Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 171 | Christopher Mims on Our Interconnected Industrial Ecology

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

As the holidays approach, we are being reminded of the fragility of the global supply chain. But at the same time, the supply chain itself is a truly impressive and fascinating structure, made as it is from multiple components that must work together in synchrony. From building an item in a factory and shipping it worldwide to transporting it locally, processing it in a distribution center, and finally delivering it to an address, the system is simultaneously awe-inspiring and deeply dehumanizing. I talk with Christopher Mims about how things are made, how they get to us, and what it all means for the present and future of our work and our lives. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Christopher Mims received a bachelor's degree in neuroscience and behavioral biology from Emory University. He is currently a technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal. He has previously written for publications such as Wired, Scientific American, The Atlantic, and Smithsonian. His new book is Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door — Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy. Columns at The Wall Street Journal Wikipedia Twitter

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These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, in combination with resistance exercise. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Chances are that the technology that you're using right now to listen to this podcast was built somewhere else. It's very likely that whatever country,

the phone or tablet or computer you're using, to hear me talk right now, was assembled in a different country than you're living in right now. If not, then some piece of it was, some dongle or some wire or something like that. We take for granted that we rely on stuff, whether it's high-tech stuff, or clothing or everyday household appliances, that was built and manufactured and assembled somewhere else. Since we've had a pandemic and we've been in

lockdown, we've been increasingly used to having stuff delivered directly to our door, whether it's books or groceries or food for the evening. This is an incredibly complicated system, as you might imagine, and it's really kind of a monument to human ingenuity that we've built a system of global commerce that really uses the whole globe, that we build things in one place, we get the raw materials in another place, we consume them in another place. So how does all this work?

This is the problem tackled by Christopher Mims, who is a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, in his new book called Arriving Today, from factory to front door, why everything has changed about how and what we buy. I'm sure you remember the ever-given disaster. right, or at least snafu, maybe not disaster, but this giant container ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal a few months ago

and slowed down all of global commerce. So that's a reminder, on the one hand, that there are fragile points in this system, but it's also just amazing to look at these ships, right? These jihumongous vessels stacked with these containers, and these containers are part of the intermodal transport system, the containers, the boxes that are on the ships need to be unloaded incredibly quickly in some very busy port and then stacked onto trucks, trailers, and then taken somewhere else, usually to be unpacked and put on different trucks.

And all of this is just incredibly interconnected, incredibly time sensitive, and it's still incredible flux. We're not done yet. We're not done yet innovating how all this works. So the subject here is industrial ecology, how you build the stuff, how you ship it, and the ways in which this search forever more efficiency and productivity have shaped how you work, how you work in a factory, in a manufacturing center, or also just in a distribution center, increasingly these days. And there's, look, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It's a little dehumanizing some of these stories about what it's like to work in a distribution center

or work as a trucker or a driver for delivery service, really call into question the job we're doing as a society in providing people with good jobs that are fulfilling in different ways. And on the one hand, let me say that a lot of this structure is invisible to most of us. You know, like if we're not in that business or whatever, we sort of take it for granted. and we think about us and them, and it's a very different world. On the other hand, I think and hope that there are people out there who are long-haul truckers or delivery people right now listening to the Mindscape podcast. And so this episode is dedicated to you because you play a crucially important role in how our society as a whole runs.

And I would like your condition in life to be a little bit better. I'm not sure how much influence I have over that, but it's something to shoot for. of the episode, Christopher and I will talk about ways we can improve the current system. There are things that are just inevitable, also things that are our choices and we can make better. So we're going to try to figure out how to do that. Let's go. Christopher Mims, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

Thanks for having me, Sean. So I don't want to actually accuse you of being responsible for the pandemic that we're all suffering through right now, but it certainly is convenient that in the time when we're all reliant on things suddenly appearing to our house from Amazon or from delivery services or whatever. You've written a book about the process by which things appear at our house. How much of this is good planning and how much of this is just the cosmic wheel spinning in unpredictable ways? It does make me question whether I'm the only conscious being in the universe and I'm just

manifesting all of this or because, yeah, it is absolutely bizarre that on a whim, a super nerdy whim, I said, I want to understand where my sense. stuff comes from, this almost childlike impulse. And then I was like, I'm going to write a long explainer of that, a book length explainer of that. And in the middle of researching and writing it, the pandemic hit and global supply chains seized up and then exploded. And then the debris fell over all of us. And my reporting went on. And then suddenly I was reporting in the middle of that and having absolutely surreal conversations with people responsible. for cleaning up that mess, which I'll never forget.

From the point of view of the inside of this whole supply chain, was there dramatic changes because of the pandemic, or was it just like more intensity to get stuff to people? You know, it's difficult to say whether the increased intensity led to a qualitative change other than things just not arriving and stuff breaking down. I think that the systems were initially in the pandemic really performing kind of as designed and at capacity. And so, you know, you had a lot of these, you know,

supply chains have to be designed for their maximum throughput. And which is peak season, right? Which is like when everybody's buying so much stuff for holidays or whatever. And, you know, because of when the pandemic hit, we were actually in the, what is traditionally the lowest point in terms of demand for the supply chain. So the supply chain was ready in that sense. But the challenge has come since as that demand has ramped up.

And honestly, understanding the scale of that demand and why we're in this pickle that we're in now, it requires a lot of macroeconomics. It requires appreciating that a few percentage points movement from consumption of services to consumption of goods, along with a bunch of changes in how we live and work, leads to demand that so far outstrips the capacity of global supply chains that you get what we're in the middle of now. And what really struck me about reading the book, which I really liked, is how much of the whole process that is required to get the computer that I'm talking to you on delivered to my house is invisible in some sense. You know, we do take it for granted. And there's a lot going on.

