Julian Dorey Podcast - [VIDEO] - NAFTA Disaster, Post-WW2 American Boom, "Men Crisis,” Capitalism | Rachel Slade • 181

Episode Date: January 27, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Rachel Slade is a journalist, researcher, & author. Her most recent book, “Making It in America” is available via the link to my Amazon store in the description below EPISODE LINKS: - BUY RACHEL’S BOOK –– MY AMAZON STORE: https://amzn.to/3RPu952  - Protect Your Retirement W/ A Gold. IRA https://www.noblegoldinvestments.com/juliandorey or call 877-646-5347 Noble Gold is Who I Trust ^^^ - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://juliandorey.myshopify.com/  - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/ZVP6cP65  - SUBSCRIBE to Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UChs-BsSX71a_leuqUk7vtDg  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Making products in America again; Ronald Reagan & the Unions 13:35 - Mafia & The Unions; Political Pendulums 24:22 - Anti-Union Cultural Shift; Mexico Union Corruption 30:05 - George Bush & NAFTA 37:00 - Men in America are in crisis 43:27 - Innovation & giving up manufacturing 49:03 - Mexico lawsuit over Dolphin Label; Billionaires & Trillionaires era; Competing against Asia 58:30 - America can make everything 1:07:53 - Maine business story 1:16:41 - Quebec Workers in Maine Mills 1:21:56 - Post WW2 Textile Industry History; Uganda Environmental disaster 1:31:39 - Why Unions are still powerful; T-Shirts in America? 1:44:13 - Underwear War; Urban Manufacturing 1:54:27 - Health Insurance is insanely expensive 2:00:50 - Getting clothes safely; Competing with Walmart 2:10:55 - CJ’s Story 2:18:22 - Why building factories in Rural areas was a mistake 2:25:33 - India’s manufacturing destroyed by British Empire (History); Gillette in India 2:34:32 - Finding Rachel CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro & Episode Edited by Alessi Allaman ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 181 - Rachel Slade Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, guys? If you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. In the 1500s, the fourth largest manufacturing power was India. India was producing amazing stuff. They were in a great position because they were there, you know, between China, Iraq, Iran, all that. Then the British British come in and the thing that the British destroy was all manufacturing in India because once the British sucked everything out of India then they wanted to turn Indians into consumers of British and imported goods so they destroyed India's ability to manufacture and flooded India with cheap... All right. All right, Rachel, thank you so much for coming here.

And congratulations on the new book coming out, Making It in America by Rachel Slade. We're going to talk all about it today. So the link will be in the description for everyone to check it out. But we were just talking a little bit before the podcast i love talking with people like you who have a whole bunch of scope of history beyond just the topic they're covering like right now we're going to talk about the fact that you're really covering where manufacturing in america is at the moment but you've gone through all the way back to basically like almost the 1600s with the history of how we got here and what went on.

So what got you into this story in the first place, though? What made you interested in covering, I guess, the fall of U.S. manufacturing? Yeah, well, the fall of revival because this is an upbeat story. I mean, I want people to understand, like, we're going to do this. It's going to happen with or without you. You might as well get on board. But great question the answer is i was the biggest nerd when i was a kid that's probably not surprising i write books so um and i was obsessed with labels i really was i read

everything i mean when you're a reader like you there's nothing you won't read you know i was reading the back of my barbies and it would, patent pending. I'm looking at this thing when I'm, I don't know what, six years old, and I'm like, what's patent pending? Are you OCD? Because I'm OCD. That's something I would do. Okay. Yeah. I wouldn't say it's OCD.

Okay, I'm a compulsive reader. Yes, I am. I love ad copy. I love cereal boxes. Anyways, the point is, like, I was always reading labels. And when I was a kid, which was 100 million years ago, but we'll just say 70s and 70s, almost everything was made in the u.s but also you're supposed to look for the union label there was even a song look for the union label it was that was a thing oh yeah oh my god yes yes yes it was you guys need to find this clip all right look it up it was it was like a jingle it was a total jingle was sung by like look at the teamsters yeah it was somebody that ILGW the International

Lady Garment Workers Union people in the 70s you can find a clip of it please do because it's

worth it was that like a banana clip or something what oh my god you found it look for the

union label son of a bitch this is amazing we belong to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and we have sewn our union label right in here label son of a bitch this is amazing this gloss we belong to the international ladies garment workers union and we have sewn our union label right in here it tells you we're able to do what

every american wants to do have a job doing honest work at different wages when you see the fuck is this making a living making your clothes right here in america yeah what is this Making your clothes right here in America. Yeah. What is this? Oh, my God. Oh, this is like no joke. This is like a Broadway production. Oh, this is like no joke. This is like a Broadway production. Oh, yeah.

Wow. So this is actually part of a long tradition. Okay. All right, we got it all. I see that's perfect. Thanks, brother. Yeah. This is a long tradition of unions putting together shows, actually. And a lot of that started in New York City right here in the Garment District and all over New York City, you know, starting from, you know, the 1900s, early 1900s when you had a lot of immigrants.

And the idea was, like, we need the union to do a lot more than just negotiate wages. We need the union to build community, help people adjust to coming to America, teach them the English language, teach them how to bank. And if they couldn't bank, give them a bank, create a bank that was like union friendly, and understand the needs of the peace worker, the textile worker, whatever it was. And so they actually did put on shows like from the very start, because it was part of building community, you know, when you're in a show with somebody and you're singing along next to them. You know, you're not just now making clothes and showing up 9 to 5 or in those days probably like 9 to, oh, my God, midnight.

But, you know, you were part of a group that was working toward something, something better than just producing. And what happened? What happened? Well, it's a really interesting story, actually. And it actually – my argument is that it comes from the top down. There's this whole segment of the population that is absolutely convinced that unions destroyed American manufacturing. I'm going to take them on. I'm happy to argue with them. Let's do it.

All right. Okay. So what happened was you have companies that want to make more money, and you can't begrudge them that. But you have executives who start to see an opening, a changing in – let's just say a change in values, political values at the top, which is the politicians at the top, the presidents, senators, U.S. representatives understood that money won seats, right? It's not just, you know, popular vote. It's like the guy with the most money wins. And so they started courting and really working very closely with like corporate executives. And at the same time, you have this new, we're going to call it neoliberal, that's the name for it now, but this new thinking coming out of the Chicago School, the University of Chicago. Oh, yeah. Milton Friedman, I know there's a new biography about him. And he's saying basically that corporations isn't so famous without the grainy mustard.

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Learned all about that in business school. Okay, yeah, you went to business school, right, so you remember this. And so, if a corporation has no responsibility to the people, why do we have pensions? A pension is an expensive thing for a corporation, right? A pension ties the worker to the corporation as much as the worker – it's a benefit. And then there were all these other things that were kind of a given in the 1940s, 50s, 60s. The corporations took care of people. And Milton Friedman said,

no, actually, that's actually not part of true business. A true business is only beholden to the shareholders. And that kind of thinking allowed people to start imagining a future where executives were highly compensated for the decisions that they were making and workers could be free roaming. They were like all free agents. And P.S., that was a benefit to the corporation in that then you didn't have to worry about

unions. You could easily get around unions now because telling unions to fuck off basically was no longer seen as a bad populist decision. So you probably remember, and I hope I'm not repeating too much of this history that you already know, but I mean, there's the whole Ronald Reagan, one of the first things that he did was fire all the unionized air traffic control workers. I want to go through all this stuff. Let's assume a lot of people don't know because to me, the story here, again, you did go back to literally the 16th, 17th hundreds. And I'd love to get there as well. of the issue we sit at at the moment starts post-World War II to me because we see America

as the dominant power, capitalism in this country leading the world, and we see suddenly more global connectivity, technology improves. By the 60s, you even get TV and mass media and things like that. And it slowly milks its way towards the public stocks running the country because they're also buying off the politicians and then they're getting through legislation. And this is the real thing. Like when we're talking about NAFTA and all these other deals, we all hear all the politicians talking about this. And I'm like, oh, yeah, sounds bad. But a lot of us, including me, have never like sat there and read the full law, the legislation and the treaties and what they are.

And you get into that in your book. So let's – you start at the top wherever you want, but let's go through all of it. All right. So Ronald Reagan came into office actually while the air traffic controllers were trying to negotiate a better deal for themselves. And they were government workers and so they were forbidden from striking. But when he came into power, they did anyway. So, I mean, it's kind of a fuzzy story, but it's considered the er moment, right?

Like the beginning of anti-union politics at the top. And so they come in, so Reagan comes in and they strike, which means there are no planes flying in the sky. They can't because they need air traffic controllers. And they assume that they've got the country by the balls and that they're going to get everything that they want because they're necessary workers. And Ronaldagan just fires them all now whether or not he should have done that um whether you know whether or not that was

the right decision um it happened and it sent a strong signal the signal it was like a dog whistle that that a lot of you know executives are waiting for which is oh no we finally have somebody in the white house who is not going to kowtow to unions anymore and that was really that was a really really big move and also in the 80s in which i lived you know there was a huge shift i know you're lucky it was a terrible, terrible decade. And I will put that on record. But there was also this major shift from pensions to 401ks. So the idea is, let's get the median worker. By the way, median worker is now the word for middle class. You can't say middle class anymore. There's a new word for everything, guys. And I'm like, just catching up, right? Okay. So I don't know if I'm going to catch up.

You can't catch up because it's constantly moving. That's what I love about language. But yeah, so the idea was let's get these median workers out of the pension model so that they start to invest directly in Wall Street, in the stock market. And then they will be forever tied to the success of the stock market. Correct. Right? And then if corporations decide to offshore at some point, that's okay because at least the profits are there and the value is still there.

And in fact, Wall Street will boom, will continue to boom as we find cheaper and cheaper ways to make things, greater and greater profits, higher executive compensation, and the market remains healthy and actually grows. And so we saw a huge boom in the 80s. I mean, that wasn't quite when offshoring started. It had just begun. But the infrastructure was being set up for us to be thinking that way. That, like, it was okay to let go of a lot of the things that had held us together for so long. Things like unions, things like communities,

things like pensions, the things that tied us together, it was okay to let those things go, as long as the economy through 401ks, through the stock market, you know, through executive compensation, continue to be healthy. See, when you look at the history of who holds office, though, in America, I always remind people that it's a pendulum, right? So Kennedy slash LBJ, right? Let's go on this side. Kennedy slash LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan. Reagan got another four years of Bush, then Clinton came in.

And so on and so on. But to your point, there are precedents that are still set by given administrations that then kind of go bipartisan and follow party lines moving forward. So that's why we see, you know, people would look at it in history and say, oh, Reagan, Clinton, Republican, Democrat, so different. Not really. They kind of ended up doing the same thing. And it's because of what happened right there.

And I think Reagan also, historically speaking, had a pendulum moment to do this where you're going to overreact because he's following up all the economic crisis with carter and so that's i mean look what happened in 09 look at dodd frank and all these things that got set no matter if they went too far or didn't it's like we got to fix this this is what we're doing we're putting down the iron fist and now forget what's going to happen in the future because of it yeah actually you make a really really good point and when you when you say like when you're doing this, right? Like, oh, we have the Republicans, then we have the Democrats. But actually, I want you to remember that when the AFL-CIO building opened, I think in 1955 in Washington, D.C., it was this beautiful building. It was, you know, for the largest union organization in the United States.

Who opened it? Who was there ribbon cutting? It was Eisenhower. Okay, a Republican president. And I actually quote some of his speech in the book, but he was just saying like, this is America, people who make things, labor right here. And the AFL-CIO actually has their main headquarters right across from the White House. So it's like capitalism, labor, government. It was always one thing. I mean, not always, always, always.

I mean, if we're going way back to the founding of America, it was a mess. But yeah, in the 50s, when, what was it? At least, I'm going to, I'm like blanking, but at least a third of Americans were part of a union, right? And now union representation, I think, is at about 5%. So being a member of a union was part of being American. Producing things was part of being an American. And whatever that meant. I mean, you could be an accountant, or an ad man, or a salesman. But whatever you were doing was part of working with products and services that were homegrown. Yes, and that's the big difference. I always, with the union thing, I am not anti or pro-union. I'm pretty middle ground on it. I would like them to exist, for sure, and it's because of the reasons you laid out. I think the workers

who put in the labor that allows capitalism to exist have to have rights. The problem with this, and I think it's the problem with almost everything in society, is that we can never have it in the middle ground equilibrium. It always has to be one way or the other. So like you look at some of the earlier days of post-World War unions, who owned them? The mob, right? Well, in some cases. In some cases, but you know what I mean? This is the labels that people put on. You look at the skyline over here. None of those buildings went up without the OK the Mob. Not necessarily the people in the union.

It's not their fault. Let's talk about how the mob got involved in the union because I think this is a really interesting history. And again, it's going to be a New York City story, so I apologize for people who live elsewhere. But I mean obviously this is a New York story. So when the unions were trying to coalesce power among people in, you know, the Garment District and other places in New York City in the 30s, now, let's go to the 30s, 40s, it was extremely difficult. the small business owners really didn't want the union to come in. And there's a long history of them physically blocking and assaulting union leaders trying to unionize shops. Because the truth is that if half the shops are unionized, it's a problem. If no union shops are unionized, obviously, that's what it is. If all shops are unionized, then you can start to set standards, right?

It becomes very difficult when you have some shops that are and some shops that aren't. So the unions had a lot of organizers, and they were risking their lives to get into these places and talk to workers and say, we can represent your interests. We can build community. We can help you take care of your family and have a better future. And that was not desirable. There were people who were very much against this. And they paid off the politicians and the police. So the organizers were murdered. They were beaten. They were killed. And typically those murders and beatings were not solved because the politicians and the police were in the pockets of manufacturers and other business owners. They were also in the pockets of the mob.

