00:08 Welcome to Six-Figure Trucker, the podcast where we share advice on how to be successful in trucking and have fun while doing so. We’ll share stories, news, and advice on how to earn six figures in trucking, and we’ll speak to guys and gals that are already doing so. Let’s get to the show. Hello everyone and welcome to the Six-Figure Trucker brought to you by Norton Transport and each and every one of you if you join us you know that this is a space where we elevate and celebrate the drivers that make our company what it is. Of course we could not do it without them. We have a very special guest on our first video episode which we’re very excited about and that would be Mark Nichols. Mark is joining us now. Mark, how are you?

00:51 I am great. Had my first day of test driving electric garbage truck. So, been a great day.

00:59 Tell us about that driving an EV unit, garbage truck. We know this is a sort of a pilot program that you are part of. Tell us about what’s been going on with that.

01:10 Yeah, looks like they’re the facility down in Birmingham or Center for Alabama. It’s the Autocar facility. I’m pretty sure a lot of the guys out there have driven Autocar garbage trucks and have different opinions of them, but nevertheless, this is the facility down in Center Point Alabama, and they I guess they’re gearing up to make the electric garbage truck. I don’t think they’re in production just yet, but they’ve made a couple of them and I’m basically test driving them every day to make sure that they are they’re holding a charge and they’ll get, you know, at least a full day or at least a half a day service on a charge and do it what they can promise the customers that they’ll do. But I’ll be honest with you, I kind of like them better than the diesel powered, the CNG powered because yeah, the range on them is not as much, but if you’ve ever driven a electric car, electric car has something called regenerative braking.

02:18 And the dump trucks do too. And pretty much 90% of the garbage trucks that I’ve driven today, you can do one pedal driving. You don’t need to use the brakes.

02:31 Okay.

02:32 Yeah. Most of your stops if you’ll just let off the gas pedal, that regenerative braking kicks in and it’ll stop the vehicle slow it down pretty slow. I mean I that has been cool as it could it know could be not having switch your foot over to the brake and the gas pedal all the time you see you stop the gas pedal that thing kicks in and it’ll stop that vehicle pretty—

03:00 Pretty good.

03:01 So—

03:02 Do you have to finalize the stopping yourself as far as when you get to a traffic light or stop sign or whatever the case may be car in front of you?

03:11 Yeah, 5050. There’s there several situations where it’ll just kind of cruise to a stop almost a— Yeah, I’ll put my foot finally on the brake, but it’s not really doing nothing but just holding it in place.

03:25 Got did that just—

03:29 Do what—

03:30 Did that take a while to get used to?

03:33 Not really. I grew up all my life on a golf course and driving electric powering golf carts and they work off the same concept. If you if you’ll if you’ve ever been on a golf course with electric powered golf carts a lot of times, you know, you’ll see golfers, they’ll get out of the park before the golf cart ever comes to a stop and it’ll just kind of stop itself. You know, you get to where you trust the things after a while. You just jump out of there and let it—

04:02 Let it legs.

04:04 Yeah.

04:06 You’ll see that all the time on the golf course.

04:08 Oh, yeah. Tell us a little bit more about the EV. The trial run with it. How far do you guys go? I mean, to test the range, do you stay around the plant there or do you go out how far on the road or how do you guys do that?

04:23 Basically, they have two electric trucks there right now as I’ve been told. I’ll take one out in the morning and as I’m putting the mileage on it, which is basically the Porsche is about it’s like a 25 mile route. I mean it’s up it’s basically up the interstate and back down on a more state highway. This goes through some of the little small towns and rural area and pretty much four 24 mile 25 mile round trips that that depletes the whole charge.

05:04 Gotcha.

05:04 That drains the battery. So as I’m doing one truck in the morning, the other truck is on the charger charging up and then I’ll get the second one in the afternoon. And basically two trucks is all they have—

05:17 Right? And I don’t know how long this testing phase is going to go, but I assume when they get all the data that they could collect because they’re collecting the data as I’m driving the truck. You know, the computer on the truck is feeding them real time data as I’m doing the loop and everything. So, anything that happens to the truck or anything that’s happening that I see, the truck’s going to send that data back and they analyze that data and you know, they can fix things tweak things in the operation of a truck that they need before they go full production. I think that’s where we’re at right now. They’re just I’m just out there just putting the mileage on it, driving it, driving it and letting them analyze that data coming from the truck and just see if there’s anything they need to work out before they start, you know, producing a bunch of them.

