Alex Burkart: Mississippi River port and brute force marketing

About this episode

Alex Burkart, strategic marketing lead for America's Central Port on the Mississippi River, walks Vance through the hidden infrastructure that most Americans never see: 46,000 barges a year moving through Lock 27 just outside St. Louis, replacing what would otherwise require 600,000 rail cars or 3.2 million trucks. He explains how his port — a former military base with 900 acres, 20 miles of on-site rail, and deep water access — competes for "economic development" projects that arrive anonymously as coded RFPs (only public if the company is Amazon), and how a $200M chemical manufacturer with a single rail spur is production-constrained compared to a facility with full on-site rail interchange. The conversation moves into Burkart's personal path: leaving a struggling solo consultancy, landing the port job through relentless networking (including a "free coffee, I'll write about you" blog gimmick that snowballed into landing his current job), and crediting a Catholic spiritual director/prayer practice for steadying him through nine months without income. The back half is a genuinely interesting business-strategy riff: Burkart's "brute force marketing" method of using satellite imagery to canvas regions for manufacturing prospects, and a broader Peter Thiel Paradox answer arguing the U.S. should double down on "basic human needs" industries (food, fiber, energy) but that America's infrastructure edge over competitors like Brazil is more fragile than people assume if China finances Brazilian roads and ports. Vance connects this directly to his own ag background, discussing farm co-ops as remarkable but aging institutions with no succession plan — echoing a recurring show theme about generational transfer of hard-won organizational knowledge.

“There's simply so much opportunity from an insights and knowledge standpoint... being at the Port, I really do have the access to so much tribal knowledge that you can't just, you can't find on the internet. They don't, you know, write books about this. You have to be in that industry to understand how it operates.”

“About 46,000 barges interchange with Lock 27... if you didn't have the entire system that exists, you'd have another, something like 600,000 plus rail cars or 3.2 million trucks that would be needed to transport the same amount of commodity.”

“Your everyday person doesn't [use the river], but yeah... nobody would mention the Mississippi River, despite the fact that it's right there... because nobody uses it.”

Key moments

• ~13-17%: Lock 27 and the 46,000-barge stat — quantifying the invisible infrastructure that keeps grain/coal/chemical shipping costs low.
• ~20%: Rail-served real estate distinction — why "near rail" and "on-site rail spur" are completely different business propositions for chemical manufacturers.
• ~28-30%: Vance and Burkart on the Mississippi's total invisibility to the average St. Louis resident vs. West Coast ports where cranes are part of the visible landscape.
• ~50-56%: Personal faith story — Burkart's spiritual director prescribing daily prayer/rosary right as he lost all his consulting contracts, and crediting that discipline for carrying him through nine income-less months.
• ~63-66%: "Brute force marketing" — using Google Maps satellite imagery and parking-lot car types to identify manufacturing prospects nobody else is targeting.
• ~85-88%: Vance's story about accidentally undermining an independent Monsanto seed broker's business model by asking "why can't they just order the bag online?"
• ~93-95%: Ag co-ops as unparalleled but aging institutions with no succession plan — Vance frames this as one of agriculture's biggest current threats.
• ~99-100%: Burkart's Peter Thiel Paradox answer — U.S. should refocus on "basic human needs" industries, but risks losing its infrastructure edge if rivals like Brazil get outside (Chinese) financing for roads/ports.

Notable quotes

“46,000 barges interchange with Lock 27... you'd have to have 600,000 rail cars or 3.2 million trucks to move the same amount.”

“You have a co-op that's being run by the same 80-year-old men that were running it when they were 50... they don't have anybody to pass these things onto.”

“It's using Google maps to canvas entire regions... every single rail served facility and tenant and business in the St. Louis MSA.”

“Do you pray? And I'm like, and he goes, that's a no. Okay. He's like, we need to, you need to pray. Right. You know, like daily.”