Of course, it's obvious that there's a lot going on. But when you dig into it, it's, you You use the phrase industrial ecology when we were emailing about this. And it's extremely apt because it's not entirely or even mostly planned from the top down, right? It's sort of a million different networks have to work together and they arise in some somewhat organic way. Yeah, I'm currently just loving the Dickens out of the audiobook of Merlin Man's Entangled Life, which is about fungi and how we rely on them. And he studied the ecology of these fungi in tropical rainforests, where they are part of what is known as the Wood Wide Web,

and they are communicating what are analogous to impulses on our nervous system between trees, messages, also obviously transporting a lot of nutrients. And the global supply chain is a lot like the network of my corset that are underneath our feet, and which 90% of all plants depend on in that, yeah, it's not top down. The different segments kind of communicate with each other at the point of, you know, a port or a warehouse or a truck as goods are moved from one to the other. But each one of them is kind of self-contained. And it is also a distinct marketplace.

Like there's nobody who's cornered the market on ocean shipping or trucking. or even, you know, e-commerce as big as Amazon is. So every single one of these is a very complicated marketplace where the price of everything is constantly changing. Obviously, people buy contracts for long-term shipping. Like, I want so many shipping containers on this ship six months from now or whatever. But a lot of it is the so-called spot market. And that's what's been going crazy because this ecology is just getting overwhelmed.

And so, of course, you know, economics, it's also social social. science, the result is that, you know, prices go crazy or their shortages. And there's so many different parts of this, I guess I want to start with my favorite part, which is the shipping and the transport part. I mean, you mention right at the beginning of the book something that is apparently a cliche or a standard story in your world, which I had not known, about the fish. If you fish some salmon off of the coast of Scotland, maybe it's salmon, maybe it's some other kind of fish. And then you, you fish. And then you fish, you You buy it in a cod, and then you buy it in the supermarket in Scotland.

Unbeknownst to you, it's visited China in between when it was caught and when it arrived in your supermarket. Yes, it was frozen. It went to China. It was filleted. And then it's shipped back in that same cold chain to Scotland because the cost of labor is so much lower there. So it's like this 20,000 mile journey for your cod or whatever that was caught very nearby. I think that that shows kind of the absurdity of global supply chains. I mean, is it absurd or is it just really efficient?

You know, before the pandemic, there was enough capacity that it cost $2 to send a flat screen TV from a port in China to the port of Los Angeles and the United States. Now, obviously, it only costs $2 because it's stuffed with hundreds of other flat screen TVs in a big shipping container. But, you know, what that cost doesn't reflect, of course, are all the externalities, right? Like all of the fossil fuels, you know, all of the labor, which, you know, some of the workers in that supply chain are working under less than ideals circumstances. You know, but it's kind of like we've got the science, so let's do it. Like we have the technology. And of course, now we're in a very different place where the cost of shipping that television is going to be 10. what it was before. So it may no longer be profitable to fillet that cod in China. And, you know,

the short-term result is, well, maybe there's no filleted cod in your supermarket in Scotland. I mean, there's all kinds of shortages happening in the UK now because of a trucker shortage. You know, the long term is maybe people start to relocalize or, or as they say, re-shore, those supply chains. It would certainly be less absurd from an energy expended perspective. What exactly are you referring to when you say that it will soon be 10 times as expensive to do that shipping? It is 10 times as expensive. Now, the spot market for a shipping container, if you wanted to transport a shipping container from, you know, one of the biggest ports in China across the Pacific to a west coast port in the U.S., usually it's the port of L.A., Long Beach, which is the biggest port in the United States. In the before times, it would cost you maybe $2,000.

Now, on the spot market, it'll cost you $16,000. $20,000, it's so expensive that a lot of shippers have just thrown up their hands and said, forget it. Let's just put it on an airplane. The problem is because there's so much less domestic, not domestic, international travel, a lot of that airplane shipping was just in the spare capacity in the belly of passenger jets. So people are really stuck. But what is the reason for this growth in cost?

Is that the pandemic or something else? So this is the thing that is difficult to appreciate. There has, what we have as much as anything, as much as we have a supply of shipping crunch, we have an explosion in demand for shipping. This is because lockdowns led so many more of us to sort of buy things via e-commerce. E-commerce supply chains are biased toward, you know, things coming from China and East Asia and South Asia and Southeast Asia. And in addition, there was this thing. that happened where at the beginning of the pandemic, shippers, truckers,

et cetera, companies canceled their orders because what they thought was going to happen at the beginning of the pandemic was a sequel to the Great Recession, right? You know, like where Lehman Brothers collapsed and all that. So everybody thought, oh God, we're going to have this huge recession. So let's pull back our orders. Let's not book anymore, you know,

shipping containers and trucks and whatnot. But instead what happened was you saw this huge surge in demand, you know. And part this is a big part of this is people just stopped going out so that they just started buying stuff. Another part is, you know, obviously, like, all those stimmies, the stimulus checks helped. But I really think what happened more than anything else, and this comes from recent reporting I've been talking to economists and stuff, people have changed their lives more than we appreciate. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that only maybe 14% of people are

still working from home. But that could be an artifact of how they ask the question. If you look at it, there's a Gallup data that came out yesterday, which says that the number is more like twice that. So we may already be approaching the maximum number of people who are in jobs who can work from home are working home part of the time. And what that's leading to is just this huge lifestyle change. So one, one sociologist Wong person called it family insourcing. And I think whether or not you have kids. We've all had the experience of being like, you know what, I'm going to do more stuff at home. I need a new set of knives. I need some outdoor furniture. I need a desk for my kid. I need a webcam. And so that demand and then the ability to do that spending because nobody's

going to Disneyland or whatever has just shifted so much spending to goods. And those goods have to get into our country on shipping containers. And that whole system is not designed to ramp up. up quickly. And it's impossible to ramp it up quickly because what are you going to do? You're going to put in another ocean-going ship that's literally three football fields long and 15 stories tall? Okay, great. Well, Hyundai Heavy Industries will get you that ship right away in four years. So that's a big part of the problem. What's the secret to your best night's sleep? First, toss out your memory foam and upgrade to Awara, the luxury hybrid mattress with natural foam and New Zealand wool fiber.

