess comes into the room and I'm like, yeah, it's fun.

Ken Lucci 48:32

He makes it look easy. And I know he is got a very low turnover in and he's got some extremely loyal clients. Um, but that was a great panel to put on stage. Um, so now we're getting to close to the end. Let's get to controversial. You and I, no, we're not gonna go back to the AV session to get controversial positive. I'm done, I'm done. I'm gonna just take that my own way and get the video out that, that John and I want to do. Um, I was extremely impressed. With the keynote speaker, I, I knew of him beforehand because I downloaded his white paper and on, on Gen Z,

James Blain 49:20

Yeah.

Ken Lucci 49:21

so I didn't put two and two together. It was the same

James Blain 49:25

This is the same guy. Yeah.

Ken Lucci 49:27

So tell me your thoughts, please.

James Blain 49:30

Um, you know, I, so a couple things. So the one thing that I will say, and I had issues in my session, I know Jason had issues in his session. I think, um, the AV really

Ken Lucci 49:42

whoa. whoa. whoa. whoa. You better clarify.

James Blain 49:45

The audio visual, the microphones, right? So for those of you that weren't there at one point, he's got like a cluster, like a bouquet of microphones just trying to see like, hello, hello, hello, hello. Couldn't get him to work. We had similar issues where we were having people that couldn't hear us. I think, I think that did him a bit of a disservice, and that has nothing to do with him as a speaker. That just makes it tough to follow. So

Ken Lucci 50:07

Yeah, that was right. I, we didn't, we didn't have that kind of AV problem with my session, but I

James Blain 50:14

I did with mine. I had a whole section of the room that they couldn't hear and I felt awful 'cause they kept going like this. And I'm like, definitely hearing myself above my head. But apparently in that corner of the room, there was no audio.

Ken Lucci 50:26

so let's,

James Blain 50:27

kind of a, a, an all day

Ken Lucci 50:28

for the pe for the people in the audience who didn't go, this guy's name is Jason Dorsey. I love the way he presents himself as a researcher and a speaker. You know, he's, he's written a couple of books. The, the, the definitive book he's written is, uh, book on gen, uh, on generation Z. What's it called? ZZ Economy.

James Blain 50:48

Yeah, I think it's something like that.

Ken Lucci 50:50

And you know something, I didn't buy it. I downloaded the white paper a few, I mean, many months ago because my clients are telling me they can't get the kids to come to work. But I, but I literally, I ordered while I was sitting in that room. I ordered his book on Amazon. Um, I found him extremely engaging. I found him to have the right combination of great personality and substance. I loved his presence on stage. Honestly, I wish I had half that presence. Um,

James Blain 51:20

think we all do.

Ken Lucci 51:21

and he's been on 60 minutes C-N-B-C-I am so surprised, I shouldn't say surprise. I'm so happy that the CD and NLA are going after guys like this. And this guy was a, he was an A player speaker, high in demand, and I thought he was great. But you maybe have a different of opinion.

James Blain 51:48

You know, for me I am. So, so it's funny 'cause we talked about, at one point he talked about kind of the, the, the two different types. So my wife and I were talking about playing the two different types of millennials. So there are millennials that, that are like myself, that have businesses that are on our way up, that are building, that are working, that don't kind of fall into the very typical thought there. And then they have the ones that I think everybody kind of rolls their eyes at and they're like, oh man, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? Um, I think for me.

Ken Lucci 52:17

you think this, because it's, I, I don't want to a, I don't wanna be ageist, but you are on the cusp, aren't you?

James Blain 52:24

I am. And I think, and, and for at, at one point they actually, and, and maybe it's just me, But I, I, for a long time didn't consider myself a millennial. I don't even think my age group at one point was. And so I think we have those of us that fit more like the previous generation. We're not all afraid to get our hands dirty. We're not afraid to work on stuff. We're not afraid to do things. I for one, if something broke on a car, I'd get my toolbox out. I'd go build something. Then I had people that were maybe a year or two younger than me that can't even pump gas in their car. and so I think that for me, I think a lot of it gets put on there. And I think for me, nothing against him as a speaker, I thought he did an incredible job. I think a lot of it almost gets put on too much. People are too focused on this generational age gap and how I focus on this and how I focus on

Ken Lucci 53:23

I agree with you there. I think that there's a cutoff in age, though. I think also there's a cutoff in, stage of life. I mean, you had no choice but to grow up. You have kids, you have a beautiful wife, you gotta keep happy. I don't know how that happens, but whatever. Um, but then you get the kids that seem to be perpetually stuck in their twenties, so Right. With no responsibility, you know, the

James Blain 53:46

But there is a difference in mindset. There is a difference

Ken Lucci 53:49

there is, can, can I ask you a question? I mean, I'm being serious here. Do you think, do you think progressive politics plays a role in it?

