Inside TPM Tech and Editorial-Driven Conference Programming with Eric Johnson

(upbeat music) - Eric, welcome to the very special episode, TPM Tech Preview. Good to have you. - It's always great to talk to you, Brian. Looking forward to it. - So before we dive in to all of the nitty-gritty details, why don't you tell everyone just in case, what TPM is, what TPM Tech is, how they're different. - Sure. - Give us the rundown and the context. - So I am a reporter with the Journal of Commerce. I focus on technology. I am part of a team that puts together the program for TPM, which started in 2001 as very much a trans-Pacific shipping-focused conference, but has involved over the 25 years plus into what we kind of consider sort of containerized supply chains. So touching the edges around container shipping, and obviously I'm focused on the technology side of things, but we have sessions now, a ton of sessions on global economics and geopolitics has become obviously a huge part of something that everybody who's involved in shipping needs to worry about. So we have lots of sessions on that. We look at kind of macro things around what supply demand is on various trade lanes, and then I focus on more of the technology side of things. So a few years ago, we started a side event that eventually got integrated into TPM called TPM Tech, and that is now a series of sessions that is fairly granular on topics very frankly that interest me, you know, that I have a bunch of conversations over the course of the year, and I try to think of like, what would be interesting for me to hear and talk about in front of an audience? And it's usually I try to round up a bunch of people that I have very interesting discussions with and frame something that I don't think people are really like paying attention to. But overall, the idea is how can I help someone like mentally navigate the fog of software and data out there that they're having to make decisions on investing in? And so if I can help ease that burden a little bit, then I feel like I've done my job. So I see other events take different tax at this, right? Some events I go to are very almost exclusively case study focused, others are thinly veiled marketing exercises for vendors, you have a much more editorial first approach. What informs that why is it different? Why do you guys choose to go that way? And how much do I have to pay to get on the stage? Zero. I mean, you're on the stage this year. I leave that up to the commercial team. So I the answer is actually zero. By the way, so it is, okay, so there you go. So this is very instructive. I swear we did not set this up, but it's a fair question. Obviously it's important. An event is like a product, right? And some people call events, some people call them exhibition, some people call them symposiums, some people call them conferences. I think we think of TPM as a conference and we think of pretty much any journal of commerce event as a conference where sometimes partners and sponsors are able to exhibit or show what they're doing or talk to people, right? But it is always the heart of everything we do is always the program. So the editorial team long ago, long before I was ever with the journal of commerce, decided the most credible way to draw people to something over a number of years is to have the editorial team lead the program and have it completely firewalled off from the commercial side. So we as editors completely decide what the topics are who's gonna be on the program and then the tenor of the discussion once we're on stage. So what does that do? It gives us the ability to look everybody straight in the eye and say we are doing in a live setting what we try to do the rest of the year which is report on the industry from a very neutral and credible perspective. So I can look at you, I can look at someone who might think that a sponsor, someone who sponsors and is also on the program that happened in that order. Generally what happens is we invite someone and then if they also sponsor, it's because they want to support with a sponsorship the person who's been invited to speak. But I never ever, and nobody on our team ever would say you can only speak if you're sponsoring as well. So we're not trying to be like, holier than that, we're not trying to be high in mighty. We're reporters and we put this together and the reason we put it together is 'cause we do, we put programming together the same way that we would assemble a story, which is to say no one gets a quote in a story simply because they advertised in that magazine or advertised on the website. So it's the same mentality that cuts all the way across. - Yeah, and I mean actually we're the perfect evidence because last year we sponsored this, and I didn't speak in this year, I'm speaking and we're not sponsoring because it didn't make sense for this year. - Yeah, I mean it is, I think there's probably an assumption that we usually have to fight like literally door to door sometimes that there is a cost to be on the program. And like a lot of people know that's not the case, but some people always assume that's the case and so we have to walk people through our thinking. - So let's go to the content. - Which is more important. I am safe in making the assumption that the letters AI will be used in that order at least once during this series of events. - And is that an Allen Iverson reference or is that, you can't spell chain without AI, there's all sorts of things. - Oh, there you go. Thank you, you're now, you're hired. (laughing) - Yes, you can safely assume AI will