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Discount auto-apply to check out. Okay, good. So it's just supply and demand and the pandemic and this shift in lifestyle, which, as you note, might not go back. I mean, I think just to sort of put things in context here, over the course of this conversation, we'll be bumping into various horrific aspects

of this whole supply chain. but we do as consumers benefit from it. I mean, like you said, we buy stuff. I mean, not only the obvious stuff, but I did upgrade my kitchen utensils during the pandemic because I was using them a lot more frequently, right? That kind of thing goes invisible, but it can definitely lead to a lot more demand.

Yes. I mean, this is, economists call this multiplexing when one good can be used over and over again and it's just a much more efficient use of that good. And when we were all going to offices and sharing a coffee maker, we were multiplexing that coffee maker. Well, now that we're all at home, well, you know, 60 new coffee makers got ordered or whatever for every one that used to be in the office.

We all had this experience during the pandemic of watching on Tenterhooks the drama in the Suez Canal with the ever-given ship being stuck. And when that happened, like it sent me on a little bit of a, uh, trip down the rabbit hole concerning containerization. And this is something that I just become absolutely fascinated with. Like I could have the whole podcast conversation about containerization, but we'll try to get to other things first. But the very idea, which I'm sure I knew, but hadn't quite appreciated, that those boxes, those containers that are on the ships are the same boxes that are being pulled by trucks, right? Like it's literally exactly the same box. You

pick it from the ship, put it on the truck, put it on the train. And this, This is not automatic or natural. It happened starting the 1950s, and it changed everything. And the word container is not just a box containing things. It's a very specific kind of container, these intermodal things that go on ships and everything. So, I mean, put into your own words a little bit about how that did change the whole supply chain that we rely on. Yeah, I mean, I think containerization is it's actually a much deeper phenomenon because this is also how the Internet works, right? Like the internet, the underlying protocol, it turns data into discrete packets that then are all handled the same, right?

So anytime you want to create a system, whether it's the internet or a network of fungi in the forest or a shipping network, you want to containerize things. So you have like a standard thing that all the different modes of transport can handle. And that's called intermodal, right? So a shipping container can go on a truck, on a ship, on a train. and all of the cranes can be standardized, et cetera, right? It's like any other standard, like, you know, the plug in your wall. Like if every electrical plug in every house was putting out a different voltage, like we would never, you know, our modern world wouldn't work.

So that standard, you know, came about, as you said, starting in the 50s, really in the 60s, it picked up because there was this guy named Malcolm. Malcolm McLean. There's an amazing book about him by Mark Levin called The Box. And he just had this vision. Let's stick stuff in containers that can travel between, you know, ships and trucks primarily. And everybody was like, okay, we kind of agree with you and we've experimented with this a little bit here and there. But we have a different standard. You know, there's a different dimensions of a box that we want. And ultimately, he won in no small part because, the United States government needed to move an enormous amount of material into Vietnam for the Vietnam War. So he got that contract and they were like, cool, we'll use your shipping containers.

You know, it gave him enough kind of startup capital to build ships that were designed just to handle shipping containers of a specific size that could then be unloaded by cranes of a standard size. And then before you know it, those cranes were being installed in ports all over the U.S.

and then eventually the world. And then what happened was, you know, people examined the throughput of these ports. And it was so much higher than the old way, because the old way was you have a bunch of barrels and sacks and God knows what else. And then an army of men has to go into the hold of that ship and haul it out. It usually used to take like two weeks to unload a ship. A containerized ship, even a big one, they can unload. it in 24 hours.

Yeah. And a big one is really, really big. Enormous 10,000 40 foot containers on the biggest of ships. I said this earlier, but it bears repeating. Three football fields long, 15 stories tall. When you are next to one of these, as I've been both on the water and on land, it really, really feels like when you stand on a long block in like New York City or Chicago or someplace like that, and you're just looking up at these kind of hulking.

buildings and there's a whole block of them because it's as big as the sky it's they're literally as big as the empire state building laid on its side right and that is is you know the most efficient way to move atoms mass on the surface of the earth that we've ever invented because of all the fun Newtonian physics of water and all the rest well and what's interesting one of the many things that are interesting to me about this is that there needed to be some kind of phase transition right like it's easy for everyone to individually load their sacks of grain onto a ship. But for the world to agree, we're going to use this kind of standardized container. They might all agree that if we all did that, it would be great, but someone has to do it first, right?

And there is very expensive when you first do it. And basically, like you say, it was this one guy, Malcolm McLean. He just really pushed for it. He was at the right place at the right time with the Vietnam War contract. And that changed the world. Yeah. I mean, it's such a great argument in favor of. standards and open standards, you know? I mean, it's, it's on a par with, like, Tim Berners-Lee and

like, the World Wide Web and HTML and being like, let's all agree that this is the standard, and this is how we're going to render web pages, and everybody gets to use this, and then we can all interface with each other, and then, boom, globalization. And the, the magic of the container is, you know, it gets loaded. I'm stating this as a statement, but correct me if I'm wrong here. Like, it gets loaded in Vietnam or wherever, and then it might not be, oh, or unloaded until it arrives at some factory or some facility in Utah or whatever. It just travels across the world and who knows what's inside. Someone knows what's inside, but the people who loaded don't need to know.

