Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 505 | Food Shortages & Slow Supply Chains: What’s Going On? | Guest: Ross Kennedy

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

Today we're talking to Ross Kennedy, an expert in worldwide shipping and supply lines. There are lots of cargo ships just off the coast of America, but they're not able to dock and unload their goods, and in turn this is resulting in shortages all over the nation. Kennedy explains how this happened and how delicate our system really is. COVID really threw a wrench into the works of our supply lines, and a year later we're really starting to see the effects. Kennedy also points out how America's dependance on China makes situations like this worse and offers some solutions to the globalist trade system that is failing us. Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (02:28) Interview: Problems With Our Supply Chains (07:33) Interview: Are These Disruptions Intentional? (19:23) Interview: We're Just Now Seeing How COVID Affected Supply Lines (34:59) Interview: How Foreign & Domestic Policy Affect Our Supplies (40:42) Interview: Are Supply Problems The New Normal? How Do We Fix It? (48:25) Outro: Closing Thoughts on The Great Reset & Self-Reliance --- Today's Sponsors: Dwell has built a beautiful listening & reading experience for the Scriptures, featuring a new read-along experience letting you read big, bold text accompanied by beautiful background art while you're listening to it being read at the same time. To get started with Dwell, go to DwellApp.io/RELATABLE to get 10% off a yearly subscription, or 33% off Dwell for life! StartMail keeps your email private. Period. Every email can be encrypted, even if the recipient doesn't use encryption. Start securing your email privacy today & get 50% off your first year at StartMail.com/ALLIE. Good Ranchers have traveled the US, meeting with actual farmers that raise the livestock to ensure the product they're sending to your table is the very best! Their product is 100% American! Go to GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE & use promo code 'ALLIE" at checkout to save $20 off & free express shipping, or 20% off each box of mouth-watering meats when you subscribe! --- Past Episodes Mentioned: Ep 470: BlackRock, Bill Gates & the Great Reset | Guest: Justin Haskins https://apple.co/3AyfyQZ Ep 344: The Great Reset: Everything You Need to Know | Guest: Justin Haskins https://apple.co/3DuCHWi --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed.

You can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday. All right, we've got a little bit of a different show for you today. Today we are talking about logistics. We're talking about supply chains. You've probably seen some stories of these huge shipping containers off the, you know, off

the coast of California, not being able to unload all of the, you know, the, you know, items that are in those containers. You've probably even gone to the grocery store and you've seen there's a shortage of items or maybe you are trying to buy supplies for some kind of project at home and you aren't able to get the supplies or there's like a six-week lag time. All of these things are interconnected and there are some political theories about why all of this is happening. It's just contributing to this anxiety that a lot of people have about the geopolitical sphere right now and the state of our world and specifically the state of our country. Thankfully, I really think this episode is going to walk you back from the ledge rather than all of that contributing to this kind of like

apocalyptic feeling that we all have, which maybe it's a little justified, but I think that you'll learn today that it's not completely justified. And rather than thinking that it's, you know, intentionally this, you know, master plan to, you know, to drive us into complete scarcity, we're going to talk to someone who is very logical about this. He is an expert in logistics and supply chains, and he is going to tell us exactly why this is happening. He's going to reveal some things that I just didn't realize that have been going on behind the scenes for a really long time. And then at the end, he's going to talk about some solutions, not just solutions on the political level, but also solutions that you and I that we can do that, we can take things into our own hands if we are

worried about, you know, the supply chains and the things and the shortages and the things that we see. that are going on. So it's a really interesting conversation. Again, a different conversation than we're used to on relatable. It's not about theology. It's not about culture. It's not even really about politics. It's about this very nitty-gritty process that I personally know very little about. And we are going to, we're going to get smarter because of this person. He's going to bring in expertise that we don't typically have on this podcast. So I'm super excited for you to hear from our new friend Ross Kennedy. Without further ado, here he is. Ross, thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell everyone who you are and what you do?

Yeah, my name is Ross Kennedy, a 15-year veteran of the logistics and supply chain industry. Pretty simple way of just saying that other people pay me to move things from point A to point B. My particular sort of expertise seems to be in this sort of intersection of politics, geopolitics, economics, and logistics and supply chain. and it's been a wild ride the last few months seeing how how how what I do has suddenly you know which has always been kind of this man behind the curtain right for an average consumer is now kind of step forward in a way that you know I don't think most people realize quite how interconnected the world was and yeah how how the big world of ships and trains and trucks gets things you know from from overseas to our store shelves yeah and I found you on Twitter

for that reason because I've been trying to look into, okay, why are we having these shipping containers that are unable to unload the supplies? And there are a lot of conspiracies about that. But I don't know a lot about the supply chain and logistics. And so I found you on Twitter and you seem to actually know something about it. Most people in my realm, we like to pretend like we know something about everything. But when it comes to this, a lot of political, cultural commentators, which is what I am, we don't actually know. So I wanted to bring an expert on. When people are talking about supply chain issues, when people are looking at all of the ships at all of the ports that are unable to unload the supplies that they have, what are we really looking at here?