06:12 Have they?

06:14 Have they indicated what they hope the range to be on these? Well, I test drove the McNeilus garbage trucks up in Smyrna and I did that for a little bit and those range on that were like it was 200 miles on a charge and I think that’s what this will be is 200 miles of charge. So, I think everything’s comparable. Yeah. But this the Autocar garbage truck is or electric power garbage truck is going to be completely different than that McNeilus. That McNeilus it’s a new design from the tires up. There’s new chassis. This is new everything. There’s no parts coming from other trucks or nothing. It is 100% brand new design. The Autocar it is just like a go, you know, it’s like a diesel or CNG powered Autocar go truck that we’ve all driven probably except it doesn’t have that in it.

07:14 It’s got big old battery pack right up underneath the middle part of the chassis and that powers it. Gotcha. But it’s very quiet. It’s got that regenerative braking which I love. And I mean I think it’s gonna I think it’s going to be a winner. I mean, it might be more of a winner than the McNeilus cuz the McNeilus out here that garbage truck is like $950,000.

07:42 Wow. Wow.

07:43 Yeah. And this is go I would assume this one’s going to be a lot cheaper.

07:47 Gotcha. How does it ride? You talked about how quiet it was, but how does it ride compared to a conventional be it a diesel or a CNG garbage truck? It rides like a sports car as far as takeoff. When you give it gas, I mean, when you give it power, it’s ready to go. I got you. And I’m sitting at red lights and I’ve got pickup trucks next to me, like one F-150 pickup trucks next to me. I got all kinds of different vehicles next to me and I can beat them offline.

08:20 Wow. That’s impressive with a garbage truck.

08:22 Yeah. And now what happens? It’ll take off just like a jet, but it won’t keep that power going. It’ll back it off, but it but it’ll like your first 10 15 seconds, it’ll get going. Like if you’re coming around a let’s say you’re at an intersection and you come around a curve and you need to you got traffic coming on you left and you know get on it a little bit to get out front, you know, so it’ll hold the traffic up that’s coming at you from the back. That thing will, you know, when you say, “Hey, let’s go.” It’s ready to go. How long have you been in this test pilot program?

08:57 This one I’ve been in was this particular one’s my first week.

09:02 Okay.

09:03 It’s I think it’s been going on for just a maybe like a month or two. It’s brand new cuz I mean I can tell you know they’ve worked out few a few tweaks in the system. But I mean the like the last lap I made today in the last truck I got it like 10 miles from the plant and they threw a code and everything. So I mean it’s you know I hit a bump and all of a sudden all the computer street sirens and code started coming on and everything. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a new territory there. And I understand you’ve been working alongside one of our colleagues Lynn Smith. She’s been driving some of these as well with you.

09:46 Yeah, Lynn. I’m not really— She’s not there with me today or anything. I think she kind of started it out, but I think they needed her up in Chattanooga. There’s the things up there and that’s why they sent me down because I they think everybody’s short-handed now and they got people everywhere they’re trying to utilize in the best position. Gotcha. You’re listening to Mark Nichols here on the Six-Figure Trucker brought to you by Norton Transport. Mark is one of our very seasoned drivers and he’s in part of a pilot program for EV garbage trucks made by Autocar. He’s been talking about that. We wanted to switch gears here, pun intended, to a couple of issues in the news right now. You’re on the road all the time. There’s a bill out there that is before the House right now.

10:41 Now, the appropriations committee has advanced it to debate and it’s about more parking for truck drivers on the open road. You’ve been on the road for a long time. What kind of a challenge is it to find a safe, secure parking spot when you’re out there on the open road?