Now, the mob had gotten really strong during Prohibition, right? So we didn't really have a strong mob, I would say, until Prohibition. Suddenly this became like a very, very professional organization, which already had the politicians and law in their pockets, right? Like they had a whole infrastructure for taking care of these guys. When Prohibition is repealed in 1933, these guys need new things to do, right? How do they use their power that they've already amassed

and all their connections and all this money? So they do all kinds of things, but one of the things they do is union bust. Okay. So the cops and the politicians and the attorneys general and the DAs are not going to protect the union leadership from physical harm. We know this. Who will? The fucking mafia. The mob. So the mob plays both sides. So you pay protection money to the mob to keep the union leaders from coming in, and the union leaders have to pay protection to the mob to protect themselves from getting killed. Once the mob gets into unions that way, they start to work their way into leadership.

What does the mob want more than anything is all those pension dollars. They start to work their way into leadership. What does the mob want more than anything is all those pension dollars. They want to be able to control. It's a hefty amount of money. They want to be able to control where that money gets invested. They want their taste. They do, though. Exactly. So don't forget that it's pension money that built Las Vegas through the mob. Right? Yeah. We know that. Yeah, I've seen Casino. Okay, right. Because there's this huge amount of money.

The mob is now all involved. Like, you can't extricate the mob from the unions at one point. I mean, they were still very much above board unions, and unions were still doing important work. But that's how we get to this place, that it was an honest effort on the shoulders of so many honest people who found themselves completely at the mercy of mercenaries in this form of the mob who were willing to protect their interests in return for all kinds of compromises that ultimately ended up with you and me sitting here in 2023 going, well, the unions are just all wrapped up in the lot. If you're trying to navigate market turbulence, why not set course to the noble gold investments safe haven with global uncertainty looming your savings and retirement plans are under siege. But there's one asset that stood the test of time, gold. So unlock the peace of mind that comes with owning gold, the ultimate safe haven.

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slash Julian Dory, or simply hit the link in my description below. So head there now and open up your own gold IRA with the only gold company I trust. Yeah, I don't – I think there's – and I think pop culture has actually done a good job of showing that there's significant pressure. It's not like a lot of the – when that does happen, and again, this isn't everywhere as you said. When that does happen, it's not like they have a choice. They don't come in and say, hey, you guys want to work with us today? Yeah, that never happens. They walk in and they say, listen, fucking Vinny, there's a bat.

Make sure this guy is straightened out. That's what it is. But all these – whether – that's just one example. But all these different things I think led to maybe this perception of all unions that is not right. When people are pure anti-union, I constantly will get in arguments with them like, well, don't you think people should have a right to be able to not see their job shipped overseas or to be able to have proper coverage if they got injured and stuff like that? Like who represents them? That's who represents them.

It's like when you have an athlete, he's represented by an agent. That's right. You know, what's – And the union. I mean all athletes are unionized. Yes. But I'm saying like even at the front half of that before that, he even has his own guy. So why shouldn't the average American worker at least have a group that can get behind him?

I'm with that. But in the midst of all this, you laid out what happened with Reagan when he got in and we go through those years. We get into Bush 1 and Clinton. This is where all the NAFTA stuff happened. So can you just explain this? Like, we're all fifth graders with this. Sure. Okay, I'll do my best. Okay, so basically, the culture has shifted. By the time Reagan has Alzheimer's, you know, a lot of Americans are now anti-union, whether or not they benefited from it.

Actually, every American has benefited from unions. I mean, that's why we have weekends. But there's been a huge cultural shift away from unions and a strong interest in profit because our 401ks are going to go up. Any middle class voter wants the economy to be healthy, whatever that means, whatever price we pay for that in the long run. And most politicians now are free trade thinkers. That sense that we have to let the market be free to be what it wants to be, that there's some kind of like natural stasis that we'll be able to reach if we move all these regulations from it. It's a magical thinking, frankly.

But it was very much the zeitgeist. Like free the markets. They will self-regulate. And then I don't know what happens. Nobody really knew what happened. But it was supposed to be a good thing. Like we're for freedom, right? Like you're American. Yeah.

You like freedom. I like freedom. Yeah. So like free the market. That sounds good. It has free right there in the name. Good marketing plan. All right.

Exactly. So NAFTA is a really interesting piece of legislation. It was kind of like a let's test this out. Let's see how much people are willing to take in terms of free market thinking. Keep pulling up NAFTA, Leslie, just while we're at it. Okay, yeah, fact check me on this. to create our first free trade agreement with Mexico and Canada and basically lower all tariffs and obstacles to allowing businesses to manufacture abroad,

but to adjacent countries. And then the idea was that then we would be able to export to these countries. So, okay, let's just make this real. So, like, Whirlpool is making dishwashers in Indiana. And they say we can make dishwashers in Mexico just as easily as we can make them in Indiana. And by the way— Yeah, for less, definitely, because the peso, you know. And also, by the way, this is going to be really great, because then Mexicans are

going to have money in their pocket, and they're going to buy American goods. That was the dream. That was the dream. So we're going to boost others' economies by exporting what we do, which is make stuff. Their economies will be boosted. Then they'll start buying our stuff. But if we're not making things, then they can't buy things that we make. They're going to – anyway, you can see how it kind of breaks down real fast. Okay.

There were only a few voices who said, whoa, whoa, hold on. Like of course it's going to be cheaper to – am I like going off level? No, you're good. You're good. I'm always watching the levels. Okay. You're like so aware of everything my husband is a record producer there you go okay so um so they were like so there were just a few folks who were like okay wait a minute the reason that it's so cheap to make in mexico is not just because the peso is

a different currency it trades at different rates but also because they do not have a strong union culture there. And the union culture that they do have there is actually pretty corrupt. And there's no environmental regulation. We love that in America. And they don't have OSHA, which is here about worker safety to ensure that things are done properly, that you're wearing headgear to make sure you don't blow out your ears and you're not inhaling mercury all the time. So there's so many things that the Mexicans don't have, which would make manufacturing more expensive. And so what the unions and senators like Sherrod Brown over in Ohio tried to do was get some of the language into the treaty that said, no, no, wait, you need to ensure that you need to guarantee workers' rights. You know, trying to like level the playing field just a little bit

in terms of environment and workers' rights vis-a-vis Canada and Mexico and Central America where ostensibly all this manufacturing was going to go. basically reset the ensure that there's an even opportunity cost i'm explaining this a little wrong to have a similar price based on if something is or a better price based on something is made here or somewhere else so they're getting exactly yeah exactly yes like yes lower all the barriers that make free trade possible which by the way this chart that you have isn't that amazing book this chart's incredible i'll hold it up to the camera, but it's the average U.S. tariff rate from 1821 to 2016, and it looks like

the Grand Canyon. It just goes backwards. Yeah, that was absolutely stashing. We could talk about that, because the history of getting Americans manufacturing in the first place is the history of America. Yeah. But we can talk about that.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, right. So, right. So these voices emerge, you know, legislators and union representatives are like, we see bad things coming out of this. But the Bush administration says, we're going things coming out of this. But the Bush administration says, we're going to negotiate behind closed doors. They say this to Congress. And Congress, you would get no opportunity to weigh in on our negotiation. And when we finally come to the terms of a treaty with Mexico and other countries, you either buy it whole hog or you're against freedom.

That's what they do. Yeah. It was a very strange deal that Congress made. But remember, you know, at that point, everybody was pro free trade. Like, it seemed like a great idea. Sure, let's try it. Yeah. By the way, the Soviet Union had just fallen.

So, like, freedom was everywhere. um so we got nafta and nafta the north american free trade agreement it's astonishing how quickly the dominoes start to fall after that i mean it's absolutely astonishing again i was alive then. I saw it happening. You would go to – everybody worked at The Gap when I graduated from college. Is there even The Gap? Does that exist anymore? Is that a thing? Yeah, it's still around.

Okay. I got a couple Gap things in there. Do you? Yeah. Okay. I'm pretty sure. I mean, can you fact check that? I was actually thinking about the gap yesterday.

I was like, I'm going to bring up the gap because everyone works with the gap. So you go to the gap. This was in five years of NAFTA. You go to the gap and there would be piles of T-shirts with crap people are buying, including me. I was buying that shit too. And you would like rifle through. Remember, I'm a reader and I'm looking at these labels and it's like made in Mexico, made in Guatemala, made in El Salvador. And it grows. It grows, right?

Like when you start going through the stacks of clothes now, it's Vietnam. It's Bangladesh. I still don't know where Bangladesh is. Oh, really? It's like the northeasternmost part of India. It's like this little piece of it. Pull that up on a map. All right.

Never look. Keep going. But the problem is it's like very low to sea level, and so they do a lot. Anyway. Okay. And Cambodia, now you see. Anyway, so you're starting to rifle through this stuff and stuff is made everywhere and that happens in an incredibly short period of time. Yeah.

Incredibly short period of time. It's just – the floodgates opened and then industry was gone now when they're so you said this is about a five-year period so it's quick but when the manufacturing immediately starts going over there because of nafta we're now introducing human rights issues though because this is where i mean in school they taught us about the sweatshops back in the 1800s and stuff is some of which a lot of it was happening here right here now we're doing it somewhere else like where you know i love nike but my nike was made by some like slave eight-year-old kid in cambodia i i do feel bad about i thank him for doing it but i do feel bad about that you know what i mean and this is where that all started and now it's even infected

we were talking before we got on camera it's affected things like tech and where we talked about the cobalt mining and stuff so all the jobs that now got there are very few things that you can be certain of in life but you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning you can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink and of course you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile, different is calling. In these human rights massacre situations, back home, all those jobs, those people are laid off, right?

Yeah, they just lose their jobs. And the issue is that America did not have what we like to call an industrial policy. So there was no infrastructure for helping people transition now from whatever they were doing to whatever they needed to do to be able to survive. The government was just basically gone. And there were company towns, and we know this, like Akron, Ohio, which is, I think, one of the most depressed cities maybe in the country at this point. But there were their manufacturing had, you know, it was all over the country. It was

in Kentucky and Mississippi and Alabama. And there were these like small factory towns that made one thing there was, I write about Fruity the the Loom so there was one town in Kentucky that where Fruit of the Loom employed 20,000 people and that's what everybody did there they worked for Fruit of the Loom and then suddenly Fruit of the Loom was gone yeah and what do you do what do you do there was there was nothing nobody was prepared for the gutting of these towns when industry left. That was a big phenomenon with Trump too and it's one place, at least for political messaging, it's one of the places you have to give him some credit is how he spoke to these people. I'm someone who cares a lot about the environment, right? I know there's no such thing as clean coal.

I know it's not good for the environment, right? Some oxymoron. Yeah, when he would say that, I'm like, cares a lot about the environment, right? I know there's no such thing as clean coal. I know it's not good for the environment, right? Some oxymoron. Yeah, when he would say that, I'm like, what are you doing? But the people who lived in those coal mining towns, and you just described a couple other types of examples. I've been to those coal mining towns. Their father was in the mine. Their grandfather was in the mine. Their great-grandfather was in the mine.

They are treading water right at the top trying not to drown to get by and they don't know anything else because they've never been given the resources to not be a coal mining town in the middle of fucking nowhere in pennsylvania right you know and so i looked at this and i said okay these are the people very often who put trump in office and if you're not happy about that that's fine but you need to look at the root cause because by the way it's a bipartisan problem yeah he was he was an outsider with this stuff and he came in and spoke to those people because they'd been forgotten about and how how do you solve that though how do you go into how do we go into towns like akron where was the town in kentucky you mentioned yeah i'm blanking on the town i'm sorry but we can all right the town in kentucky or like

the coal mining towns in west virgin and Pennsylvania and suddenly be like, all right, today you're going to learn, what was the old quote, like learn to code or whatever. Today you're going to learn to code. Like how do you go in and change the culture there for people who are doing nothing but making a living and doing hard work and doing their best? Right. Well, I mean, that's what I'm talking about with industrial policy. It's a holistic look at people and work and job training, right? And so to your point, I want to actually talk about this a little bit. I mean, I don't know if now we're done with NAFTA and we're moving on to like what's happening right now. But I want to talk about – can I pause this conversation and just talk about men?

You can do whatever you want. Okay. Okay. I'd like just talk about men? You can do whatever you want. Okay. Okay. I'd like to talk about men in America because the data shows that men are not doing well. And this is something that I think traditionally liberal people have not been thinking about a lot. And I think that's where Trump got a lot of traction. But the data does absolutely support that men in America are not doing well. And there are a million reasons, I'm sure, for this. And, you know, you could bring in

any thinker and they'll come up with a different theory. My view is through manufacturing. And I would say from being an educator, working with kids, there are people who aren't really made for sitting in front of a computer eight hours a day. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. There are kids who probably just shouldn't go to college. Not because college is a terrible idea of blah, blah, blah, but because they're just ill-suited like they'd be much happier being outside or working with their hands yes i'm not being pollyannish about it i i mean humans right i mean for 50 000 years we developed these in tandem with this yes we love to work with our hands. We love to produce things. We love to see the

fruits of our labor. And so again, I don't want to be Pollyanna-ish about this. I don't want to act like there's some utopian solution to every problem, but I do think that there's a large percentage of the population that would feel really good about making things. Yeah. I agree. A hundred agree 100 and this is a conversation i actually i'll go back and forth with in the dms with with fans about because they it's it's good timing to do this podcast with you because it's something people bring up to me i have one long time fan this guy joel shout out joel who went to trade school right because he knew he knew he eventually he knew exactly what he wanted he knew he eventually wanted to own his own contracting company, what he wanted to build, etc. He was

like, Wait, why am I gonna go? I could go get you know, B pluses and A minuses in college for some degree that makes me sit at a desk all day and hate myself 30. Or I, I like building shit, I'm gonna go out and build stuff. And I, And I – the two words you didn't use there but I think are right in the middle of it are the mental health with that. This right here, this is not natural. All right? Sitting under fluorescent lights like this because I got to tell you – I was going to say, what is this light about anyway? This is a terrible light.