be. - So, so what are you? - One of the things I've noticed is this like convergence and a lot of the content and a lot of the events I've been at, how are you keeping the sessions distinct? So they don't all just become like, "Bock chain, blockchain, blockchain." Like how are you trying to keep it so that you don't just have one continuous panel for the people or just like that? - Yeah, well that is gonna be a challenge. No matter how I set the dominoes up, once one falls, you have a limited ability to like stop it if it's going the wrong way, right? So it could easily be, even if you set things up, even if you prep people and you name sessions so that it's not dominated by the subject du jour, it could just be like a four hour Jerry Lewis telephone about AI, for sure. Like that's very easy to do these days 'cause it seems like it's all anyone wants to talk about. So I try to anchor it two ways. One is, what do the people in the audience, what is their day to day? What do they care about? How can we help relate what's going on at a technical level and a software development level at a marketing level? How can we relate it to something that matters to them? I always try to keep that in mind with any bit. And then second, like the reason I invite people to speak is not because I've heard they kind of know what they're talking about. I've generally had multiple, in your case, a hundred conversations, if not more, with most of the people that I speak to on stage. And so I try to understand what their role is in the subject that we're talking about so that we can get really specific perspective on things so that it doesn't end up being like, you can replace one session with another and it wouldn't have mattered. Now certainly, there's people, you're one of them. I could put on eight different panels and you would find a way to have an interesting perspective on that, but at least I'd say something. I mean, there's people who are very eloquent and very adaptable into different, talking about different things. But I really try my best to plug people into specific roles that I have in mind that they're best suited to talk about. - Take me behind the scenes for a second. I think that's just maybe interesting for people who've never done it. Like, so I'm gonna be on a panel, right? The panel title is a little bit of a mouthful that we're gonna talk about some interesting stuff. So go ahead. - The silo fantasy. - Yes, the silo, it's about breaking down silos in the industry, right? So when we talked at the beginning of the year, hey, you know, it's what I'm thinking about, and then you sent us kind of your thesis, right? Which is actually what goes in the program. And then a few weeks back, so maybe six weeks in advance of the show, we have a prep call and we essentially ran through the panel as like a dry run, not effectively. What's not a dry run, but like we hashed out ideas. - Yeah, we shout out ideas. You take notes, use that to build up the questions. And I think it's an interesting thing for people, and I remember having never done it before, that there is prep that goes into these things at some events, other events that I've been on, like literally you just get up on the stage and the person goes, who are you? - Right. - That happens both ways, but I think what makes this event unique is that there is that kind of prep and continuity. So, you know, I won't say that everyone you prep remembers exactly what they said six weeks earlier, but the topic is fresh and you know the questions to ask that are gonna prompt the similar answers. - So sometimes just the prep call, right? The prep call is like really important. And sometimes the prep call ends up being like, like you just sort of mentioned, like the prep call that we have through your session, we could have just hit record and it would have been like an interesting session to play at TPM. Other times, I'm not as familiar with the people, I know them, but I don't know them as well. And it's more like we're gonna do this and then we're gonna do this and what questions can I answer. So not every prep call is the same, but to your point, like, you know, every year TPM is in the beginning of March and February are really March. I start putting thoughts down on what I want to happen at the next TPM around May, June, over the summer. I start working up like a draft idea of the program for tech and even some sessions that are tech related that end up in the main program. And then you start like throwing ideas out to people or people throw out ideas to me, you've pitched me on ideas that we should have. Other people have too. And I sort of synthesize that into an initial draft. So that, but that all happens like an August, September that there's something on paper, which is still like six or seven months ahead of the actual event, which seems like a crazy amount of time and it is, but to your point, there's a lot of thought that goes into it. So it's a 30 minute discussion. And yeah, we could just roll up, you know, you and Heidi and Grant, the three people around your panel. We could literally roll up five minutes before we go live and have an interesting discussion. Now, would it be as focused and hopefully valuable for the audience if that's how we did it? Probably not. It helps to like get everyone organized a little bit. It helps for me to plant the seed about what I want to talk to months in advance. So that's the way I approach it. It's also, I think it's a signal to the market. When you are coming up with a program six months in advance, to me, that's our signal to the market that we know what we're talking about and we know the types of companies that we want to have on stage to discuss this. And these are durable subjects that matter in August of 25 as much as they do in March of 26. And we're not just sort of like at the whim of whoever approached us last minute or whoever signed up as a sponsor last minute. - So there's always a thing with when you see movie stars interviewed and they say, sometimes they say, we thought the movie was gonna be great and it flopped and sometimes they go, I knew this was a dud the first day during the first scene that we shot, right? And I just wrote it out. - Right. - At what point, I'm just curious, just for coming on a, when do you know when it's gone bad? 