Yeah, the only wrinkle I would add is that a lot of those containers, unless they're traveling on a train, because trains are so, so efficient, will actually be unloaded not that far from the port and then put in, into all the contents will be put into the back of a semi-trailer. And the reason that happens is containers are heavy because, you know, they have to withstand an ocean, you know, traveling across the ocean. So for that reason, just to save on fuel and all the rest, a lot of containers get emptied in these vast warehouses that, you know,

are kind of invisible to us in, you know, California's inland empire, let's say. Okay. And the materials cross-docked as it's put into the back of a long-haul truck. Because a semi-trailer is super lightweight. It's very thin. It's very, it's strong because it's got a metal frame, but it's very, very, very thin and lightweight. Yeah, so I feel like when I'm driving around L.A., I'm at the center of global commerce sometimes. And I've noticed since I became fascinated by these containers that some trucks are really, you know, they're clearly containers.

and some are not. And what you're telling us is that there is sort of an economy to only actually lugging the intermodal container a short way before you distribute it to more efficient ground transportation system. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And again, the exception of that is trains. And we shouldn't forget that by ton mile, we move almost as much material in the U.S. by train as we do by truck. It just tends to be different stuff. It's like commodities or, you know, frankly, a lot of it's coal. Yeah, okay.

But yeah, a lot of that stuff gets put into a different kind of box when it goes on the back of a truck. And is there some feeling for, you know, the most important or popular trade routes and the most important kinds of cargo? I mean, obviously it's everything in some sense, but is it dominated by a small number or is it really just this network that, you know, every big city has a port? and it connects with every other big city. Well, this is the thing that's interesting about containers and containerized shipping is that it exactly maps to the pattern of global trade, right? So we have a big trade deficit with China, right? We buy way more from them than they buy from us.

But what does that actually look like? Well, the physical reality of it is shipping containers worth of goods. That's why so many full containers cross the ocean from these giant ports in China. I think the seven biggest ports in the world are all in China. You know, across the Pacific to the port of L.A., Long Beach. I mean, they can also go to Oakland or ports in Canada and places like that, or they might go around and go to like Savannah.

But then, you know, one of the challenges we have right now with global shipping is that what we're selling back to China is, you know, a lot of it's like intellectual property. and software and cloud services, things that do not need to go into shipping containers. So then the problem is, well, you got all these empty shipping containers, like, who's going to ship them back? And I remember, like we talked about earlier,

there's no top-down authority that's like, I wave my Fiat wand and say all these empty shipping containers need to go back on another route. Like, they take a kind of more tortured route back to China. And so that's why there's this imbalance. Just as we have a trade imbalance, there's this imbalance of containers. and people are like, oh, crap, we don't have enough containers.

And China's like, oh, crap, we're making containers as fast as we can. But there's this terrible inefficiency in the system where it's like, we have a lot of containers. They're in the wrong place. Like, somebody's got to figure out how to get these back. And we have ways to get them back. It's just that those are broken, like so many other parts of the supply chain. And is there a simple way of characterizing the sense in which China is the center of a lot of this?

Is that they're, I mean, you know, are T-shirts and everything say made in China, But is that just because labor is cheaper? Is it going to continue that way? My feeling is that China is trying to sort of upgrade their job force to go from mindless labor to other kinds of things. So is it a temporary thing where all these things are made in China and soon they'll be made elsewhere? So it started because China had a cheap labor, but also, you know, it's just a big centrally controlled economy. where the Communist Party can just sort of dictate, well, we're going to prop up this industry

or we're going to build these kind of factories or whatever. But even as wages rise in China, there is a stickiness to things still being made there because it requires expertise to make many things in our modern world. They're very, very complicated. So even if manufacturers would like to move the manufacturer of, say, consumer electronics from China to Southeast Asia or even, you know, South Asia,

they have to do it one piece at a time, starting with the least complicated part of that process, which usually is the assembly by hand of the iPhone or the Samsung phone or the AirPods at the end of that manufacturing process. But those microchips and, like, other, you know, tricky to make components, they may still be made in China and then shipped over there in order to,

because that's where the expertise is, right? And the funny thing is that like expertise, you know, it's like water or something. Like it sort of like accumulates in these unexpected places. It turns out that Malaysia is where the world's microchips are packaged. And packaging a microchip means taking that silicon chip and putting into the little thing that you've seen when you've like busted open an old computer where it looks like a bug and it's black and has little legs which are you know the electrical

connections chip packaging is really important that's done in Malaysia Malaysia had a bunch of shutdowns recently so it caused another kind of mini chip shortage not because there weren't enough chips but because there wasn't enough capacity to package them in Malaysia so what ends up happening is even as China is trying to move up the kind of scale of development to, you know, more like, you know, software engineering or whatever else, production of cultural capital, whatever it is that the U.S. is doing, you know, there is that stickiness, and it tends to have this effect of just lengthening supply chains and making them even more complicated and more vulnerable. Like, it's a bit comical. Like, that's not the only effect it has, because

because people who do logistics for living get wise to this and are like, hmm, we really should spend the extra money required to like vertically integrate this all on our shores. But you make it. But that's been the near term. It's a very interesting point. The combination of the fact that expertise pools in certain geographic locations, plus the fact that shipping is relatively cheap, right? I mean, that's the lesson of the cod from Scotland.

creates this absolutely Byzantine network that I think that we're not usually aware of of how many trips the individual pieces of something have to make. You know, like it's built somewhere, packaged somewhere else, you know, put in a cardboard and plastic container somewhere else, et cetera, before it gets to us. It's just cheaper to do things in different parts of the world

than to build a, I don't know, a factory or whatever it is, a facility locally. The shipping is the easy part. Yeah, and there's so many fascinating examples of that. And the more complicated the object, the more of those dependencies it has. I mean, one of my favorite examples is like, okay, let's say you want to build like the CPU of a smartphone or whatever. Okay, starting point, if we're not going to go back to the birth of the universe, is ultra pure quartz sand in of all places, Appalachia. Now that quartz sand is going to get transported somewhere where it can be melted down and grown into a crystal.