It's a nice-ass light. But it's a nice-ass light to be on camera when you're in a studio like this. But I, you know, I've lived in a studio for four years. One of the reasons when I got my new place that I wanted to get the one I got is because there's light everywhere, natural light coming in, right? I go for walks on the Hudson River every single day like i value this stuff because i'm like hold like i watch my body like shrivel up doing this and then i think about all these people who aren't aren't lucky enough to be building something that's theirs number one so you're less into it with that case they're stuck on the same salary there's a limited ceiling that they have and they're stuck in these in these little boxes all day and you know when i was first out of college I was working on Wall Street I remember seeing the people go outside every day like some of the adults and adults but they go outside and like go for a walk around

the parking lot and I was like what the fuck are they doing and a couple years later I was like I understand now that you got to get out that you got to be outside of this shit and so i i remember i brought my cousin she was coming out of college and i've been working there about three years i brought her by the office one saturday morning when i had to pick something up and she was in town and i just took her to each you know we worked in an enormous enormous office it was a big producing office for merrill lynch so there's just desks everywhere, right? And I walked her to different parts of the office and she was a marketing major. And I just asked her to creatively tell

me what she saw. And there was one particular section of the office that probably had like 60 different desks and everything's gray. I mean, the shittiest, that light gray that no one likes, you know, with like the fuzz on the side, just to piss you off even more, you know, on the sides of the cubicles where it's not even hard it's like literally fuzzy yeah and but not the good fuzzy and you look around all the there there's just drab like whatever that's called like computer parts of the desk and then the computers are dells from 08 you know god forbid they buy good stuff at a bank and i'm like what, what do you see? And she's like, destruction. Destruction of people.

And I'm like, whoa, that's spot on. And it just – they don't teach – and I'm not blaming college for this. They don't teach you this stuff in college. But now we got to have some sort of – I'm glad you're bringing it up because we have to have some sort of societal awareness that it's OK to figure out that like hey maybe that system right there isn't for me and maybe we even if kids don't know that we have to find ways to have conversations so they can come to an answer that maybe they thank you right yes absolutely right so the other piece of that so yes bringing back manufacturing, which will happen, also offers our kids different kinds of opportunities that are not necessarily tied to seeking an extremely expensive four-year degree and also allows people to move up through organizations. You can really, really start at the bottom. Is it the head of GM, I think?

Can you help me out here? She's a woman. Mary Jo whatever? Mary Barra? Thank you. Yeah, I'm blanking on her name. I'm not great with this stuff. Mary Barra.

She started at the bottom. She did. I believe she started as a line worker. You can look that up, you know, working on the line. Which they don't have anymore. Right. Well, yeah, it's a pity. But the point is that manufacturing allows people to come in at any level.

Yeah. And when you know the process, then you have knowledge that then you can use to move up. Shoot, I'm blanking because I was just about to say something, but let's talk about innovation. Okay. Okay. How do you innovate? Like how do you come up with a new idea? You put brains together and you get creative.

Okay. Okay. Yeah, that is true. You can come up with any kind of idea you want, but in order to execute, you need to know how to make it. Yeah. Thing. The thing. So, like, let's go back to Apple or Steve Jobs or something like that.

These guys were physically building computers in their garages, right? Wozniak, yeah. Wozniak, thank you. I didn't actually read the book. When you think about the best innovations in the United States, even pharmaceutical companies, like where does that stuff start? How do you get a drug to market? Where does that start?

That starts with people in labs like dripping stuff into other stuff and heating it and spinning it and that sort of thing. And, you know, doing all kinds of testing. And then ultimately, you get a drug that needs to be manufactured. But the point is, the people who are doing the innovating are making, they're using their hands, they're experimenting, they're innovating, They know how to manufacture things. So they're starting from a manufacturing standpoint. Right? This is – so computers. We talked about computers, technology, robots. The kids who are looking at robotics these days, they start by building robots, right? Yes. They don't start by, like, I don't know, programming robots. Like all the kids I know who are in robotics they start by building them

so in order to innovate you need to know how to build this thing so then you can communicate with the other people who need to help you build this thing and put the things together parts together to actually create so when we gave up manufacturing, we give up manufacturing, we're giving up this incredible like pot, you know, this stew of knowledge. That's not just I desire, I want to do something, but also the know-how to build it. Yes. It's a good feeling too. Oh, it's the best. You like this table?

I was going to ask you. Did you guys make this? Me and Danny Jones, who runs another big podcast in Florida, a really good friend of mine, flew him up here, and we built this table in a weekend. And I got to tell you, when it was done, I was like, let's go. Right? That feels so good. It's amazing. Every time I sit here, I'm like, damn, we're signed below. It's cool. It's right there.

Your pride is right there. I love Home Depot. You know what I mean? Home Depot's fun. And that's what I'm there. I love Home Depot. You know what I mean? Home Depot is fun. And that's what I'm saying. Like that represents manufacturing. There you go. You walk in there and you're like possibility.

Yes. But you know the possibility because you've made stuff. And maybe you started making stuff with your father or your mother. Like your mother – I don't want to be like binary. So like somebody had to make the food and somebody had to like fix the toilet and so you know that's all about understanding how things work how things go together how to manufacture yeah and so we lost that quickly with nafta and then there was another big agreement another beat is wto yes yes can you explain all this oh god i wish i could i'm gonna try okay so um in

1996 we uh several countries got together i'm gonna say 130 but you're gonna fact check me maybe it was 72 i don't know lots of lots of numbers in my head a lot of countries um got together and formed the world trade organization which in a nutshell, worked hand-in-hand with the free trade movement to reduce obstacles to free trade. And we were talking about obstacles like environmental regulation and labor regulation, those slow down trade. And so the World Trade Organization was there to help countries and companies litigate, mostly companies litigating against countries that they felt were slowing down their ability to make a profit. So like Interpol for capitalists. Oh, God, I love that. It's good, right? Can I use that?

Yeah, you can use that. Okay. It's on tape i'll just say copyright julian sorry okay okay so um that's exactly right so so here here countries could go to their representatives and say i mean sorry companies did i say countries companies like kodak could go to their American representative and say, go fucking sue Japan because they're making it hard for us, Kodak, to penetrate the Japanese market. They are favoring their own brands, Fuji, in the 1990s. This was a big lawsuit.

I guess this didn't work out with China too well, huh? Well, at that time, China didn't have a free i know but but now it was so fuji was actually japanese yeah yeah no i know i'm talking in the future though because like we didn't do this very well with china all our all our companies just left uh we didn't do what well we didn't do well with if china was causing competition problems fixing it you know what i mean like literally google left china you know a lot of our companies left the market right there right i was cutting ahead but yeah no no that's totally fine yeah you're right about that so um so yeah so So a fishing cartel, a tuna fishing cartel, for example, in Mexico sued the United States because – do you remember the little dolphin label on tuna fish? Yeah, this was in that movie Seaspiracy, I think.

Like it's all bullshit. Well, yeah. Yeah, you're in that movie Seaspiracy, I think. Okay. Like it's all bullshit. Well, yeah. Yeah, you're probably right about that. I'm not going to go there. It may be bullshit. But anyway, Mexico sued the United States because we had this little dolphin safe label because the idea was that the tuna was line caught. So then the dolphins weren't getting caught in nets. But the problem is this major tuna fishing cartel in Mexico didn't use lines. They used nets.

And they said that the labeling, the Dolphin Safe labeling in America was cutting in on their ability to sell tuna in the United States. They won this case in the WTO. I just want to give a couple examples of like what free trade actually looks like. And especially when you allow countries, I mean, sorry, again, it's important to understand companies to sue countries for making legislation that they feel is slowing down their ability to make profit in that country. And the only – the countries who actually have an advantage here are the ones with the biggest GDP, like the top three in that type of situation because everyone else is – I mean money talks. You are essentially a hostage to what they're going to support. So if there's some sort of case brought vis-a-vis the WTO and the US says, you know what?

Yeah, we agree with that. And you're like fucking Cambodia. What are you going to do? Be like, no. I mean – You're done. It's a little bit about that, but it's a lot more about like think about why the WTO exists at all. Their mandate is to ensure that no country is slowing down any corporation's ability to make money.

Which is supposed to put more money into the economy and more money into people of the world, but what it ends up doing is it kind of creates a wealth gap is what you're saying. Oh, a major wealth gap and an environmental wealth gap. Well, yeah, that too. But yeah, because like we're seeing more billionaires around the world stamped every day than ever before. And I was talking with someone – actually it was about AI but it's the same idea here. You can talk about AI. was telling me that this stamping of new billionaires into eventually trillionaires is going to keep happening over the next five to ten years and then the gap is going to be so wide there's no return. And he said – and it was a really negative way to look at stuff, but he was trying to give his prediction.

He's like you're going to have wealth in the hands of so few that it will control every level of – every lever of government everywhere around the world and politicians will be paid off and the people will be left to get their universal basic income. In many ways, that's a scary way to look at it. I mean I don't know why he doesn't think that it's already happened. Well, it has. But he's saying it's point of no return. Like it can't be fixed. So I would argue that the antidote to that is manufacturing i mean again it's not just like you know to to hammer all the world is a nail

like the ability to be able to make things let me back up once one click 10 of the gdp of america is still manufacturing based yes i didn't know it was that high. We are making things. We are making things. And what's really fascinating is that it's a lot of mom-and-pop shops. Well, that makes sense. And that's why we don't really think about them. They're not really on our radar. But there are little manufacturing factories all over this country, I think. and again, I don't have the numbers in

front of you, but I think they average 100 employees or less, but they're making things. And that is the alternative, right? That is the alternative to what you are describing, which is an incredible amount of wealth in the hands of the few. When we start to recognize that we can lift up communities and support each other by buying locally, which in this case means domestically, but then we can start to talk about actually like local manufacturing and actually even go further by creating, get this, a circular economy where your waste,

so like all your plastics and um glass and other things are then being recycled especially here in new york you could easily do this you know recycled maybe on the periphery of new york and then sent back into industries here in new york like that's the circular economy right there that's what eric olsen is working on it's like the exact thing oh really yeah this guy i had on the podcast. I'll show you. Oh, wow. He came from big oil, left it. It was his first job out of college and was like, wait, there's a middle ground solution here.

And he's basically building these things that measure for plastics and waste so that it could be collected and then recycled. But there's all kinds of other terminology with it to be reused within the same place. That's amazing. Yeah, it's very cool. That's super real. I mean the Chinese don't want our trash now anyway, so we got to get rid of it. So instead of burying it, if we actually manufactured here, imagine now you have a buyer for all of this waste if we can figure this out. So there's actually a company in um new york city

i think it's called um you can look it up uh ice stone ice stone ice stone and they make beautiful countertops out of recycled glass whoa yeah and i think they're in the is it the brooklyn yards brooklyn navy yards that sounds right i mean yeah okay here we go made in u.s i look they're making it out of glass yeah recycled glass so wait that thing right there i mean, okay, here we go. Made in U.S. Wait, they're making it out of glass? Yeah, recycled glass. So wait, that thing right there? I mean, it's got probably polymers and all kinds of stuff in it, but yeah. And it's all made right here? It's made in Brooklyn, New York.

Let's go. I mean, this is not tough stuff. Shout out to Ice Stone. Yeah, shout out to Ice Stone. My point is, this is not hard it's actually not hard it's actually can i challenge very simple okay go ahead or sorry as the philly girl would say go ahead i forgot you're from philly go ahead what's the how do you compete on some of this if you're competing with a 10-year-old working for 50 cents in Vietnam?

Right. OK. So first of all, like Vietnam is doing really, really well. And it's no longer going to be viable to manufacture in Vietnam at some point. So that's going to keep happening, right? So it's always – when you're talking about offshorhoring it's like always a race to the bottom and that's another thing that i write about is free capital just coming into countries assaulting them with you know cash and then boom they're gone which we saw during the pandemic um how are you gonna well first of all when you're talking about something like countertops

that shit is heavy right yes okay so. Okay. It's hard to get here. So when you think about the infrastructure required to get stuff to the United States, you start to think about how it's analogous to like the fossil fuel industry. So the fossil fuel industry, in order to function in America, is subsidized by the government. It's extremely expensive to extract fossil fuels and refine them, right? Both actually economically and environmentally. Sure. Okay? So following NAFTA, following all this free trade zeal,

a whole infrastructure has been designed to get goods into the United States, right? And it's a very expensive infrastructure. It's about, and this goes to my first book, it's about shipping and ports and highways and widening the Panama Canal and dredging New York, New Jersey port and raising bridges

so that you can get these supermax ships. So that's the expenses that we don't think about when it comes to what are we actually paying for as Americans when we import all these things. Back to the countertops. This is a big, heavy thing. Might as well just make it here. Probably you're saving 30% on transportation costs. So I would imagine that they could compete pretty well with countertops made in other parts of the world.