James Blain 53:58

I, I have never picked one side or the other in politics.

Ken Lucci 54:02

But this extreme, I think the Gen Zs are seen as extreme progressives. No.

James Blain 54:07

so without going down an absolute just deep cave here. Um,

Ken Lucci 54:11

on Sunday, but

James Blain 54:12

yeah. When I was growing up, I had family from Spain. Spain has not one political party, but various political parties. They literally have a socialist party. So, you would always see them fighting and dividing. The one thing that I think we've seen happen in the United States, and I don't care where you land on the political spectrum, is that as a country, the gap between the two party system has never been wider in my opinion. And So I think what's happened is a couple things. I think one of the things that, that he talked about and, and we were going over when he was presenting was the environment and technology. And it was funny because when he asked like, what do you think is the most important thing about shaping my immediate, everybody's like, technology, music, and I went trauma. Trauma, how much childhood trauma did you have? And, and when we were at lunch, I, I brought up that both of my grandmothers grew up during the Spanish Civil War. So at one point my, I've never found anything to validate it, but I don't have any reason to doubt it. But my grandmother tells this story of when she's very little, and Franco basically kind of buddied up to Hitler, so they, they weren't one of the access powers, but they weren't on the other side, so they, they kind of had a deal there. That's, I don't wanna go into a history lesson, but that's the whole reason that ADE is in the same time zone as Berlin. So even though geographically they're way off, so

Ken Lucci 55:37

always learn something from you. It's incredible.

James Blain 55:40

Yeah. A full of all this kinda stuff. So, anyways, so, so to the, to the point,

Ken Lucci 55:45

Mr.

James Blain 55:46

so the story that my grandmother tells, right, and this would've been in the forties, is that they had bombers, and these would've been early Nazi bombers, right? the German bombers are flying over Madrid. Instead of dropping bombs, they're throwing out what I can only assume, and she's not sure she doesn't remember, is pumpernickel bread, because she describes it as the brown bread that you think of there because they were starving so badly. Things were so bad there that they were throwing out this bread to feed the starving Spaniards. I can't find any record of it. But you know it, it's funny because this whole conversation came up because we were talking about my daughter doing a project with her grandma and some of the things her grandma did and the way she was and those, and that childhood trauma, growing up in that environment is what caused that. And one of the sayings, I've always loved that I'm gonna butcher it so badly, right? Strong men create easy times. Easy times create weak men. Weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men,

Ken Lucci 56:57

You didn't butcher it. You absolutely. It was perfect. So you, uh, I think you need to say that again.

James Blain 57:03

Oh yeah. 'cause the guy, 'cause I, I was worried about butchering it the first time. Now he wants me to really screw it

Ken Lucci 57:06

No, no. But

James Blain 57:07

Alright, so, so so essentially strong men create easy times

Ken Lucci 57:13

they work hard.

James Blain 57:14

because they work well and it, it's not even that they work hard, it's you pull yourself up by the bootstraps. I want my kids to go to college. I think we're in a generation and an age where everyone has to a certain extent become a movie star. We have Instagram, we have TikTok, we have Facebook, we have all these places, and we are seeing more and more people worried about creating these experiences and creating these things solely for the point of putting it online. I saw it in Vegas all the time. You got the boyfriend chasing the girlfriend around, just taking pictures of her to post online. And they're not in the moment. They're not in the experience. I think all of these things are contributing to a societal shift, and I think a lot of that has absolutely nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with any of that. But I do think to a certain extent, we are seeing people getting grouped into categories based on what they think the stereotypical

Ken Lucci 58:12

And stereotypes. And stereotypes, right. Um, Jeff Nikkos, um, from ros, we sold 'em, red Oak Transportation up in Westchester and they're, they're a solid buyer. I mean, they're just a solid company. But Jeff Nikkos son is now working for him. And you know what comes to mind? Very quiet. Very cerebral thinker. And what came to mind is his father is, is demanding hard work out of him and teaching him how to succeed in business, which is capitalism. my whole point there is I think the question I have is, and I think it's, this is a podcast on its own. And if we ever could get Dorsey to come on here, I think where it matters most is generational businesses. You know, Kevin Ellingsworth, Kevin, do you know him?

James Blain 59:00

Kevin's yeah.