11:01 Yeah, it is a challenge. I always mean, I’ve been talking over 20 years and it’s always been a challenge trying to find parking space. Especially since we went on electronic logs, you know, you know, you can’t do what we you know, the drivers used to do back in the olden days. You know, you can’t stop the clocks and do what you want with the clocks, you know, what they could do way back then. But yeah, it’s it is an ongoing problem. Trying to get, you know, the government requires you to stop, take a break, but they don’t give you a place to stop—

11:43 Right? And I can remember going back in time a little bit when they first started the electronic logs, the drivers you know there a lot of drivers were like stopping at the Walmart parking lots and places like that. And I can remember all the local sheriff departments starting to run the drivers out of those parking lots. And I mean it was hectic there when they first started went on those electronic logs. It hasn’t gotten any better. I think, you know, it they need to have some parking stations, but I’ll tell you there’s one peculiar thing about that. I don’t think they’re really taking in control or taken in consideration about these parking spots. You know, drivers are like cows. We migrate around the field the same way basically every day. And wor where drivers stop, it’s usually where they can get a shower, right?

12:48 Primarily, and then secondarily, some where they get something to eat and have a bathroom to use. And really the only place a driver can get a shower is logs, pilots, and flying jets. There’s, you know, those TAs and pros, but those first three are the many guys because that’s where everybody gets their free showers when they fuel up.

13:11 Mhm.

13:11 And you know, everybody’s going to be looking for those places to park because they want to get a shower. Cuz if you just park in a like a rest stop, then you got to go to a pilot of loves to get the shower. And that that’s two stops you got to make rather than one. And—

13:31 You know, I would suggest if they’re going to start giving out money to build parking spaces, they give money to Pilots with Love’s, all the major truck stops to expand their current parking spots first. Buy the lot next to them or the lot behind them and just expand out. And you know, I would suggest they do that first. You know, and give them first dibs on that money because that that’s where it could be utilized the best because if the driver is going to be stopped there for a shower, might as well expand that far and, you know, go from 200 spots to 400 spots, right? And this is I’m going to go to my notes here for a second on it. It’s a $200 million spending for truck parking and the American Trucking Association is certainly behind it. They have said publicly that it would certainly help to extend parking capacity and as they have noted and as you have noted it is a big problem and according to Topmark funding trucks outnumber normal parking spots at a rate of 10 to one.

14:38 Is that something you see on the road in the parking spots?

14:42 Yes. And another thing that makes parking scarce for semi trucks and big trucks and trailers and 40, you know, the 50ft trailers and everything is you’ll have these duly trucks coming in there with their trailers or you’ll have RVs coming in and they’re back in the truck parking taking up spaces or you’ll have a box truck back there with a day cab or just a regular, you know, a day cab. They’ll have a sleeper and you’ll have people and we all know this sleeping in these trucks which you’re not supposed to because the DOT says that’s not an adequate sleeper birth and it’s not far enough away from the steering wheel to be classified as staff.

15:23 So there’s a lot of people in the truck parking spaces behind the truck stop that really don’t need to be back there—

15:32 Right? And they’re taking up space from a legit truck driver with a 54 foot trailer who needs that spot. So, they need to, you know, that’s going to have to be addressed, too. Because if you have more trucks parking spaces, especially just a lot of spaces on the side of the interstate, you’re going to have RVs in there. You’re going to have box trucks in there sleeping. You’re going to have these little Sprinter vans with a soft field box on the back. You know, they got the little sleeper above the right—

16:03 Of the you seen though the a lot of the eur Ukrainian drivers. I smoke a lot of Ukrainian drivers loves to drive those trucks, but you know you’ve got a lot of that stuff these spots and they’ll be in there taking up spots and you know there’s got to be a way they’re going to have to police that. If you are going to go utilize a truck parking space, you should have a qualified sleeper on your truck.

16:36 Mhm. You get first dibs because and if you’re in a day cab or a box truck or something like that where you don’t really have a DOT-compliant sleeper berth that you can use. They got to have something else for you because that that you know these guys are the ones that you know you pull in a truck stop at 11 o’clock at night and you’re trying to find parking spaces and you’ll find like 20 box trucks taking up spaces you know and you have all the trucks and trailers and everything that the legit trucks that should be utilizing those spots. They’re rolling the side or they’re blocking the entrance coming into the fuel island or something like that. I mean it’s just a mess. If you had some way of regulating that and make these truck stops, go back there or have a police officer go back there say, “Hey, you don’t you’re not allowed back there because you don’t have a sleeper birth on the truck.” You know, that’ll open up a lot of slots for truck drivers.