So let me ask this then. Yeah. Is this a problem we can solve by doubling down on strengths and just eliminating weaknesses? And let me put an image on that. Doubling down on things like countertops and heavier stuff that would be expensive to get in here and just completely saying fuck it with clothes. Okay. Good question.

Because your book is about – Apparel. Yeah. Which is – That's why I'm asking. Which is like the lowest common denominator to make apparel. All you need is a worker and a machine and some other stuff. And a sweatshop. You don't need a sweatshop. I think that we can make anything here.

I really, really do. And that's actually why I focused on apparel. What's happening in manufacturing, of course, we know this, is AI and robotics, right? So in almost every industry, there are fewer and fewer and fewer and fewer workers. So what you actually need is space, electricity, robots, and you need people to service the robots. And then everything that spins out of that, you need people to sell the stuff and market the stuff and carry the stuff to the end buyer and whatever it takes. So as manufacturing becomes so much more sophisticated – remember, I live in Boston. So I'm right there at MIT. They're crazy building robots all the time.

Oh, yeah. They do all kinds of weird stuff like the headless dog. Yeah, that's the Boston whatever group. Boston Robotics. Boston Robotics. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah so like i'm very well aware but you know the the bar for robotics is getting lower and lower and lower and so these trade schools should be teaching robotics because what we will be able to do extremely well as americans with our sophisticated manufacturing infrastructure is tons of customization. We can also, so we can respond also very, we will be able to respond very quickly to market changes. So for example, if you are making a pharmaceutical product and you have kind of a

robot army doing a lot of the manufacturing, you have these people coming in who have robotics training, not necessarily a four-year degree from a college, but actually they got vocational training. They can quickly reset up the shop floor to produce something new or introduce a new reagent. So robots are becoming much safer to work with. It's also the bar for programming them or customizing what they do is becoming easier. And so we can make anything.

We will be able to make anything, anything. And I think it's really important to be able to make anything because what you make versus what you import will completely dictate your politics. Our Discord and Patreon links are in the description. We are starting to do AMAs on Discord. We are also now releasing a new show called The Julian and Alessi Show with my producer Alessi Alamon on Patreon along with some other exclusive content from episodes that we have been putting out on YouTube that are not seen on YouTube. If you're not making your own pharmaceuticals, and by the way, we don't. So 90% of our pharmaceuticals come from India and China.

Huge problem. We know it is now. It's funny, when I was doing book talks for my last book about shipping, I would tell people like 90% of everything that you touch has spent some time on a container ship. Yes. People would be like, what? You know, that can't be right. I guess it depends.

Like if you're someone who lives on the coast like I have my whole life, I guess I take that for granted. Yeah. Because I always see the ships, right? Right. I'm used to it. I'm like, oh, yeah, there they come again. That's supplying the whole fucking northern part of the state. You know, it's so funny because I was talking to somebody from Missouri.

There you go. Or was it Arkansas? They don't have oceans there. It was pretty landlocked. And I was like, when was the last time you saw a body of water? And he was like, well, like a lake. He had no idea how stuff got to him. Right.

And I said, well, chances are it's either coming through you know la like a huge port in la not around here exactly or it's coming through the panama canal coming up maybe through like nolens or savannah or something like that getting trucked to you you know um maybe it's coming up through the mississippi i don't know but like think about it dude just just think a little because it's got to come from somewhere yeah yeah and so that's that's like the whole other thing too because the recent history of this saw huge changes with COVID because and I want to get into the pharmaceutical thing but let's put a pin in that for a minute but to me if if you're looking at COVID and you're like oh you know trying to let

this leak out of their lab and everything that's fine but it did kind of backfire on them no because they had all the supply chains then they shut everything down so companies here diversified their supply chains to other countries did that have any backstream effect though on bringing some things back to America when that happened? Did we see the numbers that support that? Oh, 100%. Oh, it's actually really wild what's happening. So the buzzword of the day is onshoring.

Okay. The opposite of offshoring. Or outsourcing. And companies, the big ones, the little ones, everybody is desperate to protect their supply chain from the next disaster, whatever that'll be. And they found that it's very difficult. But it's worth it because nobody wants to be caught with their pants down like they were during the pandemic. That was super embarrassing for us. I mean, we didn't have things that we need.

And actually, that brings me to my book because I found a company that was making apparel. And they went to PPE. Well, yeah. So they're making apparel. They were making hoodies, beautiful hoodies, extremely well-made, all American-sourced hoodies. And all of their workers were union workers. They were unionized. They were part of United Steel.

And suddenly they saw with the pandemic that not only would they have to shut down, but they might die. Like they were facing bankruptcy. There was no way that they would be able to sell their goods. And so if they had to shut down for like five months, they wouldn't be able to pay their bills and they'd be done. It's a husband and wife team. Like they put everything, their heart and soul into this small company making hoodies. And so they did shut down. This is March.

It's the end of March 2020. They shut down because nobody knew what this thing was that we were looking at. And then they took a minute to think. And the wife, Whitney Waxman, said to Ben, her husband, she said they were watching the news. They were looking at what was happening in New York, you know, with the nurses and the doctors. And it was a hellscape. And the first responders are saying, we're going to get to a point where we have to wear trash bags.

And so Whitney turned to Ben and said, we got to do something. And she said, we make things. We can do this. And they brought back their workers a week later and they said if we asked you to come back and we will re-lay out the factory floor so you get the six feet and we're gonna let put down a lot of plastic and hang you know we didn't know how the pandemic spread but they were they were like if we did everything in our power to protect you as workers, would you come back to make masks for first responders? Now, I want you to remember that these are new Americans for the most part.

They're coming from Congo and Vietnam and Ethiopia. The workers. The workers, yes. These are new Americans in Portland, Maine. Okay. Many of them can't even speak English or their English is not that great. They're coming from Iraq and Iran. I mean, this was a real multinational group of new Americans, their citizens.

And so Ben and Whitney said to them, we understand that you are putting yourselves at risk and you could stay home and you could get checks from the government. Every single hand went up. They said, we will come back. We will do this. And when Ben and Whitney said, this is amazing, but why? One of the guys who came from Iraq, he stood up and he said, I'm an American. I'm going to do this for my fellow Americans. That's amazing.

They did it. They did it. Because we remember back then, I mean, you just pointed to it, but people were making, it was a huge problem for all the business owners I knew. People were making more money sitting on the couch than what they were making before everything shut down. And it made it so difficult for places. So they got so

they got this thing up and running then this is the end of march you said so the end of march they shut down by eight by the by early april they were they were starting to make masks and um then they were running into supply chain issues which is another what happened story well it became very difficult to get elastic for the for the earbands And they actually ended up running a piece in the Washington Post, an op-ed piece that said, the government needs to help people who are trying to manufacture find each other so that we can get this supply chain going. But fortunately, Ben came from a union background. He had worked at the AFL-CIO for a decade and knew everybody, all the leadership at the AFL-CIO.

And through that network, he was able to – it's actually quite an amazing story. Well, let's tell it. That's what we're here for. Okay. All right. So one of the things – And this is all in your book, by the way. It is.

Making it in America. I mean, this is the story. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So there were no, like, patterns for developing a mask, but these are apparel workers. So they went to a friend who was a physicist at, I think, University of Connecticut, and they said, help us design a mask from scratch. What do we need? They had cotton jersey.

And he said, all right, let's do a two-ply, two layers cotton jersey. And in between, I think we should put a filter in there, a paper filter. And they said, oh, you know, what does that look like? Where are we going to get that filter? What is that thing? And so he created a specification for the kind of paper that he thought would be good for blocking um what we thought we knew about covid remember we had no information yeah we knew shit at that point and uh this is a couple yep so you can move this like that oh you can hold that so excellent okay yeah there we go all right You just added a couple inches there. Yeah, I did.

I was like, eh, which is, I guess, how I work. I just, you know, I fit to what I'm like a gas. I fit to whatever container I'm given. But so they have the specification for paper. One thing you need to know about Maine is that they make paper in Maine. There used to be tons of paper mills in reaches out to them and says what do you need for paper what does this filter look like what are the specs and i'm like oh shit we might have an ally here so it's like the avengers of manufacturing 100 man so they so they tell him and he's like all right hang on and literally five hours later he says

i'm going to send you a couple samples let me know what works for you send some samples they send it to their guy the guy says this one now they have a source for their filter and where was that guy so he was a main yeah but he was making everything, like where was his supply chain? Oh, so paper, you know, I haven't gotten into that, but like paper comes from trees, obviously, and so tree pulp. And so it's a very robust industry, or it was in Maine. So, you know, trees, you cut down trees, you have piles and piles of pulp. And so paper is used in all kinds of industrial uh

there are all kinds of industrial uses for paper it's not just like paper for magazines and books and probably your viewers are like what are magazines and books but um anyway so he had a product that would work and um so it's just like you cut it, you sell it with a mask. And their deal was if you buy a mask from them, then they would donate to first responders. They ended up getting, because they're union and because they were local, they ended up getting like pretty huge contracts. I think with New Jersey State, Trippers, in fact, since we're here in New Jersey, New York. And I think Maine State bought tens of thousands. And they got big really fast because people needed these things. They were beautifully made because they had been built from scratch.

Remember when I said about innovation, like you can't innovate unless you know how to make? It's like they created this thing from nothing, but it came from all of their know-how in the apparel industry. They were also making face shields for first responders. So it was this plastic. And I think at one point they were also making gowns. And that's what kept them alive through 2020.

Wow. Yeah. But they were around a while before that making the hoodies, right? Yeah. They had been making the hoodies for like five years before that. So what was it? And you met them in 2020 when they were doing this part with the COVID response. And that's how the story came together.

But what was the original idea here? They, I would imagine they were very upset about all the jobs going overseas and they wanted to bring it here. So they're like, we're going to do the easiest one, the the apparel industry which is the easiest to send overseas and we're gonna prove we could do it here and that was it um oh kind of um so ben i mentioned that he came from the flcio so he's a mainer he was he was born and raised in in maine and um he was sent all around the country during – between 2003 and 2013 or 2002 and 2012 to represent workers. So I mentioned Whirlpool.

Like he was there when the Whirlpool factory shut down, trying to negotiate with Whirlpool and the family, the Crown family, big supporters of Obama, by the way, to keep the factory open, keep the jobs here. So, you know, he was in Ohio. He was in Detroit. He was, like, all over in Pennsylvania seeing how the loss of manufacturing

was just destroying communities. And he came out of that decade kind of a broken man, but a man who had a dream. And the dream was that we could build manufacturing, and if we did that, manufacturing would rebuild community. Like he saw how the two were so tied. So he came back to Portland, Maine, and he sat on his couch and he tried to figure out what he could build. He even thought of like becoming a shipbuilder, believe it or not. Like he was willing to consider anything.

And one day he was like just plowing driveways for a friend because it's Maine. And he was in his plow truck or tow truck or whatever the heck it was with the plow in the front. And he was wearing a fleece vest. And it was from some Democrat's campaign for something. I don't remember. And he goes, where the fuck is this thing made? And he's like me pulls it off looks at the label and it says um me it said made in el salvador and he was like

what the fuck we can't even make a fleece vest here. Right. That was made of... Of a U.S. politician, nonetheless. It was made of fleece, which at the time was actually made in Massachusetts. Polar fleece was invented in Massachusetts by a textile company, an 80-year-old textile company. That's another beautiful story that's in the book.

So it was a local fabric, but the fabric itself had to be cut and sewed in El Salvador. And I think that's when he realized, like, this is bullshit. We can do anything. We can make our own clothes. Like, let's just start there. Also, his mother had a company that— Got shut down, right?

Yeah, from NAFTA. had a company that got shut down right yeah from nafta so she actually was um making these beautiful wool blankets and cloaks because again in maine a lot of it maine is like a mystery to a lot of people but actually it was an industrial epicenter so it at one point it was the shoe making capital of the united states um yeah it was it was a huge source of paper, but it was also a huge textile state. And so there were these like textiles all over, textile companies all over Maine that made these beautiful wool felts and fabrics. Like if you had a pool table that was covered with felt, chances were the felt was made in Maine.

Yeah. And so these were like small mill towns um again you don't need a lot of people to make this stuff because of the industrial revolution like making textiles doesn't require a lot of people just a lot of space and machine how many people live in maine can we look that up a million less than a million i was gonna say i thought it was like 10 people that's amazing they got this whole textile thing didn't know anything about it. I'm very Jersey-centric. No, no, that's okay.

It's good that you're Jersey-centric. It's good you're asking. Yeah, 1.3 million. Okay. That's a lot of people. So here, I love this. I love this. This is like you like history.

You're like me. You love history. Who were the laborers in all these main mills? Is that like a trick question? question no it's not a trick question it's like how much do you know history and probably you don't know much about main history because you're not from me i don't know shit about me okay so like who was working in the factories who's who's doing like this low level factory work the laborers yeah yeah like where did they come from maine italy oh i like that um they were quebecois they were coming from quebec quebec wait that's like a term quebecois yeah that's how you say it

yeah i thought it was like quebecer or something well yeah quebec is a place yeah i know i thought you called them like quebecers or something oh that's cute i like that yeah well quebecois quebecois okay all right i'll go with it okay so they were from there they would come across the border just to work and then go back they'll walk well they walk across the border so celine dion you remember i know celine dion you know her do you know her yeah yeah she's quebecois yeah and you remember her backstory like why we love her? The husband died. Oh, yeah. Okay.

Well, I'm sorry. I shouldn't ask you these questions. She did the Titanic. She did. Yeah. It's great. It's a great song. She came from a dirt poor Quebecois family. Mm.