What are we talking about? Yeah, I think for a lot of people, really the first thing that people really ever triggered in on since the pandemic started, in terms of really understanding the scope and the vulnerability of this very sort of vast, globalized network we've built was the ever-given incident back in March. And it sort of captured the imagination of the world that this giant steel ship that's 400 meters long, you know, four football fields long essentially or even a little bit longer, had somehow managed to get itself turned sideways and wedged into the bank of the Suez Canal and effectively blocking about 15% of all the trade in the world at the time. Right.

That route is so important. And it really hit home for people. The first time that image came out of a fairly large excavator, we all have some sense of scope of how large an excavator is. You see them on the road at construction sites or whatever. And those are pretty big machines. And so you see this very large machine sitting on the bank of a river and it is absolutely dwarfed by this massive.

vessel. And when you start to, and then that caused people, I think, to start to look a little bit about a 40 foot container they see going down the road. They realize 40 feet's actually pretty big. You know, these containers are 8.5 feet tall, 9 and a half feet tall. They're sitting on top of, you know, three and a half foot tall chassis off the road. And they begin to realize that there's a lot of stuff that moves in these things. And as they began to consider the scope of even one single ship with that many containers, with that much weight and that much mass, and then scale that across thousands of these ships around the world. I think it really started to hit home for people that there's something bigger at play here. And so when you're, you know, when we see the video of traffic reporters or CNN reporters or whoever, you know, flying over the harbors there at Los Angeles and Long Beach and you see 30, 40, 50 ships at anchor, people maybe for the first time are able to connect that to each of these huge ships is the size of the same one that wedged itself into the canal and into, the Suez Canal. And the scope is almost overwhelming when you really think about what these ships

weigh, how fast they move. It's not an agile system that we have built that can sustain and support a network of ships like this that are carrying all of the trade of the world. About 90% of global trade moves on water. And so when you consider that 20% of everything in the world is made in China, and that 90% of that, you know, just using rough statistics, is moving on water. That is a phenomenal scale and scope for the average person to go, hey, wow, you know, wow, all of this gets here that way. And we don't typically have a visual of it, but I think seeing all of these ships off of a port unable to unload, it gives us a visual of what you're talking about, that most of us at this

point, you know, at this point in the advancement of technology, we're so detached from where we actually get our stuff that we're really not thinking about it. We're just relying on the fact that we're going to be able to click on Amazon. It's going to show up to our front door. But we're not even thinking about where it's traveling from or how it's getting here or who is unloading it. And so people are understandably really concerned about this, especially in what already seems like a tense political moment. And it seems like there may be some conspiracies flying around that this is Joe Biden purposely, you know, not allowing the supplies to get to America because he's trying to, you know, he's trying to crush us or something like that. Is that the case?

No, not at all. In fact, these problems predate. Really, the direct cause goes back to when China shut down in January pre-Looner New Year of 2020. None of us in the industry really knew what was happening. All we knew is this, this thing, you know, this this coronavirus, which we were seeing the videos coming out of China. And there was a lot of back and forth over is this serious. Is this an op? Is this what's really going on here? And so we get to the end of January. President Trump declares this national emergency. And very quickly, the uncertainty of political bias and political agendas came in. First, we were supposed to mask. Then we weren't. supposed to mask and we had all these things going on.

But from a supply chain side, all of this relies on certainty at the moment a company who may be a Walmart, a target, anybody says, we're going to import goods. There's a certain amount of stability and reliability that they depend on from a geopolitical side, from an economic side. So while we were all sitting here at sort of this moment of confusion, not knowing what's going to happen, is this World War Z or is this just sort of a. you know, sort of a 10% a teapot or something in the middle,

all of these companies were still having to assume that because supply chains can't stop and start on a dime, they're not a race car, right? And so they were having to assume that this is probably going to be business as usual at some level from a shopping standpoint. So they were still putting orders in at the factory.

And we're used to a three-week or a four-week delay around Lunar New Year. That's baked into the cake of everybody's procurement and logistic cycles. That's a Chinese holiday? Is that what you're saying? Yes. Okay.

And so you anticipate kind of a slow turnaround then because things are just slower there. They're celebrating like we would celebrate Christmas. Absolutely. Absolutely. And one thing a lot of people don't realize is that a lot of manufacturing in China is not done by people who live year round in Shanghai or in Shenzhen or in Hong Kong or Qingdao or wherever. Those people come from interior, you know, interior provinces, whatever it may be. And China geographically is a huge country just like ours. So those people will have to take it takes them days to leave the cities to get back home to their families to celebrate. They spend the actual week of the Lunar New Year holiday with their family and then it takes some days to get back.