17:39 Sure. And that’s one of the main intents of this bill is to eliminate or at least reduce I mean, we’ve all seen it. Trucks on the side of the exit ramps on the side of the park. They got to do the reset and they’ve got to, you know, rest—

17:55 Themselves. And that’s one of the primary purposes of this bill. And I believe right now it’s on the it’s been advanced to debate on the House of Representatives floor and that’s where it stands right now and it’s part of a $927 million funding to go to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. And of course the parking part of it, you know, would certainly be a win for the drivers out there and they’re hoping that this will be completed into fiscal year next year. How important is the parking aspect of it? Obviously, you’ve really highlighted a lot of the need for it, but across the board for drivers out there, particularly, you know, otrs and those that may have the 53 ft driveans behind them.

18:44 Yeah. Well, I’ll start with us first, transport drivers. Mhm. We don’t really drive a lot of vehicles with a sleep with a sleeper bunk in the back—

19:00 Right?

19:01 You know, we drive school buses, garbage trucks, dump trucks, box trucks.

19:07 Every now and then we’ll get a nice Volvo with a nice bunk in the back—

19:10 Right?

19:11 But probably the thing won’t idle, so you really can’t use that, you know, because you’ll blow it up in there because if it don’t idle, you’re not going to be able to use that air conditioner. So that’s a tossup. And there are a lot of drivers on the road that may not be transporters, but they are doing what we’re doing. They’re in box trucks or, you know, something other than a semi with a 54T trailer with a sleeper bunk in the back.

19:40 Mhm. They’ve got to come up with an option that these guys can get a good night’s sleep without having to sleep in a seat, sleep in a hot truck. I’ve seen them sleep underneath the truck. I’ve seen them sleep in the back of a box. I mean I have seen all kind of sleeping configurations that if truth is known are not do certified. They’re not they would not if the officer saw him I mean he probably wouldn’t but if he did he could probably give him a ticket.

20:19 Sure.

20:20 Cuz if you’re sleeping upright like I am right now in a state with your head laid over on the window you’re not getting good sleep.

20:29 Yeah. You not at all. You know, and it’s still going to catch up to you very quickly. You’re going to be tired and then you’re going to burn out and then you’re not going to want to do it. And I’ve been doing driveaway for a long time. And you know, I made the decision long ago that like I am right now, I’m going to be in a hotel room. Right—

20:51 Now, there’s different ways of getting cheap hotel rooms, but if they really want to help solve the hidden problem with trucks and parking spaces, they got to solve that because if you go to a truck stop at night, you’ll have people, you’ll have those Sprinter trucks, you’ll have a box trucks parked out front, you’ll have them parked out back, and you’ll have drivers sleeping like this, drivers sleeping like that. And none of them are getting any sleep at all. They’re just barely getting I mean maybe a military nap at bails.

21:26 I mean that goes the heart of the safety problem right there.

21:29 Yeah. You got these drivers getting up the next day and they’re sleepy because they have you know been sleeping up right asleep and you know they got to address that and you know I mean you can’t make the hotels give the drivers you know special rates or something like that but you know I think probably the best thing I’ve seen in a while is like over in Japan you’ll have truck parks or truck stops over there where they’ll have sleeping rooms and the truck stops for the drivers where you can have a, you know, you can get a sleeping room. And I’ve seen airports have this too where if you wanted to get some sleep, you have like a sleeping pod—

22:12 Inside the airport and you could rent that pod out for $10 and you get a, you know, get a shower and go with that pod. It’s soundproof and you could, you know, you get some good sleep. And now branching out from that with trucks you know about five I guess five 10 years ago I’m not really sure how long ago it was but all the truck stops started renting out their truck spaces and they called that priority parking—

22:47 Right—

22:48 Or reserved parking. And now you can pull up your love app and your pilot app and you can reserve a spot. Even if you’re not at the truck stop, but you’re 50 miles away, you can reserve a spot. But what happens is it’s like just like you remember when they had that old idle air at the truck stops.

23:08 None of the drivers are using it because they had to pay out of their pocket to use it. The truck stop the trucking companies wasn’t reimbursing them. So that didn’t make that that was a failed business right off the bat. Because truckers not go to pay for that stuff—

23:22 Right?

23:23 Same thing with the reserve parking. Drivers are not paying for that reserve parking. And you’ll pull into a truck stop at night and let’s say it’ll have 100 spots. And of those 100 spots, 50 will be reserved parking. And you’ll have at least 60 70% of that reserved parking space unpurchased, unused, empty with a big cone in front of it that you can’t back into it. And there you go. You’ve basically taken out 40% of your parking spaces at a truck stop because no one wants to buy the reserve parking.