That could be Australia. Now, that incredibly pure crystal of silicon is going to be transported, you know, elsewhere. It could be another country, but let's just say it goes to Taiwan. Then the crystal is sliced into wafers. And then, you know, TSMC's fabs in Taiwan, it's etched. Now those chips are broken. up and as we just discussed, they're packaged in Malaysia. And then they're going to get transported to Shenzhen, where finally they're going to get

stuck into a phone. That is the trip just to get this thing assembled. Oh, and by the way, it might then travel from Shenzhen to like India because so much phone assemblies being done there or in Vietnam. And then it's going to cross the ocean to us. So just to imagine, like, if you were trying to design the most Rub Goldberg, and the most vulnerable to trade wars, actual wars, global pandemics. I mean, honestly, it is a miracle that, like, we haven't run out of everything by now.

When you think about it, it shows that there is a lot of flexibility and elasticity in these markets. Yeah, no, but it does seem very fragile in a way. I mean, that's the difference, I guess, with a biological network, a biological network, like you compared it to the fungi, et cetera, or the networks in our bodies, but there's sort of evolved to be resilient, right? Because whatever kind of redundancy that is useful to survive a little bit longer might be selected by natural selection. Whereas here there's just one global supply chain,

and you can imagine there are critical points where it could break down catastrophically. Yeah, I mean, look, you're student of evolution. I mean, you know that one of the major reasons that we think species go extinct is that they overspecialize. And then the ecosystem changes. And then it's like, boom, adios. Like, you're the dinosaurs. The asteroid just arrived.

Like, see you later. You know, and then the weed species of the world kind of take over. So, yeah, I mean, I think that this whole system is in a place now where people are recognizing these vulnerabilities. Like the Tim Cooks of the world have, like, woken up. And that's why, to go back to microchips, you have Intel and others being like, you know, we're going to spend, I forget the figure. It's tens of abilities.

billions of dollars to build more fabrication capacity in the U.S. TSM, which is, you know, they make almost all the high-end chips that we all rely on. They're building a new fabrication plant in Japan. They just announced, interestingly, that plant is not for the latest generation of chips. It's for the old chips that the automakers need and can't get enough of. So people are kind of saying, oh, this needs to be more resilient. And the one, One way that you build resilience, of course, is redundancy. After hours of dedicated research, nothing feels better than the satisfaction of finally finding the information you've been looking for.

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you need indeed. Okay, let's switch to something you already mentioned very briefly, but clearly is an overarching theme in the book, which is time, saving time, making things happen as quickly as possible. And you mentioned the chaos, not the chaos, but the activity at a port like Long Beach or L.A. or Shenzhen or whatever. And it's kind of awesome to behold. You see these pictures of, you know, what looks like acres of shipping containers lying on the ground. And I read an interesting statistic here that the average time to unload a container from a ship in North America is 76 seconds. In Northern Europe, it's 46 seconds. And in Asia, it's 27 seconds. So I thought 76 seconds was pretty good. But they're even much faster in Asia. So it reminds you. It reminds you.

be a little bit of, you know, trying to get to a sports stadium for the big event or trying to park at an airport where you have many, many people trying to converge on a tiny place. And there must be both science and engineering that goes into figuring out the most optimal way to get this stuff to happen. Yeah, and there's a lot of fun math, which I think you should probably enjoy. You know, like it goes back to, I think it was Claude Shannon. you know, having to, the problem of figuring out how big of, or how many, I forget the name of, the people who like used to direct phone calls in the old days. Operators, yeah, or switchboard operators.

Operators, how many, yes, how many switchboard operators do you need so that, you know, X number of people in a town will be able to connect 90% of the time? And that turns out to be this really interesting mathematical problem. And that kind of math, which among other things led to so-called queuing theory, which is literally the math of waiting in lines, is absolutely integral to the entire supply chain because everywhere you go in the supply chain, everybody's waiting in a line. You're a ship waiting off the shore to get on in. And then once you pull these containers off as quickly as possible,

and maybe you're using robots to help you do that faster, now you have a whole new queue. Every terminal in a port is just a big, messy, three-dimensional line queue where containers are stacked on top of each other and they're moved around. And they need to be in the right place, which is on top of a stack, not that far from the far side of the terminal, at the moment that a truck pulls up to grab that container and then cart it off, you know, to a warehouse. And the thing is, if you fully unloaded a modern container ship, I did the math, it's in the book, and I can't remember exactly the math. But if you fully unloaded

a modern container ship and you allow a reasonable distance between the trucks doing it, the line of trucks would be like 50 miles long. That's the length of your queue from one ship. Per ship. And so now you can see the sort of challenge of making this work. And you can also see the value of why so many ports are turning to automation to do things like groom the yard of containers, which just means rearranging them continuously with these big robots, so that the containers are kind of moving through with the least number of total moves smoothly from where they're pulled off the ship to where they're put onto a truck. And that's just one of the queuing problems, right?