So there's this whole it's about a one week, technically a one week holiday. Actually, it's about a three week productivity loss from a supply chain side for American importers that are manufacturing there. This time in 2020, what we had was a very long, a very long cycle of six to eight weeks while China was locked down before, during, and after Lunar New Year. Because Lunar New Year is, what, beginning of February? The last year, it was the very beginning of February, I believe. Okay.

Okay. So you're talking about it just extended even longer than usual. And maybe that's part of why you guys didn't know, okay, is this just an extension of our normal, you know, the normal slowness that we are experiencing right now, or is this going to be something a lot more drastic, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And so during that time, it wasn't just the uncertainty of us in the industry wondering, well, how long is this really a durable issue? Purchase orders were still flowing in from American companies, American importers into these factories. So before when the factories would turn back on and they'd have about three weeks of purchase orders to make, you know, home goods or apparel or electronics or auto parts or chemicals or whatever it may be that a company is making over there and importing here, now we're at six, seven, seven.

eight weeks of backlog, production backlog, six, seven, eight weeks of raw materials not moving into China. And so the calculation that I made at that point was that China would do what's called a V-shaped recovery, which is where as quickly as they stopped, they were going to ramp back up as hard as they possibly can from a production cycle because China is very dependent on the dollars and the currency it generates from its exports. So the longer they were offline, the longer China was locked down, and the factories weren't producing and exporting goods to the rest of the world, the worst of it was going to be financially for China. So my calculation, which ended up being correct, is that they were going to go from a standing stop to just ramping up as fast as they possibly can, throw bodies at the problem.

If people get sick, it doesn't matter. But as soon as they could end their lockdowns over there, they would. And so they did. Concurrent to that, though, what happens is these ocean carriers, remember these big huge ships, These things cost anywhere from 50,000 to a couple hundred thousand dollars a day to operate. That's the fuel. That's paying the crew. That's provisioning.

That's all the things that goes into the operation of one of these giant ships. And so they're not going to just keep these ships tied up, close by, waiting for the port of Shanghai to resume business as usual. They moved those ships out. They took them somewhere else where maybe the lanes were still productive or they were doing these things. But a huge amount of capacity exited the market right away from a transportation. transportation standpoint, because if they left all that capacity in and the factories didn't come back online, rates would bottom out, costs would skyrocket because these ships aren't operating. And all of a sudden, the ocean carriers are going broke. So they overcorrected the other way. They took a huge amount of capacity out of the market. And it took weeks to start, even start getting capacity back for the carriers to trust that this demand for export was real again. And so you had this as as production increased and capacity deep. decreased, production kept accelerating as high as possible. Capacity slowly went with it.

So you had this just divergence of output and things to ship and a much slower recovery of capacity to ship it with and rates begin to increase. And so by the time the ocean carriers, which was around June or July, got their full capacity back into the trans, what we call the trans Pacific trade, which is Asia and the U.S. By the time they got all of that capacity back in, rates had already doubled. Demand had already backlogged to such an incredible extent that even if we stopped making anything in China right then, it would have been October before we cleared the backlog of goods that were being produced at the factory. October 2020 at this point is what we're looking at. And sorry, just to clarify a couple things because I know, you know, this is not something that we typically talk about. So you're talking about towards the beginning of 2020 when we didn't really know what we were. was going on. We didn't know when the when the factories were going to start up again, when we'd be

actually able to when I guess companies would actually be able to empty the supplies on these shipping containers outside of Shanghai. They said, okay, we don't want to just sit there. You said that they have to move to other places where the vessels are still open. But then you said that you have to take, we took a lot of stuff or the companies took a lot of stuff out of market. So what do you, what do you mean by that? So like were they still able to unload these ships or like did they turn around and go home? What exactly kind of happened there? So when an ocean carrier either what lays a vessel up, they put them in labor earth or they

move that vessel to another what we call a trade or a trade lane. So for example, they may take a vessel that's normally running from the port of the Antian in South China to the point. of Los Angeles and say, okay, well, this vessel still needs to be productive. We still need to keep the crew occupied because, again, at that time, we didn't know what we didn't know about COVID. We didn't know we were going to have to lock the whole world down. Right. And that that was a political calculation that would be made. So these ships suddenly, nothing was being made in China. So maybe they then moved them to Vietnam, where Vietnam was still producing goods at the time.

Yeah. And so that ship started moving goods from Vietnam to Rotterdam in Europe. because they wanted to keep these big expensive vessels turning profitably to the extent that they could while minimizing the amount of ships that they had to lay up, crews that they had to send home. It takes a week to two weeks for a crew to get back to the port, reassemble and get back into the rotation on the ships. So we had a lot of these things happening where decisions were made to stop, but it takes weeks to get a vessel back online, moving back in that trade, loading again at Shanghai and taking goods to Los Angeles. Gotcha. So those decisions that were made to stop things very quickly took a lot longer to get the capacity back in. And we're talking about all kinds of goods, all kinds of materials from all kinds of different companies. Absolutely. It was everything from, I mean, the semiconductor shortage is the one that's gotten a lot of attention now. But it was everything from tires to electronics, apparel, furniture is a huge thing that gets made in China, particularly knock down furniture like you'd buy at Walmart.