24:03 Sure. So that can and that happens everywhere across the United States and that’s contributing to the availability of parking spaces have gone down because the trucking companies had basically taken 50% of their parking spaces and put a cone out there paid a reserve parking and in the hopes that drivers would just pay up for these spaces. And guess what? The drivers didn’t. And every night there’s that all that unused parking spaces because drivers are not purchasing it. The trucking companies or the truck, excuse me, the trucking stop truck stops are not pay are not making any money and it’s just set and empty contributing to the problem that they’re trying to fix with this motor carrier act.

24:48 We’ll see what happens with bill 2367 and see if they address that. What you’re talking about the unused space. I mean it’s there but not being used because of the fees associated with it but hopefully it’ll open up some more spaces because I mean really I mean it is the safety issue when you talk about getting the rest that is needed and the reset that you have to do anyway. It what they need to do is that and hopefully some congressman will have the have this information I just told you and put something in here that says that you know that these truck stops are going to have to open up that unused reserve spots you know they can only let’s say they can only have 10% of their slots for reserve rather than 50 I mean I’ve been in truck stops where 75% of the spots were reserved I mean, you had to go way in the back to get a free spot—

25:49 Right? Well, you know, we were talking about before we got on the show here, something that could eliminate totally different from this, you had brought it up and I did a little more research on it. Amtrak along with there’s a private company out there that is hoping to partner up with Amtrak and that is Ameristar Rail and you had had your eyes open to this and it would certainly change the landscape of trucking and tell us when you first became aware of this as far as drive up trucking onto an Amtrak three. Well, first of all, I have ridden probably every Amtrak route there is at least once and usually I’ve ridden them about five or 10 times.

26:41 When I first started out in transportation or transporting, we didn’t have Uber back in those days. You didn’t have you couldn’t call up Norton and get you a rental car or anything. You had to rely on public transportation and Amtrak and whatever was available, you know, even Graham. So, you know, you had to be a little more clever about getting around. So, I started riding trains. I started picking loads that well, I could get on a train. That’s the way I picked my loads when I first started out is it I would first thing I would look, is there a Ram track nearby? Can I get to it pretty easy? If so, I would pick that load. So, one of the major cross country routes that there is with Amtrak, it’s called the Southwest Chief. It’s an old rail passenger line that’s been around prior to World War II. Very famous route. I think there’s even a song out there, the Southwest Chief.

27:44 The train back in those days had a big old red nose on the front of it, you know, to symbolize the I guess a Southwest Chief or whatever, but it was it’s a famous train. You can look it up on YouTube. It’ll they got stuff on there. You can look up see what it was like riding back in the 1940s. That rail line went to Los from Los Angeles to Chicago and back just back and forth each day. It followed the old Route 66 highway. You remember that? Prior to the interstate system being rigged, Ameristar is proposing not only a rail line, but a high-speed rail line.

28:28 Which would take you from New York to Los Angeles in 72 hours. It’ll go through start out over in New Jersey and it goes to first groups of Pennsylvania, Chicago and then it heads down to Kansas City and St. Louis, Kansas City and then it falls in, you know, goes down into like Albuquerque and Kingman into LA like the Southwest Chief does. But along with that proposal, they want to make this train where it can stop at what they call rail port locations. And if a truck driver is want to take his big rig with his load cross country, even maybe halfway across country, you could put your big rig up on the ra on the train just like you would do like in pick in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

29:29 You can put your car on that train and it’ll take you down to Miami. Same concept here except you’re putting your big rig up there and you’ll just ride the train to LA and along with your, you know, your load of Clorox. How that how much fun would that be to be able to put your transport load on that train and Mark’s going to go and have a nice dinner inside the on the inside the car there. Well, I think that’s if that happens, and I’m sure it would if it’s available, drivers are going to do it depending on how much it’s going to cost—

30:07 Right?

30:08 But, you know, you’re looking at let’s say if you’re taking a garbage truck from Pennsylvania to LA and you got a fuel surcharge, I don’t know, close to $1,000 probably would be your fuel surcharge. And that rail line train is $600. That’s a pretty easy decision to make.