And there's queuing problems throughout the whole thing. And it's nevertheless a, of interplay of human judgment and automation. Like you have this fascinating story of just piloting the ship into the port, right? Like there needs to be a highly paid ship's pilot who is local to the port, who goes on a little tugboat or whatever, climbs onto this big container ship and then pilots it in. Yes. I mean, the harbor pilot thing blew me away because the simplest way to put this is that for every for 90% of the stuff that you own which comes on ships 90% of everything as rose george's book is called um someone had to risk their life right at least at that one

moment to get it to you and what i mean is that to transfer the specialized pilot who knows how to navigate that giant ship into the very tight confines of a port that person had to um you know motor out to that giant container ship on what's called a pilot boat. And then because the pilot boat's so tiny and the ship is so big and there's this ocean swell happening, they have to time it just right where the two ships are moving up and down and with a different period and kind of nimbly hop from the deck of the pilot boat onto what to this day is still a rope ladder. And then they got to scramble up the rope ladder before the swell of the ocean catches them because if they get sucked under, their survival rate is like zero.

So over the course of a harbor pilot's career, there's a one in 20 chance that they'll die on the job. Wow. And these are not people who are disposable in any sense. I mean, no human life is disposable, but in terms of their expertise, because these are the most experienced pilots in the world. They have to be an ocean-going pilot for years and years, generally.

And then they have to pass this insane test that's like the test that cabbies have to pass in London to become cab drivers, the knowledge, where they literally fill out by hand a giant paper map of the port that they're going to be harbor piloting in and it takes them like six hours to write in all the features and the depths and the hazards.

So the things that they do in terms of steering this boat are just unreal. Because it's something with the mass of a skyscraper and the tolerances as they go under a bridge or the tolerance between the bottom of the ship and the bottom of the ship channel could be like a meter. and then they've got to get it right by the key side to within a meter or two of where it's

supposed to land between two other ships that they don't want to crash into so that the electricity and the fuel can be hooked up properly. So it's just like crazy. It's like stunt driving, but with a skyscraper. And it doesn't seem like the most rationally designed system in the world. I mean, are ports constantly being reinvented to be better, or are they just sort of scrambling as fast as they can to keep up with the changing global supply chain. I think that there is an element of scramble, but the thing is that ports are public infrastructure. So, you know, it's not like Amazon's like, oh, we need a bigger port. I mean, we might get there.

But, you know, what happens is you get billions of dollars of public investment by, you know, let's say the state of California in this case or the cities, because they know, that they're going to recoup it because of taxes and economic activity. But that kind of investment and expansion takes decades in order to make these, you know, the challenge they have now is that because it's more efficient and cheaper for the ocean shippers, these container ships have just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. And now they're really at the limit of what these ports can handle. I could talk about the shipping and the containerization forever.

So like I said, but we should shift gears a little bit to. the manufacturing side of things. And as you point out in the book, you know, the issues that were always there in the factories on the manufacturing side of things are now there at the opposite end of the supply chain in the fulfillment centers, right? I mean, it's a very full circle kind of operation. But tell us about Frederick Winslow Taylor, because here's another thing where if you're in the business, this is just like he's super famous. Everyone knows him. It's like who's Einstein? But if you're not in the business, you've never heard it. This guy. Yeah, Fredlick Winslow Taylor, he's like, you know, he's like what, you know, what Karl Marx is to communism.

I think Taylor is to modern kind of technological industrial capitalism. But his name is not familiar because his ideas have become the water that we swim in. He was really the first management consultant. And he invented this whole idea of like time and motion studies and speeding up the labor of people who are in jobs that involve a lot of routine like manufacturing. That's where he started. And of course, you know, should be stated that this was one of these moments in history of like dual discovery, like Newton and Leibniz, both coming up with calculus around the same time. Because at the same time that Taylor came up with all of his ideas, Henry Ford was, and his team was coming up with the same ideas in order to get employees to be able to keep up with

the pace of the assembly line, which he had just invented, or borrowed really from slaughterhouses. So Taylorism is just this idea that you can, you can break down, you know, a job into these minute tasks, time every single one of them, and come up with better ways to do it. And what it leads to is the speed up of work. And the way that Taylorism was implemented back at the beginning of the 20th century, workers found it so brutal that at the Watertown Armory where it was implemented by the U.S. government, a bunch of them went on strike. And then there were congressional hearings, and Congress declared that Taylorism

could never again be used, like anywhere in a federal facility, which is ironic because, again, now it's kind of like the way that everything is run. The modern day version of it, I call Bezosism. And Bezosism is just what's what happens in Amazon fulfillment centers. It's Taylorism. It's the ideology of Taylorism, kind of carried down to us through a bunch of other management consultants combined with very sophisticated systems for observing in real time every single thing a person does, right?

It's technological surveillance. And then once you have all that data, you can manage people by algorithm, right? So if somebody falls behind in an Amazon fulfillment center, he's not their boss who's like, hey, work faster, went back in the days of Taylor. It's an algorithm. And it just says, hey, you spent too much time off task.

Or it says, hey, this is your third warning in two weeks. You know, this algorithm is going to write you up. And then you're going to go talk to your human manager. So management by algorithm, obviously you see that everywhere now. You see it in the way that like shifts are scheduled at, you know, fast food restaurants, the way that the pace of work is regulated at fast food restaurants, the way the pace of work is regulated at call centers, obviously the way Amazon fulfillment centers are run.