Walmart or Big Lots or Target. Mm-hmm. IKEA. So we had all of this stuff just stopped being made. And then suddenly it was being made again, but there was no place to send it because there was no way to carry it across the biggest ocean in the world from there to here. Yeah. So we had the ability at the time to receive it.

They had the ability to ship it, but there were no ships sitting in the middle to carry things from made of being. Hey, this is Steve Dase. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues face our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers

wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed. You can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. I don't remember in 2020 feeling the inconveniences or the weight of a supply shortage. This is the first time just in the past couple of months that I've seen people even talking about the inability to get the stuff off the ships outside of the United States.

Why is it that it seemed like things were going pretty seamlessly in 2020 when you're really describing what sounds like kind of a big mess at the beginning of COVID? It was already becoming a mess. What happened, though, and really where it began to kind of sort of dawn on some people that this could be a very durable problem past 2020, you know, into 2021, was the we started to see the effects in about July. of lockdowns plus the first round of stimulus that went out. I think maybe even by then we were into our second round of stimulus. But what happened there was restaurants shut down. People weren't going to athletic events. They weren't getting to go play golf with their buddies.

They weren't getting to go out drinking bars or whatever it may be that they did as a recreational hobby or as a way of spending dollars and time outside the home. Mostly they were sitting at home, not going anywhere, not spending money on vacations. And they were looking at the TV or at the couch that they didn't like. got stimulus dollars. Most people were still working at the time and saying, you know what, I've got all this disposable income suddenly available to me, this bit of a windfall, I'm going to replace this furniture. I'm going to buy the new TV. I'm going to get the laptop. So we transferred spending an economic activity from things that don't require ships and containers, all the way

we dumped all of that money suddenly into things that requires ships and containers. The system has already largely been hand to mouth in some ways. Trucking. has been constrained for years. Rail capacity to move containers between the ports and the interior cities like Chicago or St. Louis has been constrained for years. Chassies, the bare frames that the containers ride on on the back of semis. Those have been constrained for years, but it was a hidden issue that we more or less kind of kept in the industry. The world at large didn't really know about it. Where this got bad was right around August and September, there was a, there was a, a sudden and very rapid divergence rate-wise where the ocean carriers, MSC, Merrsch, you know,

CM, CGM, half-Hagloid, realized, A, this issue is not going away. B, they have all the ability in the world to start to increase rates dramatically. And nobody could say anything about it. Nobody was going to stop them from doing it. And now is the chance for the ocean carriers who normally operate at a pretty significant loss, but are floated along because they're all too big to fail institutions. all of a sudden at that point, the rates began to pop. What do you mean by that?

I've heard you say that a few times. Can you explain what do you mean by rates begin to rise? I think you said at one point the rates doubled. What do you mean by that? Yeah, so the ocean carriers get paid in some way by either the shipper or by the receiver in the United States. So sometimes the shipper overseas in China will pay the ocean carriers to move the goods on the ship and move them somewhere in the United States. or in most cases here in the U.S. are companies that import will pay the bill for the ocean freight. And so that's paying Maersk or MSC or any of the ones that actually own and operate these

massive ships and containers to move these goods and services. So what two or three years ago was maybe $800 to $1,500 per 40-foot steel container to whatever you can get in that container, we'll move it for $1,500 per container. from Shanghai to Los Angeles, those rates now are anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000. Gotcha. So we've seen a 1,000, I guess it would be 1,000 percent, you know, increase in two and a half years to move a single container of goods from China to the U.S. And there's this whole downstream ecosystem of costs and things that are involved

to move a container, but broadly speaking, to get a container from Shanghai to China, from Shanghai, China to say Chicago, Illinois, what was a, to a warehouse, right, to a Walmart distribution center or Target Distribution Center, whatever it may be, maybe that container costs by the time everything was added up except for customs duties. It was about $4,000 to $4,500. That same container now is going to cost $23,000 to $25,000. So it's an enormous working capital issue for companies to suddenly have one container be $4,000. five or six times more expensive than it was. The cost of goods has gone up in China

to produce these things because demand is high and raw materials or labor are getting short. Right. So it's had this huge impact on the economy. And by the time this sort of slow motion train wreck began at the ports, we began to see as far back as August last year where a ship would not immediately be able to pull into birth. It would have to wait maybe a day or two on water.

And then it would get a birth. And as the year, we kind of turned into the new year. We began to get into the new lunar new year cycle at the beginning of 2021. Things slowed down for just a minute. We had the same effect happen where this huge pop of demand for containers to move from China to the U.S. began. And it was just, it was really off to the races at that point. June, I mean, even as far back as May in June, we would have 15 or 20 vessels sitting on water out at the West Coast ports.

