In the ninth episode, Tobenna chats with Sam Tibbs, Senior Data Scientist at CloudTrucks.

Sam walks us through his background as a finance professor, his extensive career working in the transportation sector, and how he got to be the Senior Data Scientist at CloudTrucks.

In today’s episode we cover:

• Sam Tibbs background and journey to CloudTrucks
• A broad overview of the current supply chain crisis worldwide
• Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen’s Twitter thread on the logjam at the Long Beach Port
• How trailer and goods shortages are affecting rates in the trucking industry
• When do we expect to see things get back to normal?
• The difference between the supply chain situation in 2021 versus previous years

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Tobenna Arodiogbu: You've had an extensive career working in the transportation sector and really going deep across different business models in the trucking Industry. But before then, you were in the academic field & focused on doing a lot of research. I think that this is the perfect combination for the type of conversation we are having today. Can you chat about the current supply chain crisis and what's really going on?

Sam Tibbs: It boils down to one thing and there's a couple factors that really affect that, but the main thing is the consumption of goods—the consumption of products that go on trucks. Typically when there's a recession, you have a large reduction in services and goods that takes place. In this case, because of the pandemic, instead of us spending money on vacations, eating out, concerts, etc., we sat at home and purchased a lot of items.

Typically, the economy is about 30% goods and about 70% services, so there is a large shift that took place.

If you look at consumer spending expenditure of goods that happened in 2019, we have consumed about 4.4 trillion dollars more since the Pandemic.

Another issue is that in a typical recession there were job losses across middle, low-income classes, in these cases, the vast majority were in hospitality and leisure which means they were one the lower Income levels.

‍Tobenna Arodiogbu: So, what is the percentage increase in spending?

Sam Tibbs: Initial 10% more in July, which is like 600,000 times above where we expected it to be.

Personal spending rate before the recession in January was like 7.3% but now it is around 9.4& which peaked in April to about 34%.

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Truckers & Nerds is hosted by Tobenna Arodiogbu, CEO and founder of CloudTrucks.

Listen and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Jamit, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to learn more about CloudTrucks? Visit our website at cloudtrucks.com.