So I don't want to get too much into it. You should have a Quebecois on your show, but- I'll get Celine in here. Okay. That would be great. Yeah. You might really enjoy talking to her. I'd love to talk to Celine.

So the screwed up thing about the Quebecois is they were treated really, really terribly by the Canadian government because the Canadian government was English. Oh, that's right. They're Frenchies. I forgot about that. So the Quebecois were – come up with a really derogatory name of Canada. Right. And they were fiercely French and they were fiercely Catholic as opposed to the white Protestant English settlers who ran the country. And so they had big families and they were farming families and they were totally starved by the Canadians because the Canadians truly hated them. I say Canadians, but i mean like those

the non-quebeckers thank you yeah and and so yeah they were profoundly poor they were starving and they were uneducated and they would come across the border into maine and massachusetts and i wanted to point out that i don't know if you remember ma had a governor. His name was LePage. Do you remember? Yeah, that's not that long ago. No, it wasn't. A couple years ago. He was like the fat guy?

He was a fat guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't want to fat shame anybody, but he was a heavyset gentleman who was a proto-Trump in a lot of ways. Interesting story. He was born in maine okay and his first language he did not speak english his first language until he started going to public school was french and he was born in maine born in maine so he's like living in the warehouses with the quebeckers well he was quebecois oh he was well i mean his family was oh i got it

now gotcha gotcha yeah so the quebecois um in many in many ways refused to kind of assimilate in maine and they kept themselves and they kept their language and they kept their culture another famous quebecois who has come up quebecois is yvonne i'm gonna show the art i forget the guy who founded patagonia he's from maine yes yvonne chenard yeah right chenard chenard it's something chenard why does he have a french name why do all these people from maine have french names is because their families came from quebec that's so interesting yeah unknown part of history for me there you go yeah i mean some of the flyers like our philadelphia flyers still come from quebec and they talk different they talk different they totally talk different it's not like it's not like a it's like ew whatever the french accent is yeah yeah well there you go yeah because they're

actually french i mean they're french canadian right and they speak it too it's like it's a real thing yeah i'm butchering French right now. I'm sorry. So the Quebecers, Quebecois, were the people who were like, what years are we talking they first started doing this? Like the 1870s?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It does go back that far. So literal beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Well, the Industrial Revolution started here. Yes, but when I i say that i mean like immediately post vanderbilt and and uh steel guy carnegie yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah absolutely but i mean you know they were they were coming down pretty early on and um sending money back and then you know people just kept coming i mean the situation i've read a little

bit about this i'm not by any means an expert but the situation in quebec was uh it like it would make your it would make the hair on the back of your neck just go that bad oh yeah it was bad it was bad they were really being deliberately starved i was i don't i don't want to make a false comparison but my understanding is that it was something like how the irish were treated by by the english yeah yeah that's like another forgotten part of history with america i mean man we had we had some we had some bad track records with immigrant groups in america oh really kind of you know we messed that up a time or 10 but okay so they so they build that up and then what years – NAFTA comes in early 90s. But in the 60s, 70s, 80s, were the textile mills in Maine still enormous or were they starting to fall off post-World War II a little bit? Post-World War II, okay.

Well, I mean a lot of things happen. If you're talking about textiles, so the main textile industry was really built around wool. And by the way, the wool, some of it was homegrown, but a lot of it actually was coming from Australia really, really early on, which surprised me. I didn't know that. So after World War II, you know, times change. And all these new fibers come into being. So we start to get rayon. We get nylon. We get like all these petroleum product things as well.

And I think what happened for a lot of the mills is that they didn't change quickly enough to appeal to kind of these new products. And so a lot of the woolens that they're making, which are, by the way, absolutely beautiful stuff. I mean, have you ever seen like a Hudson Bay blanket? L.L. Bean used to used to sell them yeah can we look that up maybe i don't know okay hudson hudson bay i mean that's what's coming to mind but like a hudson bay blanket um or melton's um yeah so yeah sure i'm actually wearing i've seen that okay so these are these are like woven wool products. You can pass it down to your great, great, great grandchildren as long as you don't have a moth infestation.

Right. So these beautiful fabrics were made in Maine. So they're woven wools. And I think what happened was a lot of the mills just weren't set up to make these um synthetic goods so can you explain that to people synthetic goods as as opposed to just making the real thing i mean probably everything that you're wearing has a little bit of nylon in it or some kind of you know synthetic fibers that either come from the petroleum industry or other things. I mean, this is actually a serious problem with fast fashion is that a lot of the clothing that's made through

fast fashion has a strong like petroleum component to it, which means that it's an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Okay, so wait, hold on. If you don't mind me digressing for just one second, because I am like misdigression here. like it that's m-i-s-s misdigression um okay this is a fun story this is this i could not believe so what do you do when you when you go through your closet and you're like okay i want to get rid of a bunch of stuff and you put all that stuff in a trash bag and you take it to okay you take it to goodwill you're a good person you take it to goodwill well i'll try to be to Goodwill. You're a good person. You take it to Goodwill. Yeah, I try to be a good person. Okay, but if Goodwill is closed, what's your second option? Where do people take stuff?

Where do you take stuff? The homeless shelter. Oh, you're a doubly extra good person. People do what Julian does. Okay, so a lot of people put them in these bins that are like in parking lots. Okay, you're urban, so yeah. So there are like these bins all over America in parking lots, and it says, you know, put your used clothing here.

Hmm. You know what I'm talking about? You know what this is? Why don't you pull it up? Yeah, we have those in California. I know what you're talking about. They have a bunch where they're not associated with Goodwill or anywhere, but they're just like a green.

They look like a garbage can. Yeah. And you just throw it in there. A dumpster. I've been there a few times. Okay. Yeah. That's where you got that jacket.

Oh, my God. So they look like, I would say they look like a huge post box. Or an oven even. They have a big handle. You pull down the handle. You toss your shit in there and then it's gone and you don't think about it anymore. Right. on the handle you like toss your shit in there and then it's gone and you don't think about it anymore so that stuff for the most part goes to uganda why uganda i can't exactly tell you why uganda but i can tell why you got it but i can tell you that this started in the 70s, that these clothing bins would send the clothes to Uganda.

And this created an incredible opportunity for Ugandans because they took the clothes and they made them their own. So a lot of the clothes, Americans were bigger typically than Ugandans, and they had different aesthetic than the West Africans. And so this whole industry popped up for repurposing goods coming, these used clothing pieces coming from America. So they're getting like, is this what we're talking about where it's like, you know, the Eagles beat the Patriots, but they get the Patriots win t-shirts and stuff? Yes, yes.

Okay, so all this stuff has jumped on the Ugandans. History is a whole lot different over there. Yeah. Poor guys. That's true, yeah, yeah. They're like, damn, these guys are winning everything. They're winning nothing. Oh my God, that's so true.

So what's interesting is that when that first started happening, the Ugandans referred to the clothes that came from the U.S. through these bins. They referred to them as dead man's clothes because that was the only way that they could explain why somebody would get rid of their clothes is because they died. Because that's the only way they did it. Yeah. You don't give away your clothes they don't have like hand-me-downs and shit over there well i mean now they do but i you know at the time in the 70s when they first when this phenomenon was okay a new thing they were like okay whatever the word was fair enough dead man's clothes yeah okay so a whole industry pops up right you got you got

sewers you got dyers you got marketers you got sellers i have a i have a whole bunch of things amazing things to talk to you about this but i don't know if we'll get to them but anyway um and um some women actually emerge very wealthy um because they're really good at like repurposing the stuff for Ugandan fashion sensibilities and selling this stuff. And then the women end up buying Mercedes. And then that ends up spawning like this whole, you know about this?

You're like nodding your head. I'm nodding your head. Yeah. You're over here. Like, you know, the whole goddamn thing. Well,

we just know because California, we talk like it's known just like how the commerce and like with clothes go like i grew up like we always go to goodwill and like in my schools they always teach you like you want to donate here and give this to this so like i grew up around this this to me is like it's not like new some of it is but there's facets of it where it's like yeah i know this that's very cool yeah that's very cool um so anyway fast forward to when fast fashion starts to becoming it starts to become a thing and now we got all these crap ass clothes that we're sending over to uganda and the ugandans are opening up the packages and they're like

what the fuck are we gonna to do with this trash? Literal trash. Who is this fruit of the loom? They used to be good. No, 100%. Get this. It's literal trash. Worshipping billions of tons of it to them

every year. They don't know what to do with this garbage. It ends up clogging up waterways in uganda so now it is a literal environmental disaster you can see pictures of it it's can we pull that horrifying it's caught so they're throwing it out and then it's clogging up well remember they don't have waste disposals like we do like they can't just ship it off to some other country that doesn't want our trash that's why they need the mafia running the waste disposal there you go that right here you probably and the mafia running the waste disposal. There you go. We do that right here.

The mafia could probably solve everything very quickly. They could probably solve that, yeah. So, yes, mounds and mounds and mounds and mounds of literal garbage clothing, and toxic, by the way, because it's... Oh, wow. Oh, yeah, there you go. You got that. Yeah, that's the horror.

I saw a similar type thing in Cairo when I was there. And that's just not what you're talking about. But I saw a very similar. That was sad. That's horror. Yeah. Like when you talk about dystopian. Okay, that's dystopian.

I agree. Look at the cows. Oh, yeah. It was so – so this stuff has so much petroleum and toxic dyes in it that the market, the main market where they sold this stuff in Uganda ended up going up in flames I think in 2018. Wow. That's DEFCON 5 stuff right there yeah yeah that's scary yeah so when people say to me we can't make things anymore cheap clothes how do you compete it's like dude we can't not do this yeah i think that look i think you're making great arguments for that what i want to know though is you know because again when you were coming into

this with ben and whitney they're seven eight years into their business and now they're changing to something else to produce under an emergency but obviously they had success building up to that how hard was that to be able to do, though? Because, again, they're in apparel, which is like the lowest common denominator with this stuff. Like how did they build a business in the first place that said we're making hoodies here in America and goddammit, it's successful? Exactly. Exactly. So they were smart.

They were selling mostly to unions. Yeah. smart they were selling mostly to unions yeah so that's what i mean about unions um unions are so powerful economically um in in many ways the idea that unions support unions support unions like it's it's the antidote to what you were talking about, about the power of the individual billionaire. This is the antidote. So unions are people. They're just people like you and me

who are working together to support each other. And in this case, the unions all across the country want to support American workers. And how do you do that? You buy American-made goods. That's one of the ways that you do it. Unions support each other. And the unions felt very strongly that everything that they purchased for their workers should be made by American workers.

Wow, that's cool. Yeah. So that – so they – That's their biggest buy-in. He had the AFL-CIO connection because he was there for so long, so they were able to get that off the ground. I mean, through his work with the AFL-CIO, he knew a lot. So remember, unions are people all across the country, and, you know, every industry has locals. So it wasn't like he could just go to Mr. Big Man Union and say, buy all my stuff, and then, you know, his job was done. Like, Ben spends a huge part of his year traveling from

small local convention to small local convention, speaking to individual unions, doing all kinds of things to sell his goods. And so he has – his job really is to let people know that if they want to buy swag or uniforms or whatever it is, for their folks that there is a company out there, a union company, making clothes in America. Does he look at this like – because again, he did have – through his work, he had that connect to be able to do that. Does Ben today look at this as realistic to expect of, say, the company that's starting up in apparel to get off the ground if they don't have a connection like that? Right. So I think the answer – answer well first of all we

do i mean you're from la you know like there's huge apparel manufacturing in la i mean if stuff is if you get apparel made in america chances are it was made in la i mean you remember american apparel i mean that was a huge company until they shot themselves on the foot. But now they're back. They're back? Yeah, they're back. Yeah, they're – Are they called Bangladesh Apparel now? No, no, no. They're still making – All right, that's good.

They're in L.A. All right, cool. There's also a company called Bell and – oh, my gosh. So sorry. I cannot remember. Yeah, pause for a sec. Bell and... What are they called?

Are you talking like an apparel company? Yeah, they make t-shirts. T-shirt company, L.A., Bell. Like B-E-L-L, like it sounds. I believe so, yeah. And Luna. What, Bell? No.

That's massive. Broken Bell? Nope. Sorry. Maybe it's not Bella. It's not coming up on Google either? Big t-shirt company. I just put massive clothing line, Bella.

Yeah, maybe it's not Bella. Why am I blanking on this? It'll come to you. I know, but I really want to remember. Was it in your book? yeah probably cited towards the back see this is why I love my books

I have not read my index I have to admit well your index is low Bella and Canvas? oh yeah that's it there it is oh yeah there we go

yeah yeah you know alright so there's this massive company called Belling Canvas, and they're based in L.A., and they do tons of manufacturing in L.A., and they are doing the T-shirts. They're doing T-shirts, and I think they make also sweatshirts and all kinds of stuff. So manufacturing happens in the United States. Apparel manufacturing happens in the United States.

People are paid for making apparel in the U.S. There's no question about it. I think, you know, what are the hurdles that you have to overcome to be successful? I think, first of all, you need to come up with some pretty decent branding. You know, if somebody's just looking for basic tea you can go to belling canvas i mean they compete right now some of their stuff a lot of their stuff is actually manufactured or it's cut here but it's it's sewn in um i think el salvador or somewhere in central america but um but they do do sewing here but the point is you can do it here. There's a matter of scale and there's a matter of marketing.

And that's where I go back to innovation. Like you're wearing a T-shirt. It's beautiful. I love it. I don't know where it's made. But it was – Shout out to my boy Brian Kern. Yeah, it's cool.