Nobody was talking about it. Nobody was porting on it. It wasn't. 2020 or 2021? 2020. Okay. You know, so we've had this issue ongoing now for months where ships are having to sit for days before they can get a birth.

I think the reason. And so does any of that have to do with particular policies because maybe this is just people trying to make it a left right issue, but, you know, people are blaming Gavin Newsome for what's happening in California. Then I saw some statement by, you know, Governor DeCe. in Florida saying, well, our ports are open. So, you know, so I don't, does it really have to do with anything that someone like Gavin Newsom or even Joe Biden is doing? Or is it only everything that you have just described? Do politics play a role in it at all? Politics do play a role, but politics

play a shaping role in how a system like this works because of the role that politics, monetary policy, in particular with lockdowns and contact. tracing and things like that, the political decision that maybe was made with best intentions, maybe it wasn't. That political decision, though, to engage lockdowns to keep people at home, to do the contact tracing and very aggressively limit the ability of people to leave their homes and to interact economically with one another or with their jobs and their employers, that labor deficit was a was and remains a very durable and concerning constraint on the system.

So that's what stopped a lot of the labor flow from going in. You saw warehouses that maybe they were used to operating with 100 employees, now operating with 50. But everything continues to flow in, right? So the backups at the warehouse level are getting worse and worse and worse as well, which means they can't take containers out of the port as fast, and it just sort of starts this cascade all the way back to China. The other political decision is, was the combination of lockdowns and stimulus pulled a lot of people out of the labor force that still haven't come back in.

Right. It's only been in the last few weeks, last month or two, that most states have seen the sunset of the CARES Act provisions, the boost in unemployment and stimulus and things like that for people that got laid off or were not able to work during the pandemic. And a lot of those people are not coming back to work either. They readjusted their lives over the last year around one less income or around in a last. of cases if someone's a labor who makes 15 bucks an hour and works full time, that's equivalent to a $30,000 of your salary. Yeah. Child care, you know, if they have to go to job, they have to pay someone to take care of their child to go to a $30,000 year job, it doesn't pencil out for them. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't pencil out for them to actually go back to work. Right.

You know, so it's it's one of these things where to the extent politics is absolutely made a huge impact. It has. For Governor DeSantis, whom buying the fan in general I'm very much a fan of. But to dunk on some of the bad political decisions that Gavin Newsom's made as governor in California, but a massive thing that one man, no whole book of policies could have fixed because of the way freight flows to and from the United States,

Florida's just not as big of an import market. The port of Miami is, I think maybe like the seventh or eighth ranked largest port in the U.S. by volume. Savannah's bigger, Houston's bigger, the port of New York is bigger, Charleston's bigger, Seattle Tacoma's bigger, the two main ports at Los Angeles and Long Beach. So it's also a question of how much demand. Florida is not a gateway port. Florida is a fantastic state, but it's an appendage that hangs off the bottom of the United

States that from a freight market standpoint is not very optimal to utilize as a gateway to the rest of the United States, which is why New York, Savannah, Los Angeles, Long Beach and Seattle, Tacoma are the big four as far as what we call the gateway port, which is the biggest ships, the most freight coming in, not just to the distribution centers that have set up in those areas, but movement on rail and by truck into the interior of the rest of the United States where a lot of demand is. Okay. The U.S.

Yeah, we don't just live with the ports, but yeah, so California's problem is much bigger than anything a good or a bad governor could do. Yeah. Right. So everything that people are seeing right now and you don't have to be a logistics expert to say, huh, things don't really feel that great economically. Things feel strange. People even have like that intangible feeling. But at the same time, some people are going to grocery stores and they're seeing, why are we out of eggs? That's really weird. Or there's not things that I can typically get available on Amazon, something really small. And I understand is a first world problem. But there are times that

we get our groceries delivered and that service was unavailable for a little while. There are products that we typically get through that service that we are unable to get. And then some people say they're renovating their kitchen or their bathroom. They're unable to get those supplies or they're just super expensive. Car dealerships are dealing with a shortage. Do all of those have to do with these supply chain issues or are they separate issues? Now, every single one of them has the same root cause or at least is experiencing the same impact. This is globalization in particular, but even just the way an economy functions, okay, there's buyer and they're seller.

And that's A and B. And everything in the middle is supply chains. And everything that physically needs to be made and transported through time and space is subject to the same sort of disruptive factors, particularly when you're talking about a pandemic. You're talking about a lot of political and economic motive where everybody's kind of at war within the United States, but, you know, other countries, everybody's competing for suddenly scarce resources. So a good example is meat, right? We produce an enormous amount of meat. We're a huge exporter of meat to the rest of the world. And that would be things like chicken and pork and, and, you know, other kinds of poultry, steak, you know, beef, whatever it may be. But suddenly

shortages are showing up on our shelves and people could, figure out why they're like what's going on here you know we've still got plenty of cows but two things that happened uh there were numerous outbreaks of covid amongst workforces at slaughterhouses and we don't have near as many meat or you know slaughter houses anymore meat processing facilities and so suddenly meat processing capacity it is offline because a lot of workers were out of work for 14 days and that shut down the pipeline but even something as simple as packaging there's a shortage of packaging the phone trays that stakes go in and then the, you know, the plastic wrap that goes around it and the labels that go on it.

