During COVID, we ran out of toilet paper.

Sure did.

Baby formula, computer chips.

We had cars that were ready to run, but no computer chips.

What the f*** happened?

And did we fix it?

We have not fixed it.

I'm sorry to say the vulnerabilities are still there.

What happened was a reveal of something that had been there for decades.

We are dependent upon this really improvised, ad hoc, rickety supply chain.

It's really a bunch of supply chains.

We've been devoted to this kind of reckless, ruthless form of deregulation.

And during the pandemic, just as we were in our darkest hour of need, it buckled and yeah, we ran out of a lot of stuff.

When I was reading your book, I kept asking myself the same question, which was, why don't we just make this s*** here?

Yeah.

Why aren't we making all of the s*** here?

Well, but you, you answer that, but explain it, explain it to me again.

We could make more things here and there's a movement to make more things here and that's helpful.

It's in the margins, but we're not going back to self-sufficiency.

Look, if there was no trade, you and me wouldn't be having this conversation.

We'd be out trying to feed our families with bark or whatever, right?

And, you know, I'm not that good at growing food.

I'm sure you're not either.

So here we are, we're dependent upon a global supply chain.

I did lose a tomato in the wind last night in my rooftop garden, but...

Good luck with that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't want to try to feed my family through my own labor.

So we have trade and we've got a lot of jobs in this country that are dependent upon a global supply chain.

And it's been a consumer bonanza.

We've just done a very poor job cushioning the people who've lost jobs.

We don't need to throw out globalization.

We need to reconfigure it.

We need sensible regulations.

We need working people to get more of a piece of the action.

So we have a more reliable supply chain.

You tell the story in the book about one company that is trying to make these glow-in-the-dark toys, even has a contract with Sesame Street, and he wants to actually use American manufacturing, but can't find American manufacturers to do it.

Right.

I mean, he calls around, these are these, I follow this one container from a factory in China to the West Coast of the United States, and then across the continent to Starkville, Mississippi, where his warehouse is based.

He couldn't find somebody to make the molds for these products, unless he paid 12 times as much as the price in China.

He tried to get somebody to make a kind of children's pop-up book style package for his product, and he was told, this is just too complicated, go make this in China.

It was the path of least resistance.

You follow this container ship from China all the way to Mississippi, and literally, this is the path it takes.

I mean, it is.

It's a harrowing journey.

And as an American that buys a lot of stuff, I'm going, holy shit, I didn't know that all this happened.

I just pressed click, and then it shows up.

Yeah, well, then it worked, yeah.

Yeah, do we need to buy less dumb shit?

I know that's like, not the most intellectual question.

Do we need to buy less dumb shit?

It's a legitimate question.

Look, I rode for three days with a long haul truck driver from Kansas City to Dallas and back to try to understand- That sounds like my worst nightmare.

It's everyone's worst nightmare, which is why we don't have enough truck drivers.

And the best part of that moment, we're somewhere in Oklahoma, and this truck driver looks out the window and he says, people just buy too much, the word you just used.

Right, shit.

And yeah, we could do well thinking more carefully about what we buy and what we need, but let's face it, we're gonna keep making stuff, we're gonna keep consuming stuff.

The question is, are we gonna have a more resilient supply chain or one that's just optimized for basically big box retailers and investors?

Cause that's what we've had now for decades.

I had, before reading your book, I had always kind of seen China as this aggressor that has taken American jobs and manufacturing.

And do you feel that's the case?

Is that an accurate portrayal of China?

I think what you painted the picture so well in here was that it's American business executives that are saying we can make more money.

It's not the American worker that's saying this, it's the executives.

Why did factory jobs move to China?

Because publicly traded corporations governed by the imperative to lower their costs and produce lower priced products, but fattened their margins as well.

They sent production to China, they were encouraged to go there by the investor class and it worked out really well for them.

And look, this is an old story, right?

Chinese labor was brought in to build the railroads in the United States.

Yeah, and Walmart going to the People's Republic of China, that's just a continuation of the old story of basically undercutting American labor unions, undercutting American working people.

These are decisions, the hollowing out of our factory towns that are not made in Beijing.

These are decisions made in boardrooms in New York, in Seattle, in Congress.

It's not always portrayed that way.