'Cause there are bad, I've been on bad panels. There are bad presentations and there are, you know, like, that's a good question. - When do you get that feeling when you're like, oh man, I shouldn't have done this one? - I would say, I certainly don't bat a thousand on the things that I put together, but I will say that one of the advantages of being in charge of something, cradle to grace, like literally coming up with the idea, literally thinking about who needs to be on it, recruiting them and then leading the discussion is, you're able to sort of hopefully pick up on cues along the way that like, oh, I'm off base on this one or this person is just gonna sell their product on stage or they're not gonna talk about what I want them to talk about or they're gonna answer a question they want to answer rather than one that I actually asked. Or the topic is just not as interesting as I thought it was, you know, and I have a conversation and it's like, I guess this is not that interesting actually. So I would like to think that I can calibrate that as because I'm in charge of this so long away, but obviously there's sessions you get up there and you know, maybe I'm lacking a little energy 'cause I've done too many in one day or maybe some, you know, the biggest problem I find is not necessarily, the topic is not interesting. I find the biggest problem is when people start venturing down the road of like saying, our company does this, our company does that. Instead of answering you as a human being, your perspective on the question I asked. So those are the scenarios where I sort of like die a little bit inside because I know the panel is missing where it could have gone, right? So I don't know if that's an answer. I really don't think we have. - It's an answer, it's not an exciting answer. - I don't think, well, I can't remember pulling the plug on any session. - Well, I'll give you a good one that wasn't from TPM and it's funny you made that AI reference. I was on an AI panel like close to a decade ago where a guy came out on the stage as the host of the panel with an Alan Irvison Jersey on and started making endless AI puns and then just sort of stared at the rest of us and expected us to keep going on the puns. - And we didn't work prepped for it. That was a rough battle. That's one way to know when there's props. - So as someone who has to think about people's attention spans at events, especially like very information, dense events, you're always trying to think of some little edge that will like perk people up a little bit and you know, a lot of these things end up looking and feeling like gimmicks. I mean, a couple of years ago, I don't know if you were there, a couple of years ago I had a swear jar and anyone who said digital transformation had to throw-- - I think that was the year I got stuck on a train on the way there. - I think that was, and I think that was. So you know, you try to do something to like break the ice or get people away from their phones, but there's a point where you're like, if this is not landing, I just need to go back to like, okay, when people recorded it or if they've taken notes or they watched the recording, is it gonna look like a zoo? Is it gonna look like something that they'd rather fall asleep to? Or is there actually like even two little pieces of information that might end up being useful to them down the road? - What are you excited about for this year? What's got Eric like, that is something I wanna see. - Well, I mean, tech, I sort of called my own shot like Roy, what's the natural, Roy Hobbs style? By saying, I'm trying really hard this year to take aim at Sacred Cows. And by that I mean, your panel is very much one of those things which is to just give a little more detail. Brian's on a panel called the Silo Fantasy and it's all about, it was just a brain wave that popped into my head that said, how many times have we heard someone say, you've got to break down the information silos or the decision making silos and that's the key to happiness in supply chain. And I've been hearing that for 20 years as long as I've been covering this industry. And someone will say it tomorrow at an event and they'll say it next week at an event. Certainly, it will be brought up over and over and so I wanted to like have three people who I felt like could cut through the BS and be like, is there a reason that silos exist? And if there is, what is that reason? And if there is in a reason why has it not been cut through before and will it be cut through? So that's one example. Another is visibility. We have a session that's looking at like, if I'm a shipper, I have to buy visibility as if every single product and every single shipment of mine has the exact same urgency and the same importance. What if there is a marketplace for me to acquire the milestones that I actually needed