Most of that stuff's not made in the U.S. Most of that's made at factories overseas in Vietnam or Thailand, Malaysia, China, and they make the foam packaging and then that foam packaging or the saran wrap or whatever is imported to the United States. So even if we had steak that we could theoretically put on the shelves, the grocery stores, the meat processes, whatever, didn't have the materials they need to actually safely process and transport that. stuff to our shelves. Now, is it, is part of the problem that over the years, Republicans and

Democrats have, have increased our reliance on China? And second part of that question, do the politics between the United States or really just the West and China have anything to do with these shortage issues? I've heard you talk about before that when you're looking at supply chains and logistics, you're not just talking about companies who, you're, you're you know, from the pure motives of their heart wants to make sure that people have the things that they need. Like you've said that there's ego that comes into play. There's different kinds of competition. There are all kinds of political factors that don't necessarily just have to do with supply and demand and profitability and things like that. So I know that's like six questions in one.

But can you talk about what are some of those like behind the scenes things that are going on? maybe in particular in relation to our relationship with China. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the heuristics that, I mean, it's in my bio, on my Twitter profile, which is kind of how this whole thing got snowballed for me was people discovering some of the things I was saying on social media. But, you know, I say that logistics is a map of human intent. And what that does is it clarifies the fact that nothing is actually moving for any reason

other than humans want it to move. So then it's really a question. of these systems that we've built up, these these massive ships, monetary supply, drilling for oil, or whatever, all of that exists to serve human needs. And so is subject to the very complex and sometimes unpredictable desires and behaviors of human beings as well. And if you, if you understand that, I guess, at a conceptual level, then scaling it up very quickly to the geopolitical level is also something that we can do. China, for three, you know, 30 years, really since the mid to late 80s, they liberalized in 1979 and we opened relations

with them on an economic basis and a full economic basis. He had Deng Xiaoping and he had Jimmy Carter. And George H.W. Bush was a part of that as well as Henry Kissinger, who was part of it with Nixon and then all the way through the 70s. So liberalization of China and treating them as a trade partner, despite them being a communist regime, despite everything that had happened in the 50s and 60s with Mao, we saw an opportunity there to co-opt communism for the first time and utilize a communist country as a partner or as a trade weapon against the Soviet Union.

And so we said, well, let's let's help China move upstream from, you know, basically very basic manufacturing, subsistence farming, these sorts of things that they were doing in the 60s and 70s. And by the way, China had nuclear weapons a long time ago. Yeah. Like they had some level of manufacturing capability. And we saw that and we said, oh, we can tap into this. we can tap into their huge labor pool. They're already a much larger country than us, you know, from a population standpoint.

And let's utilize trade and bilateral economic relations as a way to maybe keep communism in line and also benefit the American economy. Reagan was a huge part of this. I love Ronald Reagan, but if you read his autobiography, you know, published in the mid-90s, he still really believed that if we imported capitalism, then, you know, they would see how wonderful liberty is and that they would become more like the United States. But we've imported capitalism and they've kind of exported communism to some extent, unfortunately. And I guess that's, you're saying that's part of what has led to the problems

that we're seeing today and the over-reliance on them, right? Yeah, absolutely. So you had two factors at work there. Dang Jiao-Ping always said, you know, bide your time, hide your strength. And he meant it. And to what extent maybe he meant that as a weapon against the West? We can't necessarily be sure, but we certainly can look backwards at least and realize that there was a recognition by China that even as a hedge against American hegemony, if we ever got on the wrong side of them, they got on the wrong side of us. Control of our supply chains was very much part of their of their doctrine and of their plan

going all the way back into the 80s. In 1999, a boat came out, you know, in the military and in the national security establishment, they call them the two colonels. But a book came out in 1999. It was written by two colonels in the People's Liberation Army. It's called unrestricted warfare. And what unrestricted warfare was was loosely a 50, 60, 70 page white paper on all the various ways in which a country like the United States is vulnerable to asymmetric attack on an economic basis, on a political basis, on a cultural and social basis, without ever actually attacking a country like the U.S., would it be possible to fight us and collapse us without ever firing a shot? And so as that became that, then that was open.

So it was doctrine before that. Right. In 1999, they published this thing publicly. And everybody's kind of like, what are they, what are these crazy guys talking about? Like, China's not going to do that. China depends on us and our consumer demand. It was hard to imagine that they would become the superpower that they are today then. I mean, I think a lot of people then were still thinking about rural poor China that had been crushed by now's cultural revolution.