Ken Lucci 59:01

Alright, so Kevin's son works in the business. There were a variety of people whose sons work in the business. I mean, Robert Alexander's daughter, Ashley works in the business. And so you're seeing more and more of that. So the question becomes, I think number one that that Dorsey brought up is understanding them and, and common ground and meeting him on the common ground. And not stereotyping, but I think is how do you motivate them? How do you motivate them? I worry about the generational shift.

James Blain 59:30

you've got some other issues going on though, right? So if you think about it, one of the issues that we have right now is perception. If we were in a tech business, if we were in the yacht business, if we were in any kind of business like that, it is considered ultra high value. It would be different. But when I take my kids to the movies. The guys that are driving the bus in the movie, oh, it's a fat, lazy bus driver. And what we don't realize is the perception, one of the best people, and I would, I would absolutely love to add him on the podcast, is Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs. And one of the things that I love about Mike Rowe and what he did with Dirty Jobs is it's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it. These are all trades. Now, ironically enough, a lot of people that were working in offices, a lot of people that sat at a computer crunching numbers all day. Are all about to lose their job, but do you know who's gonna charge you double? To the point where South Park even made fun of it and had two competing electricians or plumbers, literally in like gold chains and whatnot, because they're the only ones left that knew how to do it right. I think that we've had a similar problem that the other trades have had and that, in media, they've pushed those jobs down, they've devalued those jobs. What do they do? Nobody wants those jobs. If I grow up seeing it's a fat, lazy guy driving alone. Why would I wanna be a limo driver?

Ken Lucci 1:00:51

I think that you are onto something. I mean, I, I really, We need to do a podcast on the generational shift. And how do you transition? I think the, you know, the perfect family we want to bring on for that. They all came to the show. We will just leave with, this is the Gino family from Gem in New Jersey. they came out to the show and we invited him on the podcast to, to talk about generational. So, um. Let's wrap it up. I think it was one of the most successful shows out there. I think that the, I think that just, you know, getting back to the gem, um, there was a woman, woman in the industry Asso Association meeting about Barbara, who, who's KO is started, I hope I'm not murdering the last name. Um, who started Gem, and then we had Dawson Rudder who gave his origin story. I kind of think that that origin story, um, live stage session was because we had him on the podcast telling his origin story. I can't, you know, I don't know if that's true, but a lot of what he talked about on that stage, which was just unbelievable to see, he talked about on the podcast. this conference had a different feeling to me. It had, it had some, it, it had a nostalgia feeling. It had a very tangible feeling of everyone happily moving forward and their businesses doing well. I definitely felt that, um, overall the vibe was extremely positive and I felt that there's a lot of new blood in the industry. I think that, no question. We have some work to do there. On education, and business acumen. I'm very enthused about what's coming. I really am. I'm very enthused and I'm very optimistic about the wave that's gonna carry us forward. It's not gonna bury us. The wave is gonna carry us forward. That's not my saying. I had lunch with, with someone yesterday who used it and I said, you know, are you worried about a I av? He said, no, we're gonna use a i a AV and this way we're gonna ride it forward.

James Blain 1:03:00

Well, when I started my presentation, I kind of piggybacked a little bit off of you guys. For me, if I'm an operator and I'm learning about AV as a business person, I really only care about a couple things. Is this going to endanger my business? Can I make money on this? Right. Will this grow my business? And then how much time do I have between the first two? Right? What's the timeframe?

Ken Lucci 1:03:27

I, and I think that's really where, where my frustration with Sunday's session went off is, I don't think we know all of it, but I tell you what we do know, we need every bit of tangible data and nobody's opinion that is meant based on, on one market or one point of view. The data is incredible coming out on ai a, b, and it's ever changing. And I think 25 was the, was definitely the year where every single economist, analyst, research firm

James Blain 1:04:04

Oh

Ken Lucci 1:04:04

financial firm said, okay, we've gotta deal with this. And I don't think we really delivered on that. I think that moving forward, it's gonna accelerate quickly, but you just nailed it. You just nailed it. How much is it gonna disrupt my business? It's gonna be temporary, it's gonna take a little bit off. There's gonna be tremendous opportunities and use cases. But that question, the question is when not if.

James Blain 1:04:39

Well, and, and I would liken this to the space race. Okay.

Ken Lucci 1:04:44

Yeah,

James Blain 1:04:44

If you, if you think of the space race, which by the way, unpopular opinion we lost, um, which, you know, you think about, you think about the signpost. Well, but, but look, it, it, it becomes a matter of what signpost you use. So if you start looking at the history of the space race with the United States versus the former Soviet Union, Sputnik has launched first, and that scares the hell out of us. We don't like that. And then.