Where was it made? And what did you pay for that? Okay, maybe he gave it to you. What does that say, Leslie? It's going to say China. Let's see. This was like a Honda. No, not China. Nobody makes it.

Made in Honduras. There you go. There you go. Well, that's close to America. It's like in the Americas. That's NAFTA. We're hanging in there. You got to give them some credit.

How much would that retail for? I mean, I got it for free. Brian's the homie. Shout out, Brian. All right. Hey, Brian. Probably $30. $60? much would that retail for i mean i got it for free brian's the homie shout out brian all right hey brian probably 30 bucks 30 40 somewhere in there with the printing on it yeah 40 yeah i hope i didn't lowball brian but yeah are you telling so so right so are you telling me that we can't make a long sleeve t-shirt for 40 dollars i don't I don't know. You tell me. No, it's absolutely possible. But what's the difference? But after cost of labor and shipping from wherever the fuck,

somewhere else, what kind of spread are we still looking at when we're operating at the minimum cost here in America? Right. So that's a golden question. So first of all, about 30% of the cost of any good that you buy is transportation transportation okay that makes sense okay 30 so remember when i said it's kind of like the oil the petroleum industry where there are all these hidden costs that we don't yes no that's one of the hidden costs there's so much tariffs um and and shipping costs and warehousing costs and stuff that's in that imported good that you're paying for if you buy it that would be eliminated or severely cut down on if it had been made

domestically right so maybe you're looking at five percent versus 30 because they still have to like truck it somewhere and stuff like that yeah exactly you're not bringing it internationally through customs right okay exactly now the other thing that's happening and this is this was the big reason that we got into free trade in the first place was for more profit right so if people were now i know i'm asking a lot but if executives weren't getting 300 times the average workers rate, right? If we somehow were able to regulate that, then we would be more like in the 1960s when we were making stuff in America and executives were making 20 times the average workers, not 300 times. Yeah, I agree. In some cases, 1,000.

I agree. The average is way too much i agree that's another one i i struggle with how are we going to fix that when there's so many other countries around the world who will create some sort of impetus for people to be able to make their money offshore with that right like ceos they're trying to make money right so now they're going to recover that somewhere else, be something as simple as a tax haven, whatever it might be, you know, declare residency somewhere else. How do we fix that? Well, what I'm saying is that if you wanted to start making a t-shirt here in America, you could easily do that. And you're kind of selling me on that. Okay, great.

Let's do it. And you could sell that t-shirt for $40 or $30, or in the case of American Giant, you can sell it for $7 or $5. It is entirely possible to come up with a very inexpensive product here in America. You can do that. How much money do you want to make? If you want to make a lot of money, you become supreme. And supreme isn't, I don't think they're meeting the United States, but slap some kind of crazy branding thing on supreme isn't, I don't think they're made in the United States, but like slap some kind of crazy branding thing on it and get, I don't know, some Taylor Swift to wear it.

Right. Started as skaters and now look at them, you know? You know, and just go bonkers. Most of cosmetics, by the way, are made in America. Look at all these incredible young brands that we have. Glossier is an American company. Glow Recipe, these are all things probably you don't know because you don't shop at sephora but like these things are made in america yeah yeah okay so the idea is like there are so many industries that

are made in america it's not impossible we can do it um how much profit do you want to make if you want to make a ton of profit then you got to be really clever about branding. But the fact is ripping off the worker does not necessarily create a cheap product. When you rip off the worker, it means there's more money in profit to goose an executive's pay i understand or you know where that goes into you know um transportation costs or whatever else um but ripping off the workers kind of the last thing that you do to to squeeze the last little piece of profit out of the good meaning they're not sending shit to cambodia to sell the 40 buck for 30 bucks now they're selling it they're not sending shit to Cambodia to sell the $40 for $30 now. They're sending it to Cambodia to sell it for $40 but make more money on that. A hundred percent.

Okay. And when you go... I think that's accurate. And when you go to... Oh, my God. Where do people shop now? I don't even know. But like J. Crew now is back.

Or Banana Republic. I don't even know what that is. Kith? Is that a thing? Yeah. Okay. I'll trust you. We should get Ronnie.

I was thinking about this because we're here now. We should get Ronnie Feig in here and talk to him about this stuff. I'd love to know his thoughts on that because I'd love to talk with him. He's the director over at Kith. But like high-end brands like that, Kith is like – some people are going to yell at me for not explaining this right. But the way I look at it is it's kind of like a sleeker, little more elegant Supreme. Like I like Supreme a lot. Kith is like a – yeah, that's how I'd say it. Okay.

So where I was heading with that and maybe you can back me up here is that that shit is expensive. It's very, very expensive, yes. Okay. And it's not made here i'd have to double check but i'm fairly confident it's not okay so we are paying a lot of money for stuff that is not made here yeah now you know maybe i shouldn't have brought up kith though for that it It's still relevant. I still want to talk to him about that to see what we could do there. But with Kith and Supreme and some of the more clubbish, I guess you could say, type brands, there's also the whole added cost of your paying to be like in, right?

There's a limited supply on stuff it's more like you're a part of the click whereas I think what we need to focus more on here this particular conversation is yes are we talk about the gap talk about companies like that though you go to the mall you buy stuff it's not like oh there's a drop of like 30 of them coming out line up around the corner you know what I mean like there's a difference between an air jordan and you know like some really nice nikes they're a different vibe okay right so that's probably fair to say but your point still remains because all these other companies are making that vig right there basically right okay so wait okay so good so i'm glad we're talking about this because

let's talk about underwear so let's talk about frugal loom which used to make all the underwear right it was frugal loom and it was haynes right and then there was the underwear war right and my homies over at sheath they're in there now they're making underwear oh okay awesome so um it was haynes versus um frugal loom and this stuff was made in America. And then Walmart came in. Oh, fuck Walmart. Yeah. You want to talk about Walmart?

Oh, we're going to talk about Walmart for sure. So Walmart, as you know, started putting up stores everywhere and putting all the little stores out of business. And so Walmart ended up becoming a purchasing behemoth. So the way they were keeping their prices down was obviously, first of all, by eliminating competition, by eliminating all the little purveyors all around America. But also they kept prices down by becoming a massive purchaser of manufactured goods. Control of the market. It's like cornering the market. Right. So instead of, at some point, instead of the manufacturer saying,

we're producing tighty-whities at $4 a pop, Walmart was coming in and saying, you have to produce this thing and sell it to us for $3.50. Figure it out. Yes, and if you don't, we'll go somewhere else. Yeah. Yeah, that's a huge problem. That was a reality.

That was a reality that also forced all these companies to really think very hard about NAFTA. What is the, I don't know if we can look this up,essi what percentage of gdp do the fortune 100 companies in america account for i don't know if they'll have a chart for this but the point is it's going to be a pretty high uncomfortable number yeah so when you think about that – The purchasing power. In 2022, the group generated $16.1 trillion in revenue representing about two-thirds of the U.S. gross domestic product. That was higher than I thought for the record. So the point is they run the world. They run this country because they get to set the price. That's the oligopoly right there.

And they squeeze the manufacturers. And this is happening in Bangladesh and all around the world is that these small manufacturers are facing exactly the same thing that Americans faced in the 1980s, which is make it cheaper. Figure out how to make it cheaper. And if you don't, we'll leave. And that's what capital does. It leaves. So as soon as Vietnam, you know, when workers make too much money, the capital is going to go leave and going to go somewhere else where it's just cheaper. And it's just a race to the bottom. But the other thing

I was going to mention was when Haynes and Prudelune were making underwear, there were mostly women in these small towns who were supporting their kids and sending them to college on salaries, on underwear-making salaries. They were actually making a very good living, and they were good at what they did. They were highly trained, extremely skilled underwear manufacturers. You could do that in those days because you were protected that the minimum wage was in some ways more tied to reality and so the cost of a pair of underwear like could those women then purchase the thing that they made yes they could because they were making a decent living the underwear um by making the underwear and the underwear was priced accordingly and everything just kind of worked until it didn't until this incredible movement toward monopolization and you know walmart putting the squeeze on manufacturers well here's another problem too

look at our minimum wage in this country it needs to be higher for people to actually be able to buy stuff now right this is something and i and i listen i hear all these politicians fighting over it because it's art you gotta fill money in the budget for people. But if we're going to argue about bringing stuff back, and then on top of that, we're going to raise the minimum wage, which I do support doing, is that going to be a problem, then it just makes the it makes the gap even bigger to have to make up for it in pricing. Well, again, that goes back to the question of and I'm sorry, I'm challenging capitalism here, but like, how much profit do you need to make?

And if you are, you know, move fast, break things, private equity kind of mentality, it'll never be enough, right? You're always looking for the fat in the manufacturing and the fat in manufacturing will always come down to workers yeah this is one of those what i like to call you're stuck between a shit and a fart with stuff because the buck has to stop somewhere okay and there's really two places it can stop and I don't think either is a good answer. It stops with the government or it stops with the corporations. Right. And the corporations even buy the people in the government. So that's already a given no matter what the system is. And governments over time, you see when they take too much control, it never ends well. I would argue when corporations take too much control, it never ends well.

So again, how do we get that happy medium where there's going to be some stuff you don't like, you're going to have corporations who have the ability to fund some of the politicians they want, that's always going to be reality. But how do we get a situation where they can coexist and you can live in some sort of more utopian scenario where say as an example the ceo pay average over the average worker is in 300 instead it's 80 or something like that how do you get there without a either either a government taking too much control or b corporations it won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added.

Neutral. Refreshingly simple. Taking too much control. Yeah, well, good question. I actually think there's an end run around all of this. And that's what I've been talking about, which is starting to think more about our communities and asking more of our communities, why don't we produce the things that we need? I mean, some things maybe you'll never be able to produce because of the limitations of your community. But I do think that we might want to start thinking more locally. And so one of the movements that I'm really, really into is urban manufacturing.

So actually, and I touched on this a little bit before, but like make things in New York. Yeah, we were talking about Ice Stone, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Make things in New York. And maybe if New York thinks that this is a good idea, New York State or the city figures out ways to support manufacturers in a kind of more holistic way. Germany, by the way, has really great support for workers. We could definitely talk about that.

But I think the idea is like, this is our community. I'm a consumer, I'm a maker, I'm a teacher, all those things work together. So I kind of sound a little bit like a utopian, like, oh, American consumers should just give a shit. And then they should push their legislators and mayors or whatever to like care and support manufacturing any way we can. But I've seen amazing things in my lifetime. And some of that stuff has come from people, right? Not from governments, not from corporations, but from people. People do amazing things when they want to.

I've seen incredible things in my lifetime i was just thinking about when i was coming over here i've seen america put a man on the moon i've seen i've seen this guy he'll say allegedly okay allegedly a very elaborate hoax not true at all the camera not true we definitely put a man on the moon go ahead all right i don't know we can talk about that you saw a man on the moon i Go ahead. All right. I don't know. We can talk about that. You saw a man on the moon. I mean, in my lifetime, you know, America put a man on the moon, right? We saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Soviet Union. That came from people.

Yes. We saw a way to work with HIV and AIDS, which at one point was a completely deadly disease. It was a death sentence if you got it. We saw a vaccination for chickenpox. I got chickenpox when I was a kid. Yes, I'm one of those people who actually did. I had it too. Oh, you did?

Yeah, I did. What was wrong with the mother? Oh, no, maybe the vaccine came out. No, it was definitely like right after something. There was a long period still. I even remember in the 2000s, like if a kid got it, like they'd have the other kids stay over. Yeah, i did have the chicken pox i'm pretty i'm pretty sure okay i gotta double check i'm like 99 sure i have so my daughter was born in 2001

and she definitely got the vaccine and i was like oh man you're never gonna get chicken pox well that was right of passage is now you know that you don't get it. And I could go on and on. I mean, we have CRISPR. Like, we're fucking editing. Oh, yeah, CRISPR is nuts, man. All right. We have AI. We're like five years away from the singularity, right?

I believe. If we don't already have it. Yeah, okay, fair. We have robots that can do anything. So I think we can do this. I think Americans can start manufacturing locally all kinds of things. I think, like I said, it would take a shift in industrial policy to allow people like Ben and Whitney to just fucking do their jobs. So one of the things that holds them back, it's not finding people to buy their sweatshirts.

That's not hard. But what does make life very difficult for them, for example, is health insurance. And this is pretty close to number one in the American Manufacturers Association, which is a lobbying organization, number one concern for them is that small manufacturers, small businesses in general, like trying to cover health care for employees is just a huge crap and headache. Yeah. It's really hard. Yeah. That's another one. It's like – so I feel like – and I hope I'm wrong about this.

I feel like in my lifetime it's always going to be a big argument, right? Like how do we make the best system with that? Because you need people to have health care. But then when you are Ben and Whitney versus Walmart, I mean economy on scale is a thing, right? I mean Walmart doesn't even pay employees health care. So that's why so many Walmart workers were getting assistance from the government. How does that work? Oh, so –

Real quick. Can I just go to the bathroom? Yeah, please do. Yeah, I want you to explain that. All right, we're back. So you were about to talk about how Walmart is not paying a lot of their health care for employees. Yeah, I mean unfortunately this has been reported for forever but i mean the truth is that what they do is they hire shift workers who are actually working full

time but because and you know we see the same thing with like uber and other companies but um so you hire them as shift workers and so um and i think the idea is like you keep their hours under 34 hours or something like that. And then you don't have to do a lot of things. You are no longer a steward of your employers. You merely hand them a check and the agreement is that they show up for work. And so because of that, I don't know what percentage, but it's an astonishing number of Walmart workers are actually on government assistance because they're not making enough money and are not fully supported enough to be able to, well, feed their families or pay for health care or – yeah, actually, did you – I'm sure you know this, but medical costs are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. I have heard that before. Yeah. Yeah.