and the quality of milestone relevant to how important that shipment was? So maybe this is a ridiculous exercise to do, but I've never heard anyone have that conversation in public and people are free to poke holes in it but we're gonna have that conversation. - It's a fascinating topic because I was talking to a different journalist today about the ability to manage two shipments for the same shipper completely differently based on the relative importance of that shipment to the shipper. So you're on to something and you and I can have a much longer conversation about that offline. Different topic for a different day. - Yeah, I mean, you could probably have been on that panel to a point earlier, but no. - Eric's just saying I can bullshit on anything. That's pretty different. - You have a catalog of experience and expertise in a wide range of topics. - So same. - So it's really like I'm trying to poke at things that people have just assumed a little bit. And then obviously I'm very excited about the discussions around AI from one perspective. I've tried to structure the discussions about AI from the perspective of most people think of it in a very abstract terms outside of like using chat GPT to put together a presentation or ask to answer a question that they have about their, you know, of a note they got from their doctor, right? Like outside of that there's like no, people have trouble conceptualizing what to do with it. So I'm looking at, I have two different sessions that are looking at a couple of things. One, how will what's going on in AI from like a code building perspective? How does that impact existing software providers and the people who use existing software and their ability to like, I'm not saying replace those systems but customize or you know build features on those systems. And then the other aspect is you have software providers that have been around for a while who are building agents within their software and then you have a whole bunch of software vendors selling quote unquote digital workers or AI agents that sit between systems. And there's a healthy debate to be had about what the right approach is. And I guarantee it's not the right, the same answer for every single person in audience. So congratulations, you're a huge nerd. - I am a big nerd, nobody. - That is an awesome thing to be excited about. (laughing) - Made me excited. I mean, I know my audience, let's put it that way. - What's on the main agenda for TPA that you're excited? What else is, what are you gonna sneak away to see? - So on the main agenda, I'm also talking to Ryan Peterson for 45 minutes. The first time we've actually ever chatted in public, like we've had many conversations behind the scenes. He's done a million interviews with other people, but we've actually never had a public interview podcast, video, live, anything. So that should be fun. I'm also talking to Pete Mento, who's become sort of like the pretty face of trade compliance and policy over the last few years. So he and if you've ever heard him speak, he's hilarious. Somehow brings the hilarity to trade compliance, but what am I excited to see other people talk about? Janet Yellen should be interesting. It's nice to, you know, this year we actually have a keynote who's not a middle-aged man. So that's always helpful, I think, to get different perspectives. And she should have some very interesting things to say. She's our keynote. What are some other sessions that I'm, I'm like so focused on the ones that I'm doing, that it's hard to think about the ones that I'm not doing. Oh, you know what's an interesting one? Here's an interesting one that addresses something that we haven't always done a great job of dressing a TPM, which is we have a session Monday afternoon that's looking at the challenges that small shippers face, very specific to small shippers, which, you know, we have, I think it's fair to say we've tended to sort of like cater more toward the mid to ultra-large size BCOs over years. And for good reason, but we really tried to focus a little, the programming and some of the themes have been focused on the challenges that smaller shippers face. So that's gonna be a great session with Kevin Pogerson and my friend Jason Cout, who's a 3PL in Virginia, who's customers tend to be in that segment. So yeah, definitely. And Audrey Ross will be on that one too. One of my good friends and former guests of this podcast. And we did a panel together at TPM Tech in the past. Long time, right? On what you expect from your folder, during the pandemic. - Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, I forgot about that. - So it's like, you know, these sessions are like midterm exams as soon as I take them. I know, I know. - I know. - I know. Awesome. Well, I mean, I'm excited. It's always the highlight of my year. It is the only US-based conference I'm going to this year. - I was gonna say, I'm so sorry for dragging you back to the US. - No, no. - You know, we'll make it worse. - All good. - All good. But yeah, we're gonna go. It's always nice. Somehow we manage to every year get unseasonably cold weather in LA the first week of March. So I'll be looking forward to scatter raining clouds in the kind of that Seattle vibe we seem to have not ever year. And I don't know a better way to pitch it than that. - What was the song that never rains in Southern California, except during TPM? - Except during TPM. So awesome. Well, thanks for coming on in chatting with us and looking forward to seeing you in about a month. - Appreciate it. (dramatic music) [BLANK_AUDIO]