And, you know, part of the kind of great resignation we're seeing now, I think, is people rebelling against that style of work. Because it's, you know, everybody has a bad day. But if your manager's an algorithm, there's no button you can press. on your app to be like, I'm having a bad day. Give me a break. Well, that's what's so crucial about this moment when Taylor comes along. And I mean, I think that you're right. The impression I got from reading your book is that Henry Ford obviously played a huge role here. But the most striking thing about Taylor's way of doing things was rather than just telling workers,

okay, this is your task, now do it. And even more than just saying, do it fast or we'll fire you or whatever. It was this observation of, you know, looking at different workers doing it different ways, figuring out what was the most efficient way, and then not just telling the workers to do it, but do it in this exact way with this exact sequence of movements. So on the one hand, it makes things a lot more productive, efficient. On the other hand, it does leach the humanity out of the human being that is actually doing this task. Yeah, everything depends on how much agency that worker has. So I had a really interesting conversation with, you know, some sociologists and labor economists. And they pointed out that, um, there are industries like automobile manufacturing

where, you know, obviously workers are unionized. So they have a lot of say over the, how their work is done where those workers, one sort of presented with, hey, here's the way to make your work more efficient. What do you think about that? And they can push back on it and be like, well, this part isn't safe or this part isn't sustainable, you know, telling people, hey, let's make work more efficient and safer and more humane. Everybody, most people will sign up for that. But when workers have no agency, then what can happen is what we've seen in Amazon's warehouses where the pace of work and the repetitive nature of the work, which is directly a product of the automation that's being incorporated into that work, leads to things like so-called musculoskeletal disorders,

i.e., you know, like carpal tunnel syndrome, whatever, because the human body was not designed to do this exact same action. I know your viewers can't see it, but I'm picking objects off of the shelf in an Amazon warehouse as quickly as I can and repeat that action over and over and over again. I mean, we all know anybody who's done any athletic activity that your joints are going to give out if you do the exact same thing over and over again for 10 hours a day, every work day.

Well, you mentioned the fact that there is a correlation between increasing automation in these centers and increasing injury rates in these centers for the human beings who are still there. I mean, is part of that just that we're in a transitional time and we haven't yet figured out, or the bosses haven't yet figured out, that it's important to keep your employees healthy, and so let them vary their routines or vary their tasks or something? Or is it just we're going to dispose of these human beings eventually, so who cares? I mean, I think that Amazon has been in such high growth mode for so long, that the people in charge, whether it was a conscious decision or not, have been like, okay, if we're going to make this business big and profitable,

this is the pace of work that we need to set. And I think the challenge that Amazon has now is they're bigger, they're more mature, there's more scrutiny. But just as importantly, the labor market is starting to do its job. Economics is working in that there are so many fulfillment centers. Amazon has such a high demand for workers. Everyone does now because it's a labor shortage, especially for blue collar workers,

that raising wages is no longer enough. If you have 100% turnover per year, which is not at all atypical for these warehouses, you need to figure out how to hold on to those workers longer. And when every time your workers organize, they're telling you our issue is not benefits and wages. Those are fine. Thank you, Jeff Bezos.

Our issue is working conditions. At some point, they have to listen. Otherwise, they just cannot run their business because they just can't recruit and retain, they can't recruit workers fast enough and they can't retain them long enough because there's only so many human beings of working age in an economy.

That's just the way it works. Well, a big part of it, we should talk about the concept of deskilling labor. I don't know if this goes back to Taylor or whoever, but the idea that we want to take the trickiest parts of the manufacturing process and give those to the robots, to the computers and whatever,

as much as we can. the loom makes it much easier for weaving to be done by unskilled labors. And so you figure, well, now I can just replace my workers with anyone if the parts that they have to do are very simple. But there's still, like you say, a bottleneck with a number of people that exist. Yeah, I mean, deskilling has been integral to the expansion of Amazon and countless other businesses, right? Oral fast food industry is built on this idea that you don't need a skilled fry cook to make a burger because this automated grill is doing it for you. So deskilling is just when you take the knowledge, essentially it's when you take the knowledge of the human,

you embody it in a machine, a piece of automation. It doesn't have to be a very smart piece of automation, but it is skilled in the sense that it can do a job that before might have been tricky. I like that you mentioned looms because that goes all the way back to the Luddites and Ned Ludd wanting to smash the automatic looms because they were taking away the jobs of the weavers.

But when you de-skill a task, you make it very easy, to recruit new workers, which gives you less incentive to retain them. So if Amazon can train a new Amazon warehouse worker in a day or less, then turnover doesn't become a problem until they run out of new people to recruit. And I want to, you know, we skipped over from sort of Frederick Winslow-Taylor to Jeff Bezos. But in between, there's this whole kind of fascinating culture of management, scientific management strategies, right? The Toyota Way, Kisen, lean manufacturing, and how much of these are like really

insightful ways to get manufacturing done and how many of them are sort of management fans? Yeah, it's difficult to say because so much depends on how they're applied. I mean, obviously when Toyota came up with their, you know, Toyota production system, that is the reason that Toyota took over the global, and especially the U.S. auto market. By the same token, you know, Jack Welch at GE came up with this whole idea of Six Sigma, which just as means like statistically like reducing the error in your manufacturing process until it's like not even there anymore. And, you know, all of a lot of that, or maybe all of it, really derived from, yeah,

this early kind of ideology of management consulting. Because, you know, even though Taylor, you know, he wrote this book, Scientific Management, he wasn't so successful as an individual at getting companies to adopt this. But his acolytes, which included like the Gilbereths, who then had a dozen kids. And then there's a dizzy movie called Cheaper by the Dozen, because they were applying the lessons of scientific management to managing a household, really spread this idea around. So it is this idea that just kind of gets expanded on.