It's not surprising. No, it's not. I mean, that stuff gets out of control. Right, because – yeah, because employers are supposed to provide health care, and it's extremely expensive. And so what they offer is this beautiful array of choices. insurance executive who then retired and started telling the American people that when you hear the word choice, your brain should explode because choice merely means that we are offering you really inferior products for very little money so that you can say that you are insured, but the fact is that we provide almost nothing. Yeah.

Which is why the American health – they call it Obamacare. But that's why it was in part created to ensure that like if you do have health insurance, if somebody is selling you health insurance in America, at least it's going to cover some things. Right. And then there's always – but to your point, there's always holes in things. Like when I changed, I was on the corporate health care plan when I worked on Wall Street, right? things right and then there's always but to your point there's always holes and things like when i changed i was on the corporate health care plan when i worked on wall street right so then i went off on my own with no money and i had to change to my own health care plan i was having some bad health problems at the time too so you know it mattered what i did and i think i had to go through in the first six months because then i'd have like doctor's appointments and procedures

and stuff and I'd learn after the fact oh that's not covered I had to go through like three different plans just to get to one that's like mediocre and I pay a lot for it it's a lot of money every month so much and I've just forgotten about it you know because I've been used to it now for a few years but you know I look at that and i'm like i'm lucky i'm a single guy and i'll have a family to support and things like that i can't even imagine if i had to you know work a job with limited upside and i had you know two kids and a wife and we had to find a way to get this coverage correct god forbid i had to cover it myself or god forbid you know you look at like ben and whitney they started their own business, right? And I think they have kids too, right?

So they're covering, I would imagine as they're building that business, trying to get off zero every day, they're having to cover the health care of all that. That's a common American story. It makes it difficult. And here's a dystopian reality. reality when you call to buy health insurance i'm sure i'm sure you did this they're like so do you plan on having cancer in the next six months right because you're supposed to be choosing what's best for you and you're like no i'm definitely not getting cancer yeah oh good good okay so are you gonna get hit by the cross down bus in the next six months. Oh, good, good. Okay, so are you going to get hit by the cross-down bus in the next six months?

Because that also, you'll have to factor that in. It's like, no, Ashley, I have no plans. And then they're like, are you going to get into a boating accident and break your leg? And you're like, oh, that might happen. Oh, then this is the insurance you need. What the hell kind of life are we living?

It makes no sense. Choice? That's not choice. Nobody's offering you a choice. Basically, they're forcing you to gamble, which is not one of the seven deadly sins. No, maybe not. But, I mean, I hate gambling. You're not a gambler?

Oh, hell no, no, no. I like to say I'm a creative gambler. So I take chances like writing a book. Writing a book, right. Just gambling and everything you're right about that i mean that was that you know what i choose to write about and how i choose to write about is a huge freaking absolutely yeah you got to make sure people get it but we're doing this podcast but you will not see me playing the slots in uh atlantic city no i wouldn't have taken

you for that okay i would i wouldn't guess you would have but we were actually just talking off camera right before we went back on at the break about the problem with convenience and alessi was chiming in on this about you know made in the usa what he looks at and what he doesn't and it's usually just like oh if i he was saying if i need to go buy this thing right now if i need to buy gym shorts or something in the stores right there i go get it right and you know there are only 24 hours in the day you gotta sleep six to eight of them whatever it is and you know people gotta go about their life i use this example for a lot of things i understand this so what what are the best ways to do this conveniently to be able to if i gotta buy some right away i can know that i'm going somewhere where it's made in america for a given product we were talking about plugging in made in america to

amazon and how that's not reliable so like what what can we do yeah exactly right so you know starting in 1992 when nafta was passed suddenly we were flooded with foreign-made goods. And now it's just like everywhere. And you can't avoid it. It's very, very difficult. So good. So the question is, where do I go? Well, unfortunately, I do spend a lot of time researching. I am a journalist.

And so when I want to buy stuff, like, to be honest, I need underwear. I know Hanky Panky is made in america um commando a lot of it is made in america these are this is women's underwear so like i just have a go go-to companies that i know are made in america but there is a lot of bait and switch um what do you mean bait and switch so like a lot of companies start out saying we're made in USA and that's part of their brand. And then they offshore just a little bit here and a little bit there and maybe they're bought by a private equity firm. And before you know it, like you're loyal to this brand and they're not making anything anywhere near your local. Right.

I think Carhartt was actually a really good example of that. We were talking about Carhartt where the idea is like, oh, it's an American brand. It's made in USA. Well, it's definitely an American brand. Most of it is not made in the USA anymore. So your question is a good one. I wish I had a good answer for you. I really do.

There are these aggregators on the web that are like, we'll show you all the made in USA stuff. They're really hard to search because they're not set up as Google or Amazon, right? These are probably – it's probably a guy or a woman in a room saying, I'm frustrated. And they're not always updating their stuff. I've actually gone to these sites and actually followed the links and gone through and found out that just what I was telling you, that companies were making the stuff in the USA and it turned out that they weren't anymore. So that had changed.

The links or the information wasn't up to date. It's really, really hard. It shouldn't be. I don't know why it's so hard. Maybe this is an opportunity for one of your listeners to actually make something that actually works. I mean, there should be an app for that, right? Like you just – I need underwear.

Tell me what – because you're not going to spend more for these things. You don't have to. You just have to know where this shit is and how to buy it. Now, I feel like you could make – there could be a way to make a central repository that kind of amalgamates things and put it puts it together like a search engine that could do that that would be cool but you're also working behind the eight ball with i mean we've covered this a little bit but to put the example back like with the economies of scale because think about two of the companies we've been talking about walmart and amazon walmart is a physical place i mean they're online too let's be clear about that but we think of of them traditionally as like the place you walk in. They got a section for everything, right? And there's a big one right there in your town in a lot of places in America. And then Amazon brings that shit just to be able to work there which is wrong on every level to be clear but you're competing with the ultimate convenience when you are ben and whitney when you

are any of these smaller businesses which now i mean we've seen the numbers since nafta but even before that as technology has grown we have watched mom and pop businesses go down like this. And I wonder if that's a trend that we're going to be able to stop and that's what you're arguing. Maybe we can because we can manufacture here and do things. And I hope you're right about that. I do wonder about how much people will be willing to trade off even the top edge of their convenience to be able to help with this though it's a natural question you make a really good point i mean look you know amazon is obviously watching us they're listening to us right now through our phones or whatever it is

i mean and and they're very very sensitive to trends and um so you know if americans start constantly asking is this made in usa can you give me a little time you know it's easy for them to to put a little check box on there in their search engine you know when you search for something and you can do the filter and you know i mean i'm not sure if they have that yet but i mean it it should be one of the little things that you check made in america made in america can we check that see if they have that yet but i mean it it should be one of the little things that you check made in america made in america can we check that see if they have that and then and if they do have it i can tell you that i have checked that box and then i get very disappointed because it's not actually it it ends up being like american companies that um obviously are not manufacturing go to go to Go to Amazon.com. He doesn't know how to go to Amazon.

We'll have to spell it out. Amazon reports. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Now go to see if we can do a search T-shirt. Yeah, okay. Search T-shirt. Yeah.

All right. We'll do this live. And we have this on the third camera so people can see this right now. Now go to sort by at the top right. Top right. Top right. Yep. Is there any way? No, no. I'm talking about on the third camera so people could see this right now now go to sort by at the top right top right yep is there any way i'm talking about on the left like all the options oh yeah yeah over here climate pledge friendly oh okay see so that's a new thing they didn't have to put that on there but obviously consumers give a shit go down american apparel well that's just a brand yeah it's a brand yeah go down go down classic fit birthday occasion size description national nope that's a shipping choice so they don't even have it right yeah they do well to do that i mean i don't see how they lose on it too because

amazon's just a giant repository of stuff yeah like how could they lose how could they lose they don't care as long as they're doing the delivering but the point is that they're not going to add a check box on that list on the side unless people ask for people ask for it and or it benefits them okay now that's a good solution because that can that can work with the existing hierarchical system yeah and build in something positive to it. Right. That makes sense. I mean, that would be a really simple fix, wouldn't it? Like just check that box and then you get Anchor. Like, for example, if you're looking for – I'm just touting all the really cool companies that I know about.

But like if you want glass containers for food storage, I don't know if you do food storage, but Anchor Hocking is an American company and they make stuff right here. There's no reason that you need to buy stuff made in China. It costs just about the same. And yeah, it supports your fellow Americans. And the money stays in here. Oh, let me just talk about one more thing.

It's called the multiplier effect. Have you heard about this yet? I have definitely heard that term, but please explain. I mean, I'm sure it can apply to like many different industries and different whatever constructs. But in economics, the multiplier effect that I'm talking about is a dollar that is spent in a community like for a local business stays in the community. It actually does a little round of the community three or four times before it actually in the community. It actually does a little round of the community three or four times before it actually leaves the community. These are studies that have shown this. And while it's bouncing around the community, it's actually growing because it's supporting

the local community. So the people are benefiting from it and it grows and then it eventually exits. So it's a really powerful reminder of what happens when you support your community by buying stuff. Keeping the resource within. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great example right there. I love that. I love that.

Yeah. I mean the emphasis – you talked about like Amazon being on top of trends and stuff i do wonder about some of those some of the more eclectic things we're seeing as gen z is starting to come up where they are a little less concerned with every single frame and what it looks like as opposed to millennials right so could that mean that like when i look at millennials, which I'm on the very back end of millennials, but when I look at that, we're prone to more big international brand type things. I can't believe it. It's so weird that like people get excited about Nike. It's like what is Nike?

What does that mean? I know. I like Nike though. You know what I mean? What do you like about it? I'm curious. But here's the thing. Okay, sorry.

Well, I do like the swoosh. It's a good look. But like I'm not the guy who's going to make or break on that stuff. I don't give a shit. Like if it's Nike and I like it, I'm buying it. If it's not Nike, I'm not going to not buy it. Right? You know what I mean?

Yeah. A lot of millennials aren't like that though. They're like, what does everyone else have? What's on Instagram? What are people wearing?'t like that though. They're like, what does everyone else have? What's on Instagram? What are people wearing? I want that too. There's a way to shift this back though to local community if you are able, if social media begins to focus more, and I've seen this a little bit, on what the people around you are doing. I'll give you an example. We had a video a couple years ago. It was a clip I made. It was probably one of the prouder moments in my podcast because it was unplanned what ended

up happening. But it was a video. My friend Jim DiIorio was on the podcast the first time he was on here back in the day. And he told a story. He's a West Pointer. So he told a story about this kid, CJ, at West Point who tragically as a senior died during a drill there. And he had seen CJ because he was a star wrestler towards what was the end of his career I guess at that point. And he – CJ's parents are from North Jersey around where Jim is. So he ended up meeting them and whatever. He told this very emotional story about when he met CJ's dad who had been a secret service agent the whole bit and you know he's like man I'll get this guy deal with losing his son like that like I can't even imagine this and you

know I'll let the clip do the talking but Jim was emotionally gripped by it and so when I put out this clip I didn't tell Jim I was going to go make this clip from that episode or whatever. I just decided one night to make it and I was sitting there and I felt on this one, I was really taking my time because I'm like, there's a level of respect I have for what happened here and who's involved. I want to make sure we do this right. So we put it out and it did millions of views, which is great. But when I put the clip on TikTok, I had captions on it and I used the TikTok captions, which at the time – this doesn't matter as much now, but that's even better because TikTok is reading the data you're typing in. So I would type in like when he said each word obviously for a caption. And so at some point, he said, from East Orange, New Jersey.

And so what do you think happened everyone who is around who is from east orange or it was west orange new jersey everyone who's from west orange and the surrounding areas in new jersey logging into tiktok and tiktok knows their data on that was getting the video so on tiktok if that thing did like five million views or whatever it was i'm telling you 80 of them came from people who live within literally like an hour radius of that area or who are originally from there. And so it created this communal effect and I didn't know this. But at the time, he had been – his parents put together like a memorial golf tournament to raise money for the cause, whatever the cause is in his memory. It's like a scholarship fund and everything. And so the second one was about a month away when I put this clip out.

And what I didn't know is that his mom was despondent because they couldn't get people to return calls about this golf tournament. It wasn't getting filled out, and she's like, oh, my God, people already forgot about my son. This clip happens. The community sees it, right? Golf tournament was sold out the next day. Wow. And I see – I get chills talking about that because it was – I'm posting a TikTok. I was sitting in my grandparents' house in Ocean City, New Jersey, not near West Orange, right?

Post this thing, just making the clip right, and the way we were able to use technology formed the community online. So I say all that to say, I wonder if there are ways we can do this with fashion statements or with statements about the brands we work with which represent where we're from. Like I love, for instance, that I'm from New Jersey. All the listeners know that because I don't shut the fuck up about it, right? What if, you know, if I could feel, if I were one of those people, and I'm not a great example, but if I were one of many people who looks at, well, what is everyone else wearing and doing? What if we could all congregate around, oh, this is New Jersey clothing or something like that? That'd be very cool. Well, what you're talking about is the shift to localizing.