Ken Lucci 1:05:17

didn't it?

James Blain 1:05:18

Well, and, and the other thing that you don't realize is our best scientist is Verna v Braun, which by the way, that's, that's not a Smith last name. That's, that's part of Operation Paperclip where we took all the guys, making the Nazi V two warheads and said, Hey, you think you could shoot these at, uh, the moon instead of people? So I, I think what what you see in that is you see this race where they're basically trying to outdo each other and saying, who's winning? Depends on which newspaper you're reading, right? They launched Sputnik. We're gonna get 'em, we're gonna beat 'em on the next one. They did this, we did that. I think the other, the other side of that though, is the realities of, at the end of the day when the smoke cleared. Uh, the Cold War, we end up winning. The Soviet Union ends up collapsing and the most depressing part for me is even though we won the space race, it was like, great. We beat him, we did it, and then we're just now going back to the moon.

Ken Lucci 1:06:20

Agreed. Now I want you to bring this back, try to bring this back to a, to av. I want you to try to make that

James Blain 1:06:26

So, so let me, let me bring this back to av. So,

Ken Lucci 1:06:30

the US and who is the Soviet Union in your

James Blain 1:06:33

so,

Ken Lucci 1:06:34

on av?

James Blain 1:06:35

so in AV and I, I had this slide in my deck and we'll, we'll pull up the slide. We'll have John drop this in. There are three left right now that are currently racing. You have Waymo, which is where my betting money would be. They have been the slow but steady. We've talked about them at Litem. They're owned by Google. You have Zoox, right? Zoox, depending on, on how you wanna pronounce it. So Zoox is owned by Mr. Bezos. He's not running outta money. but they're nowhere near as far along as Waymo and they've got a completely different model. And then our favorite crazy madman, rocket scientist, Mr. Musk has Tesla. My opinion on these is Waymo has been the turtle, slow and steady. The Waymo engineer that left to go to Uber, then got caught stealing trade secrets, then did all that. Then they have an accident. That was someone that was trying to go fast and break things. This is such a complicated thing. It's not like we're gonna disrupt an industry with an app. There's so much here. Uber becomes a casualty of war.

Ken Lucci 1:07:45

In the, in, In in, in, the development of

James Blain 1:07:47

in the development of av, right. look, they could have tried to keep going. I don't know that it would've played out well for them financially. I personally think just from a business standpoint. They probably made the right move. Now they're working with Lucid and Neuro, but even Nvidia, which had made all the news, all the chips, all that, they're now putting together their own tech for this. As that second portion of that slide, like I said, when I was presenting and, and I'll keep saying this, the big thing after that is this is probably one of the biggest opportunities in chauffeur services and we're gonna go a little long on this episode, but that's fine. One of the things I think stood out to me is that in none of those, it's not loading the luggage, it's not giving me a pastor experience. It's not taking care of me. It's not doing any of the things that you would see happen on chauffeur services. It's not doing any of the things that make us special. I made the joke in my presentation, right? Can you imagine if you're on your G six and you've got a ground crew guy that thought he was funny and put a cone on top of the Waymo coming to get you, so he can't get out there to pick you up. it doesn't make sense. You're not gonna see a Honda Civic pull up to a G six to pick someone up. The expectation is that's a sharp dressed professional. So r that's going to coordinate with the ground crew, get everything in the back, get right, get that VNP in the back, be able to drive under the stadium, be able to drive to the back entrance, right? I, I can tell you right now, way most technology will get really good. But there are situations where it doesn't make sense. They had an incident a couple days ago where a Waymo was blocking the street. The cops had to drive into the Waymo, put it into manual mode and pull it outta the way. Um, and there's always going to be a place for

Ken Lucci 1:09:36

Right. And, and those things will eventually come to a head to the point where they will have to find solutions. on our way from novelty to normalcy. That's absolutely 100% they're gonna address it. But do anybody thinks that Google Zoox or Tesla are going to leave the autonomous robotaxis space. Because they can't figure out an insurance or regulatory model. I'm just gonna flat out say it. You're ill educated, ill-informed, and you're naive. The question is when, not if, and I think that it is to your point, a day to day, week by week changing and technology evolution. I'm not sure the conference is the ultimate place to settle that. I think that we are leaning towards more is this forum. We're leaning more towards 20 groups, white papers

James Blain 1:10:56

I would go even further, Ken, I would say if you're a business owner, I think for you, your biggest thing is to be keeping an eye on it. You're driving down your lane and this is coming up in the other lane, and you need to know where it is and you need to be aware