30:31 Now—

30:32 Right—

30:32 Mr. Norton is going to have to, you know, figure out, does he want his garbage trucks up on American going across the country?

30:40 That that’s going to have to be addressed.

30:43 Sure. Sure. And he’s the kind of guy that has to make those kind of decisions. And from doing a little research on it, this could be according to Ameristar, it could be as soon as late spring of next year, which seems—

31:00 You know it seems early or it seems but I guess if the infrastructure is there and if they’ve got the setup, I mean the price will be one of the key factors and I guess the effective use of it, how many people will take advantage of it. But of course, Airar is big on it. Of course, they want to propose this with a partnership, if you will, with Amtrak. And I think mentioned this and we confirmed it. The line would be called the transcontinental chief from New York to LA—

31:33 And first ones on there.

31:36 Yeah. That I mean basically you can take the train from New York to LA—

31:43 Going through Chicago but you’re going to have to switch trains—

31:47 Right—

31:48 At least once may and sometime in some cases it’s going to be twice so it’s going to take a while to do that but 72 hours if they can hit that mark on them and that’s definitely high speed cuz right now you couldn’t do it in 72 hours—

32:04 So I mean if they can do there in 72 hours. I’m kind of I’m wondering how they’re going to do that if they have to load up a bunch of semis on top of a train because that’s not going to be a quick process right there.

32:20 No, I mean you would almost think it’d have to be continuous or unloading and loading would seem—

32:29 You would have to have that stuff already done where the training coming through just hooks and goes.

32:34 Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, let’s shift gears from news of the day, topics of the day to Mark Nichols, the person here. Mark’s been on our program before, and if you didn’t recall or didn’t see the episode or hear the episode with Mark, Mark is a ballroom dancer. How long have you been doing the ballroom dancing, Mark?

32:56 I started ballroom dancing in the early 90s, right after Gulf War I. So 95 till today. I have to do the math real quick on that.

33:12 Years.

33:13 Yeah. Yeah. Been years. Started out as a student and then I finally got a job over at the Fred Air Dance Studio in Memphis, Tennessee. And I worked there for seven or eight years. And then I worked at another studio that I was taking lessons at in Nashville. I worked at that one about the same length of time. And then I got had my own studio. So I mean since 1995 till today I’ve been involved in it. I mean I know a lot of people that I’ve taught beside and had lessons from. So you know what I’m want to do right now is the lady that that’s my teacher who used to used to be my boss I used to work for. She used to sign my paychecks. She is her students want to go to Blackpool, England next year to compete in Blackpool, which is the world’s I think it’s the world’s oldest ballroom dance competition. It’s kind of considered the world championship or you know the Super Bowl of ballroom dancing.

34:21 If you’re a pro or an amateur like me, you know that’s going to be on your bucket list—

34:29 You’re going to want to do that before you die. And that that’s so her students have bothered her wanting to go to Petroam and she told me and I said I want to go too. So, she’s thinking about getting that trip up next summer. But, you know, I’ve got a lot of truck driving chicken fingers that I’ve been eating over at the Love’s truck stop and the Pilot truck stop and the Fly J truck stop. And I’ve gained a lot of weight. And I got to get that weight off of me before I could, you know, pay 2,000 Well, yeah, about $2,000 for a custommade tux tail to wear out.

35:05 Got time. Yeah, I got the feel of it. I’ve got I got to get going. That’s—

35:10 I got you. What is it about ballroom dancing that first drew you into it and has kept its appeal to you?

35:18 Watching Fred Astaire movies. I don’t know. When I got back from Golf War One and I was a newspaper journalist over in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. We talked about that last time.

35:30 Yeah. I just, you know, there was a video store close by and I was there one night and I picked out a Fred a scare Ginger Rogers movie. I took it home and I watched it. I always kind of like dancing anyway, especially dancing like that, you know, where it’s obviously that took some skill and everything to do what they did. So, I took the video home and started watching it and I played it like seven or eight times that night, especially the dance sequences I like. And then I watched a lot of those videos until I watched them all. And then I just said, I’m going to take ballroom dancing. And I thought I was calling the Fred Astaire Ballroom School in Nashville, but actually the they had changed names to the American Ballroom Center in Nashville. And I said I want to take some lessons and they signed me up and you know Shalene Archer which is my teacher now her and her partner Ben Ermis from the owners of the studio and I went up there started taking lessons and eventually went along after that I you know I got to know Ben Ermis and I you know he was a really good dancer really smooth guy cool guy and I wanted to be just like him.