There was no way that they would ever be able to get to the level that America was. But they've always been playing the long game. And I want to hear you talk about that more. I could talk to you for another hour about that. That's kind of randomly something we talk about a lot is the rise of China. But because I know I have to let you go, I want to know, is this the new normal, these supply chain issues? That's part A of the question. And then part B, which I know that you've been talking about quite a lot, is what are some solutions?

Maybe, you know, I can't do anything about it. But what do you think is a way that we can get out of this mess? Yeah. So to the question of part A, is this the new normal? Normal for what we would recognize in the U.S. in the last 30 years where there's just this incredible abundance of cheap things on the shelves. We're not really going to retreat to that however much we want to. Because what I think is going to happen is that we're going to see optionality. We're not going to see types of products limited to us.

We're still going to have TVs. We're still going to have computers and phones and all these other things. But two things that's going to happen. We may not have the feature-rich abundance of saying, well, for a phone, in this particular model, I can choose five different memory levels and two different processors and different qualities of camera, we're going to have fewer options, but we're still going to have plenty, right? What we do have may be a little bit more expensive, particularly as we undergo the shaking out of a very difficult to scale raw materials, like, for example, semiconductors, but we will get our

feet under us. We will find a way to innovate our way out of this as quickly as possible because the dollar is still a very powerful incentive for companies to do that. It won't be like it was, but it's not going to be the end of the world either. to the question of some solutions and things that we could be doing right now. The world is two mega, you know, what I'm thinking is like macro trends are happening at once here. One is, is that the world is very much bifurcating and has into two spheres of power. You're going to have the Chinese led, a sphere of influence and order.

And then you're going to have an Anglo sphere led by the U.S., but also with the UK, Canada, Australia, India, the quad in Asia, as part of that, where where we've kind of lined up in these two big columns of influence, and the next 25 to 50 years is going to be shaped by sort of this existential give and take between those two spheres of influence across all domains. At the smaller level, but still just as important, is that the average human's relationship to globalization and the average human's relationship to its own government is changing, particularly here in the U.S., there's people who would have never thought two years ago about where meat comes from. But now they're asking, how can I go find a farmer, pay that

farmer to produce and process state for me, and then I can buy 400 pounds. So decentralization, localization, moving supply chains downstream as close as possible to the individual level is going to be where I think the next revolution in human innovation and supply chain innovation is going to live. Yeah. I feel that. I was about to say localization too. It's just, it's only, just something that humans are so interesting. And I feel like as someone who is an expert in logistics, you're really studying a lot about human nature, since you said logistics is about human intense. You're just learning kind of how humans naturally react to chaos and feeling like things are too big, feeling like things are out of our control. Humans really don't like that.

We don't like volatility. We don't like to not rely on things. And so if we can control as much as we can, we are going to. And that means relying on yourself and the people around you as much as possible. Maybe that's actually a good thing. There's going to be, I think, some pains in transition, but maybe that's a positive step in the right direction. I don't know. I'm trying to end on a little bit of an optimistic note because it's a little bit scary. Can you tell us, okay, how can people follow you? How can they support you and all that good stuff? Well, my individual account or my personal account on Twitter is man underscore integrated. The,

not really a think tank so much is just more of this, this kind of ideation machine where I can share content out on substack is Fortis, F-O-R-T-I-S, analysis.substack.com. I put most things out for free on there because I, I really do want to share with the world. I don't want to tell people what to think. What I'm interested in is helping other people learn how to recognize these things for themselves, filter them through their own worldview, and begin to make better decisions

that help them with happier and healthier lives at the individual and community level. The United States, I mean, you know, constitutionally, we're a country that, you know, we were born on localism. We were born on states' rights. We were born on being a federated union of states. The idea has always been that humans organize best around small to medium scale, not massive, you know, mega conglomerate scale. And so to the extent that we do that, it requires transmitting a certain ability within people to develop mental models to assess and manage risk at an individual level and not be told what to think, but be encouraged to think differently, maybe to be wrong, to take risks, and to do things that advance themselves in positive ways along with those around them.

So most of what I put out, I do for free, you know, the paid stuff I do or where I ask, money is usually when it's like some strategic deep dive into a specific issue for a company. Gotcha. Well, thank you so much. I'm thankful for the wisdom that you do put out there the way that you're able to break it down for people like me who don't do this and study this for a living. I really, really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Okay. So a couple things I wanted to say that I was thinking. And he had to stop when we did. And there were so many other things that I wanted to talk to him about. We'll have to have him back on. I'm sure you guys.

thinking of your own questions as well. And maybe one thing you're thinking about is the Great Reset. How does this play with the Great Reset? So I've seen some things out there that this is, you know, this is Joe Biden. This is Democrats, as I kind of alluded to in the conversation, you know, purposely trying to mess with the supply chains so that we can, I don't know, rely on the government to take care of us and then that plays into the Great Reset. Well, I asked Justin Haskins about that, who is the expert on the Great Reset, who we've had on before, we'll link to those past episodes. And he says that's not really the case. And after talking to Ross, I'm kind of realizing that that is true.