Right.

It's portrayed as there's China taking our economy.

But what, we have a big debate coming up Thursday night.

Right.

Trump, and correct me if I'm wrong, but Trump put some tariffs on China and Biden has kept a lot of those tariffs.

Has advanced them actually.

Has advanced them.

What can we expect when this question comes up Thursday night, where do they stand on this?

You know, I don't know how much nuance there will be in that debate, but let's face it, there are very few things.

I think we all know how much nuance there'll be in that debate, yeah, yeah.

There are not many things that garner agreement in American politics, but one of them, unfortunately, is the sort of cartoonish depiction of China as this job killing juggernaut without any of the details that we've already discussed here.

I mean, I think in terms of the differences between these two candidates, Donald Trump is a threat to the global supply chain.

He's proud to be a threat to the global supply chain.

He likes the photo op of slapping tariffs on steel and mugging for the cameras with steel workers going back to work.

Nevermind that there are six to eight times as many people who go to work at factories in America that buy steel as there are people who make steel.

So those companies are less competitive.

Now, Biden is also bashing China.

There's, this is a bipartisan initiative, but it's a much more nuanced kind of industrial policy.

It's less about containing China's rise.

I mean, Trump is really about, let's have a cold war with China.

Biden is more about let's embrace industrial policy.

Let's try to make electric vehicles in the US.

These are some significant differences.

I was in Vermont this weekend performing.

I eat a lot of ice cream in my life.

I wanted to go see the Ben and Jerry's ice cream factory, where it all started.

These were two men in 1978 who started making ice cream out of a gas station.

And then as I kind of dug into it, I was also reading your book.

It's kind of a perfect tie-in.

I realized, oh, they sold the company to Unilever in year 2000.

And all of a sudden, these two men who really care about keeping things local, who really cared about social issues, it felt like the big evil corporation was constantly pushing back against them and was constantly looking at profit margins.

Is there something that I can feel optimistic about?

Is capitalism always just defeat us and these two little Ben and Jerry men scooping ice cream?

I don't think it's capitalism.

I mean, the people who benefit from the status quo would have us believe that regulating and taxing and enforcing antitrust laws, we might as well be advocating Venezuela style.

I mean, it's just nonsensical, right?

Capitalism needs markets.

Markets need regulation.

They can't function without.

But in terms of what we can do, consumers are not gonna save us from the vulnerabilities in the global economy.

We're busy dealing with our kids.

I can keep buying plastic shit for my four-year-old daughter on Amazon.

I'm not turning you in.

I mean, it's gonna take antitrust enforcement, labor mobilization, so that working people get a piece of the action.

So they're less likely to quit their jobs in the middle of a pandemic.

I mean, Henry Ford, problematic character, knew a thing or two about making things in the supply chain.

He said explicitly as he raised wages for workers in 2014 and was called a communist by some, he said, I just wanna make things reliably.

Any business that's premised on low wage labor is inherently unstable.

Right, and that's where we're at right now.

It feels like.

I mean, normalcy is built on this idea that huge numbers of people have to do dangerous jobs away from their families with little control or understanding about their schedules, and they just have to suck that up for the benefit of our sort of just-in-time, ruthlessly efficient, that turns out not to be so efficient global economy.

You personally, that I can steal from you, what can I do?

What do you do?

Any habits of yours that have changed since researching and writing this?

Yeah, I mean, I try to give my business to people who are actually in control of their businesses.

I mean, if you're mostly transacting with big companies that are answerable to Wall Street, then you're ultimately transacting with entities that are thinking about shareholder interests.

Above all, they can't afford to be kind to their workers necessarily because their competitors aren't.

They can't afford to think about keeping production local.

They can't think about the highest quality ingredients, and they can't think beyond the next quarter.

So certainly local, small production.

But again, consumers are not gonna save us from the vulnerabilities in the global supply chain.

It's gonna take regulation.

It's gonna take labor mobilization.

But it helps to know that my $14 strawberries at the farmer's market is probably going to better use than the $9 strawberries at the Amazon.

You need to shop somewhere else.

Exactly, I need to shop somewhere else.

These are the celebrity prices that I get.

Look, how the world ran out of everything is available now.

Peter Goodman, everybody.