36:47 So I said, “How do I get into teaching this?” And he said, “Well, I don’t have any openings myself, but let me call a friend of mine Charles Corbett in me, Memphis, Tennessee, and see if he’s got any openings for a brand new teacher.” And of course, he did. And I went and interviewed him in Memphis and got the job. Went into a training course with another female teacher there. We were new, brand new teachers. And we were basically watching old Fredders ballroom dance instructor videos. They’ve been there for like 20 years from like the 1970s. And we were in the back room learning how we had manuals back then how to teach the steps and how to do the man’s part, the woman’s part.

37:35 So me and Stephanie in the back, we were just working on trying to get to where we could pass the certification test which is qu school. So you know they have a you have to take you know you have to pass your test to get certified to teach. So we’re back there for three or four weeks working on it, working on it, working on it. And then we passed the first part of the teachers test to be able to just to walk out on the floor and teach. And then Mr. The corporates came in like it was on a Wednesday night. He had an old jacket with a you know just like a suit and tie jacket and it had torn sleeves and it was actually here old jacket from like 20 years prior.

38:18 He said, “Nichols, you’re teaching in an hour. Here’s a coat. Put a tie on. Get ready.”

38:24 You were cast into the fire right away there. He’s basically kicked my butt out on the floor and I taught Marcia Mitchell her first lesson.

38:33 Wow, that’s cool. Now, the last time I saw you in person, you were in the office, which I believe was last week. I think it was last week, and you had your luggage with you, and I said, “Where are you called home?” And you pointed down to the luggage. It’s like, “So, you pretty much live out of the suitcase?”

38:52 Yes, I do. If you look at my old child, my I’m my neighbor I’m on the road all the time. I mean I’m the definition of a vagabond—

39:06 But something caught my ear that you were talking about. You’ve been looking at the possibility of tiny homes—

39:15 That may fit the needs of Mark Nichols. Well, there’s a guy up in Knoxville who’s on YouTube and he builds a lot of those and he has a tiny home communities up there where you know people are who buy tiny home. Think about buying tiny homes is it’s not so much the cost of the home or whatever have you or getting it built. It’s finding a place you can legally park it. A lot of communities and towns and cities won’t allow county homes to they don’t consider them classified as legal residences—

39:53 Right?

39:53 And they won’t give you a permit to, you know, like you would in a trailer park, you know, where there’s mobile homes and those, you know, and so they people who buy tiny homes are fighting that process all the time. So this guy up at Boxel, he says the heck with it. He’ll just buy his own land and have his own communities himself. So, you know, you don’t have to worry about somebody else doing it more. So, so I’ve looked at that. I’ve also looked at, you know, I’m looking at a apartment complex now in Mexico Beach, Florida. So, I’m looking at that and I’m looking at several things. But the problem is if you do this job in any time at all, you’re never at home, right?

40:32 And I’m not married and I don’t have children, so I’m really not at home. So, you know, if you have a home, you’re probably not going to see it a whole lot—

40:45 Right now. As far—

40:47 I ran out of place. I mean, I ran out of basically I rent out of one of them in Nashville, Tennessee from my dance instructor cuz she’s got a place behind her house and everything like a pool house basically is what it is. It’s a really nice pool house. So, I rent that out and that’s where I actually live. But I mean—

41:08 You have access to the pool.

41:10 Oh, yeah. I mean, if I if I’m ever there, I do. But I’m never there. But, you know, I’m on the road all the time.

41:18 Yeah.

41:19 Now, if you do in this next chapter, if it’s going to be a tiny home or the place you mentioned in Florida, how much of a consideration do you put into it as far as where your next load may be or your first load to start off a week? I mean, how much does that bear into where you live?

41:38 It’s— It does. You know, it’s always nice if you’re living in Tulsa, you can just grab a $20 Uber ride over to the airport and get a bus, school bus. So, yeah, that would be a great place.

41:50 Yep.

41:51 But you’re also living in Tulsa, too. You got to take in consider. And it ain’t it’s a good place, but it not ain’t the greatest place. But another thing you got to be consideration of is do you have an airport? Is there a rental is a couple different rental car agencies nearby that you can get in and out of there? That’s going to be your deal. You—

42:11 It’s nice to have one there locally that you can pick up a load from. But if you can’t, at least you got to be able to get in and out.