What Justin told me is that the people, you know, the economic elites that we have specified and defined in those previous episodes really don't like a lot of desupply chain issues because it makes them look incompetent. If they're the ones who are running the show and all and everyone is freaking out like, oh, we can't rely on globalization to meet our needs, then people are going to do. exactly what Ross talked about at the end there. Localization. Localization is not good for the Great Reset. The Great Reset is predicated on this idea that we can globalize everything. And really, that nationalism in particular is something that the Great Resetters see as an impediment to the Great

Reset in this whole New World Order. I know that sounds so conspiratorial, all of these different buzzwords, but it's real. It's real. Go back and listen to those episodes if you haven't already. And so this is not exactly a deliberate attempt to play into The Great Reset. It actually is probably inhibiting it in some ways because, as we just noted, people are naturally going to localize. People are going to say, okay, how can we rely on ourselves? Like you are seeing, it seems like a big exodus from the inner cities, even some people, if they can afford it, leaving the suburbs and looking to buy land, whereas a couple years ago they weren't. I saw this funny video that someone put on Instagram that like millennials in 2018 were in New York City saying,

oh, I love the concrete. I love the busy life. I love the tall buildings. And it's like millennials in 2021. It's like, oh, like in a little bonnet in the middle of nowhere being like, how do I make my own quilts? And they really has transitioned like that to where now it seems like young families are thinking about, okay, how can I be self-reliant? How can I rely on farmers markets? How can I rely on local suppliers? It's really just kind of incredible how humans naturally adapt. And so my encouragement is to keep on doing that. I do think that as far as we can, we should think about how can we rely less on this huge, massive system and how we can rely more on ourselves. Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't be going to the grocery store. We shouldn't be relying on

these suppliers at all. I think, you know, that's inevitable still at this point. But I know my family and I, we are thinking about how we can rely more on ourselves in our local community. I think that we should lean into that. This is a special opportunity, I would say, for the church to ensure that we are relying on one another. This actually kind of goes back to historical Christianity when Christians had no other option, but to rely on each other. I mean, think about, you know, the early church in Acts, how they were making sure that no one in the church had any need, had any lack, that they were supplying one another with their needs. Like this is a very unique time, I would say, for Christians to ensure even more that we

are doing that. Where there is lack, where there is need, the Christian church should be stepping in. I think first and foremost, taking care of each other. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people misapply some of the verses in the Bible about, you know, caring for those around us is just meaning, caring. for everyone in the world. That's not necessarily true. First and foremost, we are called to care for our brothers and sisters in Christ. And so I think that we need to put our eyes closer to home when it comes to how do we deal with these problems in the supply chain and these needs that now

people have that they didn't realize that they had before. Like I even think about all of the people who have been fired from their jobs, all of the nurses who have been fired because of the vaccine mandates. Like, is there an opportunity while the opportunity still exists before the global leads come in and try to mess all of this up. Like, is there an opportunity for like smaller clinics to be created with some of the people who were fired? I don't know. Like, I don't know if that's possible at all. I'm sure there are a lot of regulatory hoops that you have to jump through in order to do that. But is this a way to that America, that the world is polarizing even more, not just between, you know, East versus West, as Ross was talking about, but globalization versus

versus localization, conservatives versus liberals, Christians versus non-Christians, traditionalists versus non-traditionalist, rural versus urban. Like things are quickly being more polarized and divided and maybe rather than constantly talking about this pie in the sky dream of unity with people who have no desire to, you know, share our values and uphold the things that we want for ourselves and our family. It's like maybe we should lean into that. Maybe we should lean in to the communities that value the same things we do. Maybe we should be relying on ourselves and each other even more.

Maybe this is a good opportunity for us to rely on our church, rely on our communities, to get to know our neighbors and to try to focus on supplying things for ourselves and those immediately around us. Maybe this is some kind of blessing. And we should see it as that. Hoping to end on a positive note because I know that all of that can be overwhelming tomorrow. we are talking to a doctor, Dr. Pierre Corey, and I'm super excited about it. We're going to be talking about the famous, I have to call it, horse to wormer because it is a term or it's a word that we're really not supposed to say. It can actually get us censored. But we're going to say it. We're going to talk about it tomorrow. And just the media, the media blitzkrieg, I think,

is what Dr. Corey called it, against this medication. why Big Pharma doesn't want you to know about it, why they're trying to wage a negative PR campaign against it. We're going to talk about how you can get it, the corruption at the top of these organizations that's causing all of this craziness. And then again, we're going to end with some practical advice, some positive things. But it's really, it's going to blow your mind. I'll tell you that after we already recorded it, after we recorded the interview, he said, you know, this is actually the deepest that I've actually gotten in talking about the corruption in the public health bureaucracy, Dr. Fauci, the NIH, the FDA, the CDC. So it is a must listen to interview.

All right. That's all we've got for today. I will see you guys back here tomorrow. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos.

If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.