Yes. You know, I mean, so I'm Gen X, and I think there was this interest in authenticity. You know, it was a reaction to globalization, and, you know, people were really looking for authentic experiences and authentic brands, whatever that whatever authenticity means. And now what you're talking about, and I never really thought about this before, was the idea that technology could help you accomplish that level of authenticity or localness that maybe a lot of us, we feel we're missing. We, you know, we, we, we want community. You know, we want to feel part of something. I mean, when you're talking about brands, you're, and you, and when you're talking about like the millennials wanting to wear whatever the thing is that's the next thing. I mean, is that not about showing that you belong? Yes.

All those things are signifiers. And so the idea, you're right, that tech could like amplify that. And not only, by the way, is the branding of this thing somehow tied locally, but it's also manufactured locally. Like that's just another level of authenticity, you know, community pride support. Yeah, that could be amped up by tech. I love it.

I love it. Let's make it happen. I feel like we figured it out. Like we got a roadmap, right? There's been some good ideas floating around in here today. I like it. I think you're right that people really care i think you're right that that there is desire to um find common ground and support each other i think that i think um that we have found that um you know if you take that away from somebody you don't have a lot left yeah i agree i mean it's it's and that's kind of the danger of the

modern world because we're so stuck right here right we're so stuck on worrying about how everything looks here that we're not we're never present right and and part of being in the community is you are present you know you the way this country was built was communities of people who just knew each other. They didn't have technology. They farmed their own farms. They produced their own clothes. They took care of each other,

and they sent snail mail to the faraway town next door to find out what's going on over there and keep up with the affairs. There's something very eclectic but beautiful about that. I mean, you know, it was never utopian. But getting back to the question of our men, our guys, our Americans, and how we're going to make sure that our guys are okay. Yeah. Like, I think there's a part of that here, right?

Like, understanding that we are connected, but then connecting materially through the things that we wear, you know, the things that we eat, identifying each other, you know, through domestic manufacturing, giving men an opportunity to get into these different kinds of industries that can be so rewarding. I just feel like there's something there. I feel like what we have seen in kind of the demise of community and the pain that a lot of men are feeling has so much to do with the loss of manufacturing, which really anchored us to place. Yes. Yeah. And that's why when you see it's it's extra depressing like you talked about the beginning of your book and you've talked about on this podcast with other examples but like when you were taking the train between philly and new

york and you saw all those abandoned buildings which you know if you go look at the footage of like rocky in 1976 they weren't abandoned then. That's not that long ago. And now there are these like – it's almost – you think of it like the aesthetic like, yo, it would be sick to take an Instagram in front of that old building right there. That would be so cool. But it's empty. There's nothing in there and it's wasted space actually.

And you could fill it with something. But is there legislatively – we've talked about NAFTA and WTO. Are there any current, you know, legislative ideas that are being kicked around to repeal things like that or make something new that's better? Yeah. So so so when Trump was speaking about this, he addressed it through tariffs. We have tariffs. We've always had tariffs, as you pointed out. So there is like a whole office at the federal level that's dedicated to issuing tariffs to slow down the influx of foreign-made goods. You can be pro or anti-tariff. It's really complicated because if you issue a tariff for one thing, somebody else gets screwed.

You know, it's a really tough thing to do. So that's why I think a lot of people, including the former labor secretary, Marty Walsh, I have a quote from him in the book because I interviewed him. He actually was like, oh, it has to come from consumers. Like consumers need to care. But I actually think there are a number of things that we could do. One is to make this path easier. We were talking about vocational training.

I think vocational training, it's not going to, the movement isn't going to start with vocational training, but vocational training is a big piece of this. There's a serious skills gap in America that a lot of companies would like to actually manufacture here, but they can't because we don't have workers who know how to do these kinds of things. And as I said, manufacturing is getting more and more technologically sophisticated. So what we need to be producing are people who can actually, like, program robots, work with robots, electrical engineering, you know, whatever it takes to get that sophisticated equipment going and be able to keep it working. So there's the vocational training component to it, which I think it should be clear that like at some point you make a decision when you're going to school, you're going to, you're in eighth grade or whatever. And you're like, I want to, I want to get into manufacturing. And then that's the branch that you go into. And that's the track that you follow. A lot of foreign workers who come in have actually had that kind of training because that is a reality in their countries. Whereas we do not have that reality

here. The assumption is, I don't know, we're all going to be little geniuses and go to Amherst College. I don't know. So I think that's one thing, like creating a path, a viable path to manufacturing starting from when you're young and saying, this is okay. Like there's a whole community ready, waiting for you. I'm talking about unions, but I'm also talking about manufacturers, companies, corporations that are like, we want to make things here. We're waiting for you with open arms. There's a track here, a viable track. This can happen. We talked about health care, which is a real, real serious issue.

You know, universal health care is just an obvious solution to a lot of the problems that small American businesses face. If they didn't have to deal with that piece of the puzzle, which is unnecessarily complex, buying health care insurance for workers, like, just take that off their plate. So they don't have a clear domestic supply chain in a lot of industries. And that's a matter of rebuilding. What do you mean by that? I mean just like the Waxmans. They wanted to source zippers in America. There's, as far as I know, one company that makes zippers in America.

It's called UCAN, U-C-A-N, UCAN Zipper Manufacturing in L.A., California. They make beautiful zippers. If there were five zipper companies, now we have an industry. So whatever people make, like there's going to be kind of a waiting period or a growth period where we are redeveloping these skills domestically, redeveloping industries so that we can actually source in America. And I mentioned the whole circular economy thing. I mean, I think that gives us an opportunity, right, to be able to start thinking about our waste and how that could feed back into these supply supplier supply chain questions um and then like i said you know i think you have i think i think to be super resilient you need to put manufacturing where the people are. I think it was kind of a mistake in general to want to build factories in like really rural places

because then people are at the mercy of that company. Ah, right. But, you know, there's so many, there's such high concentrations of people in cities that to me it makes sense that you know you put in the manufacturing there but we've also fucked that up though too i mean look at detroit right there and and i'm not disagreeing with you when you go out rural we talked about those examples earlier it makes it impossible because then they pick up and leave and it's like well there's nothing left here

right because that was a one industry town they made cars true right so you're saying if it were diverse diverse yeah and think smaller i mean it's the same with energy that i as when i was an architect this was a big thing that i was talking about like think smaller think more locally when it comes to energy Why are you getting energy shipped from Canada down to New York? Like, if you could generate your own energy locally, you know, then you start to be more independent in all kinds of ways. Yeah. And then we get into some of the environmental arguments with that, which, you know, some of that's a concern, right? And some of it may be overblown. Some of it may be overblown some of it

may be like okay well we should do things for a set amount of time until we come up with a better way but it does get a little it does feel like you you're never going to make everyone happy no we we know that no but you know thinking about history has there ever been an example of like an empire you know power civilization that continued to exist in power after they had outsourced everything oh great question I'm so glad you asked that um I'll tell you a devastating example let's hear it. The inverse. Let's hear it, yeah.

So the fourth largest manufacturing power in the world in the 1500s was India. Hmm. India was producing amazing stuff. They were in a great position because they were there, you know, between China. They got stuff from China, you know, like silks and stuff like that. And they got great stuff from, you know, to the west. Iraq ran, all that. So they were kind of geographically really well positioned.

And plus they were kind of geographically really well positioned and plus they were big the big peninsula but um then the british come in and the thing that the british destroyed ultimately was all manufacturing in india because once the british sucked everything out of India, then they wanted India to – they wanted to turn Indians, people in India, into consumers of British and imported goods. Sound familiar? Yes. Yeah. And so they destroyed India's ability to manufacture and flooded India with cheap imports. And so that's how, in just a couple hundred years,

you take the fourth largest manufacturing economy in the world and you break its kneecaps. That answers my question. Well, so that's the inverse. So your question is, like, is there any country that... That ever lasted. But it answers my question about, it's a big problem. Well, I think when you lose manufacturing, you lose your independence.

Yes, exactly. You can no longer negotiate for things that benefit you because you're always trying to weigh how those decisions will affect things you desperately depend on. Yes. And I guess, you know, I am not, I'm not an American chauvinist. I'm not like rah, rah, you know, wave the flag. But I think that there's something really special about being American that you feel when you go abroad you know you miss America I'm freedom of speech is a real thing that you don't get elsewhere right um there's there's so many things that are culturally American that I just highly value and you don't realize how it's

different in other places until you go there like I really do love so many things about my country, where my family has been for 130 years. We might have to pack up and leave at some point, but that's just the reality. But, you know, I just also think that America could be a model for countries finding new ways to be independent of each other in some very important ways and supporting their citizens and their quest to protect themselves from the effects of climate change and that sort of thing like i just i just feel like by controlling your manufacturing it just you bring back the power to to to your to your citizens like you're giving them the ability to control their own destiny yeah i feel like we also have such we have the greatest access in world history to study history now than we even 30 years ago i mean you have the internet at the tip of your finger so you can see you can go and look at every you want to answer a question you heard some of the specific questions we were asking just today on the podcast for lessy to look up here it's like you can go answer some of your own questions on this stuff

and figure out okay if this didn't work for them, in what parallel universe can we make sure that we don't do that, right? Because the world's different, it changes, but some things stay the same as far as like trends. And I think about that a lot because I'm like, damn, you know, if we're not especially getting caught with our pants down when COVID started, I mean, you mentioned it was 90% of pharmaceuticals are produced elsewhere. You know, companies like Ben and Whitney's had to go and make the PPE, which isn't even pharmaceuticals, by the way, but like they had to go make the emergency equipment. Right, because we couldn't get it. And, you know, what was the other thing was, what was the, I'm already forgetting this. This is terrible.

But in 2021, when COVID was loosening up a little bit, there was like a huge cargo crisis right out here and in California as well, where you just saw hundreds of boats lined up for months. What was that right there? That was another problem with our supply chain. Yeah, that was a new phenomenon. That was because people were working from home

and suddenly they realized they needed all kinds of equipment to work from home and suddenly they realized they needed all kinds of equipment to work from home. So they were nesting like hardcore, you know, power nesting. And so, yeah, a lot of stuff was coming from China. I wanted to tell you one more story and I'll leave you with this because it's really interesting and it addresses something that I think I've been anticipating that people are going to talk about this. So I just like to put it out there. What happens when corporations introduce imported products to developing countries? It changes to – it gives them utility for things they didn't previously have. Okay. Okay. So let's talk about that for a second. So I was at this kind of surreal event maybe 10 years ago,

and it was about, believe it or not, domestic manufacturing. And the manufacturer in this case was Gillette, and they had put together this video that was supposed to make everybody feel really, really good. Okay, here was the video. They had gone to some city in India. I can't remember which one, please excuse me. Say New Delhi. I don't know. And they observed how men were shaving. And in New Delhi, wherever it was, I'm sorry, please excuse me. It was a large city in India. The men went to their local shaver to get shaved.

So there were all of these tiny, tiny businesses, just a one-man operation where they'd have a strop and the straight razor. Yeah, yeah. And they would use that straight razor forever and they used the strop forever. And guys, when they needed a shave, would come in and get a shave. Like the old school Italian barbershop. 100%. That's exactly what we're talking about. So Gillette – remember, Gillette is using this film as a promo.

So they show like, oh, this is what men have to do to get a shave around here, right? Yeah. You exit your apartment or whatever, and you go down the street, and there's a barber everywhere because dudes need to get a shave. And so they were providing a service. So Gillette was like, let's introduce the disposable razor. You know where this is going. Let's give these guys, what's the word? What's the special word? Freedom.

Yeah, yeah, freedom. Freedom. Now they can shave and in the privacy of their own home so the other thing that they did was what what attracts people in india what what kind of packaging should we put this new plastic fucking razor in and it turns out that they liked mylar packaging my god okay so they flood the place with individually mylar bag wrapped shiny plastic disposable razors you can imagine what happens so first of all immediately you put all these guys out of business right all these guys who've been shaving men forever these guys out of business, right? All these guys who have been shaming men forever, they're out of business.

They're gone. There's no need for them anymore. Now you also have an ecological disaster because you have the rapper. You also have an economic disaster because now these men are buying these razors and the money is going out of the country. So whereas before, remember I mentioned the multiplier effect where you're paying Mr. Dude to shave your face and then Mr. Dude would go and buy a tea at a – I don't know. You can see how that money would – Okay. Now it's gone out.

So now you have piles and piles of trash, disposable razors. You've put a whole community out of work and um now men have to spend a chunk of their salaries to buy these plastic devices which now can go up in price because as soon as you own a monopoly over this thing and you've put the alternative out of business you have to buy the disposable razor right that's it and it creates a brand new cycle that's not good no bueno yeah yeah the whole way across well listen this you have done some mind-blowing research on history and again everyone can get your book down in the description below making it in america it's a really cool story i'm going to finish it after this conversation but it's

it's it's a really cool story what you're doing and as you said at the outset of this because you know where my head goes with this stuff but you're like you want to inspire hope with this because my head has gone right to the fall of american manufacturing but this is actually you know you are giving this this success story of two people who were able to do it with their business so let's see if we can make that a thing and let's see if some of those other ideas we had in here could be like implemented by somebody smart out there i don't know how to do it but let's come together and figure it out i would be entirely grateful for that all right well thank you so much for coming rachel hey thank you it's been a pleasure all right everybody else you know what it is give

it a thought get back to me peace thank you for watching this episode guys if you haven't already please smash that subscribe button and hit that like button on the video it is is a huge, huge help to getting our videos into the algorithm on YouTube. So thank you to everyone who does that. And also, if you don't already follow me on Instagram, you can get me at Julian Dory Podcast for daily exclusive clips that we put out from the show or on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. The links are in the description below. See you guys for the next one.