42:17 You know, it’s like that like Mexico Beach, Florida. I used to live down there before the hurricane wiped the whole community out. But that apartment complex I’m looking at is very nice. I mean, I love the apartment, but to get out of Mexico Beach, I would have to go all the way over to Panama City Airport to fly out, which that’s a little bit of a drive, right?

42:38 Or I would have to go over there to get a rental car. So, you got to consider that.

42:42 Yeah. Some things you got to look at before you make that next step. You know, you’d mentioned being in the Persian Gulf War. With what’s going on now overseas what’s your take on some of the things that may be going on as far as the Gaza Strip some of the things of the news late the submarines going over outside Russia there what’s your take on that being a veteran—

43:14 Well when I was a Gulf War one— And the war was over and they were evacuating us out of the war area war zone. They flew us down to a city that we actually came in on. We flew in when we came into the country, we flew into the city which was Dhahran.

43:39 Mhm.

43:40 And then when we got through with the war, we flew we well we didn’t fly but we were bus back down to Dhahran. And there was some apartments down there that were called what were they called? Khobar Towers—

43:56 Right? And the apartments were built for the Muslim people there in that area. But as we were told, they said that it’s kind of against the Muslim custom to live on top of one another like in an apartment setting—

44:18 Right?

44:18 That’s what we were told. I don’t know if it’s actually true or not, but that’s what we’re told. So the apartments were empty. I mean, this is some really nice apartments, you know, for especially for that area and know they were empty. So we stayed in those apartments for a couple weeks until our planes come in to take us out of, you know, out of country. About like several months later the Khobar Towers was part was hit by terrorists and blown up. That killed a lot of soldiers there and so you know that’s you know we really didn’t I think the most dangerous part of the war for us was in those apartments cuz when we were in country we were surrounded by the mil US military so we were pretty safe out in the middle of the desert—

45:07 You know even though we were a service supply unit you know and man we were pretty close to the war we stud missiles going over us all the time at King Military City. Probably the most dangerous we were far of it were us at those apartments, you know, just setting ducks for terrorists, you know—

45:26 Right? So, if I mean if you just go back through history, there’s been war, you know, with the with Israel and all of the Muslim countries over there. There’s been war ever since, you know, after shortly after World War II. It’s a religious war. It’s one religion against another and they don’t want to, you know, they I think Israel would be happy just living where they’re living and be left alone. But, you know, the other countries are afraid that if you don’t leave them alone and you don’t run them out, they’re going to spread to your country and then it gets to the fight between two religions—

46:20 Right? Well, you know, I don’t think they’re ever going to settle it, you know. It’s just like anything else. I mean, throughout time, the only thing that really settled anything was war and blood.

46:33 Mhm.

46:34 It’s sad. But just go throughout history, there was never rarely was there a time where peace settled anything. What settled it was one side sometimes both sides got tired of fighting and got tired of dying—

46:51 Right?

46:52 And they and that’s that settled it.

46:56 I know nobody wants to think that way, but that’s reality—

47:01 Right?

47:02 You know, you get kids on the playground and you want them to stop fighting one another. Sometimes you just got to let them fight and get tired of getting hit and then they’ll stop fighting.

47:15 Well, changing topics just a little bit. You’re in Birmingham now. How long are you going to be in Birmingham and when’s your next load? Long load.

47:25 I was told I’m going to be here to the end of the year.

47:28 Okay.

47:30 Yeah. So, that might change.

47:34 So, is are you getting your way around Jefferson County there? Know your way around it pretty good.

47:40 Oh, I grew up in this whole area. Southern Tennessee, northern Alabama. Oh, yeah. I grew up in this whole area. I mean, I—

47:49 If I ever got a flat tire on the road, I probably have a relative within 20 or 30 minutes from me to come help me out.

48:01 Well, that’s a good place to be since you’re going to be there for the rest of the year. And yeah, certainly appreciate you joining us on our first episode videowise of the Six-Figure Trucker. Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to sit down and talk with us about things on and off the road. Pretty rich stuff we had here tonight.

48:20 Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

48:22 All right, Mark. Have a good evening. Get that rest.

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