Ken Lucci 1:11:09

Yeah,

James Blain 1:11:10

like you would anyone else driving

Ken Lucci 1:11:11

yeah. And, and listen, I, I don't ever, and I would never profess at all or have no interest in, in, in delving into the legal or regulatory. That's not what I do. But I will tell you the financial and business strategy aspect of this is what we'll stay on top of. But my whole point is I don't know that you can do good justice to that In a one hour session. So we're gonna keep focusing on this year's annual report, which is due out in June. We have been asked to come because of the session on Sunday, so I guess it didn't go that bad. We've been asked to come and speak in front of three of the biggest industry, 20 groups. All of the owners of the networks came to me in, in including a couple that weren't there. Hey, listen, we want your report when it comes out, and it's an evolution and it, you don't ever have the outcome of an evolution or revolution in the beginning. You just don't go you. What you do know is, you know, there's several different ways it can go. And I'll tell you what, one way is not that it's not gonna happen.

James Blain 1:12:22

I, I would tell you right now, the more I see people trying to fight things like that, the more I think of all the industries that don't exist. Can you imagine if you were a telephone book printing company and you said, no, it's always gonna be relevant. we don't need to do it online. Right. I was sitting with my wife a big in and out fan, if you don't know that, but we snuck over to In-N-Out on the very first day

Ken Lucci 1:12:53

Inn Out Burger. For those

James Blain 1:12:55

In-N-Out Burger. Yep. Butch, by the way, incredible business story. And there was a pigeon, and the pigeon was there asking for pieces of, just any food. He goes, and I looked at my wife and I said, every time I see a pigeon, I just, I feel absolutely horrible. And my wife said, well, why? And I said, because they're the ultimate sign of how relentless and how careless progress is. We created pigeons. Pigeons used to carry messages. Before we had computers, we used to race pigeons. Now we call them flying rats, my point here being that to a certain extent, nobody here is a pigeon, but that's how absolutely relentless progress is. And in business, you have something the pigeon never had. you can find the way to make progress work for you and surf that wave of progress instead of becoming a relic begging for scraps

Ken Lucci 1:13:58

And, and right. And, and, and true and honest to God, the keys to that, to me is constant education, evolution, the ability to change, that's why I say I'm not positive. I'm not positive that a one hour compressed session

James Blain 1:14:16

you can't

Ken Lucci 1:14:17

justice. you know, maybe I'll change my mind a little bit, but I'll let you know when our report is done. And look, I'm gonna cite every bit of published data I can find from all the manufacturers from Stanford, MIT McKinsey, the Gold Standard, which is Goldman Sachs. And, um, yeah, we'll just keep going.

James Blain 1:14:38

like you said, I think it's coming. I think it's something that'll be here. I think the biggest thing that we're gonna see is we're gonna see another calling. It's gonna be like when Uber came and the people that were not true actual providers, We don't see them anymore. I think we're gonna see the same thing. I'm gonna see the people that just have drivers get replaced, but the ones that are motor coach operators, the ones that are actually assisting passengers, the ones that are creating and building and diving into the value are gonna be more successful and more valuable than

Ken Lucci 1:15:08

And this is just literally going to be another diversification point for them. it's going to be interesting to see how it evolves. James, thank you very much. I have to tell you, you

James Blain 1:15:19

Best part of my week.

Ken Lucci 1:15:20

you brought us into this. I'm very satisfied that these shows have a tremendous value to the industry. 100%. I know that as a business owner, I get value out of them, but the operators, to me, it's a sponge. it's almost like an MBA in four or five days, and you just have to implement what you learn and take it all in. So, great to see you there and, see you next week.

James Blain 1:15:44

Yeah. To everybody that came up and said hello, I want you guys to know right now I can see each of your faces. It really does mean the world to us that you guys find value and we love that you enjoy the podcast.

Ken Lucci 1:15:56

I lost count. Maybe a couple dozen people said to me, we

James Blain 1:15:59

Oh yeah. So.

Ken Lucci 1:16:01

I feel good about what we're doing. James, we'll see you next week on another exciting episode of the Ground Transportation Podcast. My name is Ken Lucci from Driving Transactions. He's James Blaine from PAXs Training, the number one chauffeur and driver training in the industry. And, uh, John, good luck editing this one down.

Speaker 2 1:16:23

Thank you for listening to the ground transportation podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to subscribe to the show on apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more information about PAX training and to contact James, go to PAX training.com. And for more information about driving transactions and to contact Ken, Go to driving transactions.com. We'll see you next time on the ground transportation podcast.