Because in some sense, you know, if you're especially manufacturing, If you adhere to these dictates and these strategies, you can make an almost defect-free product consistently, right, which is the goal of manufacturing, rather than having to kind of rework it at the end, like, you know, Tesla in the early days. So it does work, and it does get implemented differently all over the world. So the Toyota production system, obviously, Japan is a completely different cultural milieu. than the U.S. because at the time the Toyota production system is being ramped up,

you know, it's a culture of, you know, lifelong employment. It's this deep relationship between the employee and the employer. So there it was more about like,

let's empower the worker. Like if the worker sees something wrong, they get to pull their little and on flag and say like, hey, something's messed up here. That exact sort of idea, set of ideas got imported into

Amazon by some executives who I talked to in the book, you know, but it got mutated in some ways and that became Bizaicism. They took out the worker empowerment part and just put more surveillance in. What do Best Buy, Wayfair, Marco Polo, and Among Us have in common? They trust Linode as an alternative to the cost and complexity of the world's largest public cloud providers. Linode makes cloud computing simple, affordable, and accessible. Whether you're working on a personal project or looking for someone to manage your company's

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to do something to be low, but it better not have that much variability around it. And part of that optimization problem has helped us create this culture of just-in-time manufacturing, right, where you manufacture something and then basically ship it to a person rather than letting it sit in a warehouse for a long time. And again, that's great for efficiency and productivity, a little worrisome when it comes to vulnerable points in the chain. Right. I mean, it's pretty straightforward. If you don't have any extra inventory sitting around and there is a supply shock where you can't get enough of something, or suddenly it takes you twice as long to get it across the ocean on a ship, then you know, you're screwed. You're

going to run out. Okay. And then the final step, we've gotten our raw materials. We've shipped them around the world. We've made a product. We've shipped it in a container. We send it to a fulfillment center and now they're sending it out. So there's a whole other step of getting the goods to people. I mean, and maybe we skipped over the trucking step where we get things from the port to the fulfillment center. But both that trucking step and then the delivery step is just a whole another invisible culture of human beings in the United States that you don't paint a very rosy picture of the life of a delivery person or a trucker, I got to say. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, truckers really, I mean, they, I think what sums it up, there's this amazing 2017 feature in the New York

times and one of the truckers whom they interviewed said, you know, we feel like throwaway people. And, you know, it's an industry where we often hear about, oh, there's a trucker shortage. But the truth is there's not a shortage of people who want to get into trucking. There is a burnout and a retention crisis. There are three times as many people in the United States who have the kind of commercial driver's license required to drive a truck as there are. of working truck drivers. And it's not because they all retired

and are having a nice life in like the Lake of the Ozarks now. It's because they burned out or they didn't even last two weeks and were like, this job sucks. I'm getting out of here. And frankly, I don't think truckers get very good representation

in Congress because this big lobbying body there it's called the American Trucking Association. It represents these really big carriers, but they don't even represent the majority of the trucking industry. Most of the trucking industry is like individual owner operators, small trucking companies.

They have their own lobbying body that somehow doesn't get quoted very often. So, you know, truckers, you know, they are, here's the typical life of a trucker, right? They're on the road 21 days out of every month. That means they're nowhere near home or their family. They're working 14 hours a day. 14 hours a day is because the federal government limits them to 14 hours a day. It used to be more. They're getting paid by the mile.

So if they're sitting at a warehouse where they have no control over how fast their truck is being loaded or unloaded, they're not getting paid for that time. There may not be a place for them to sleep at night because there's not enough berths at truck stops and rest stops. So they might have to illegally park down the side of the highway. You see this. Once you know that this is a thing, you see it all the time. You're like, why is that truck just parked on the on ramp or the off ramp? It's because that poor truck driver couldn't find anywhere else to sleep. And also, by the way, I think because maybe many people don't know this, when you say find a place to sleep,

you're not talking about a hotel. They sleep in the truck. It's just a matter of where to park the truck while you're sleeping. Yes. So and on top of that, I mean, I think there's this impression like, oh, drive a truck.

I can drive. Like, I can do that. No. Like, it is a skilled job to not kill yourself and other people because the physics of a fully loaded truck mean that it's going to take you, you know, a football field or two to stop.

and you may be driving in inclement weather. And the whole time you're trying to rush, rush, rush, because you're trying to get to that next destination in time or before your federally regulated time on the road runs out. Meanwhile, you know, you and your boss and or your kind of freight company like C.H. Robinson is trying to find you your next load to pick up along the way because you're kind of just like most of these truckers are kind of just like,

freelancers and they're just like bouncing from point to point. You know, and that's the life of like an independent trucker. If you are a trucker driving for one of these big carriers and you're new to the industry, it's really like indentured servitude. You may owe them for the training that you got to become a truck driver. And, you know, so you've got like at least a year contract with them that you can't get out of. And, you know, you're working like 80 hours a week and you're making $45,000 a year. And you never see your family.

Well, one thing that, one impact that your book has had on my life is that I'm going to definitely think more carefully about changing lanes in front of a truck on the highway. Because, you know, clearly, like you say, the physics of it is complex. And I get the impression that truckers are constantly being annoyed because they try to leave some space in between their truck and the car in front of them. So it's just begging for people to, like, cut in front of them. But that's very, very dangerous, apparently. It is. It's the worst thing. Never, never cut in front of a truck. Like, don't pass a truck until they're at least like, you know, a couple hundred feet behind you is what I would say. And when you talk about like the number of hours that they're working per day and that's regulated by the government and they can't cheat, right? Because they're being monitored. It's in this surveillance state, this Michel Foucault kind of thing where we're keeping track with GPS or whatever of exactly how long they're on the road every day. Yeah, the same management, the same intensive monitoring by technology and management by algorithm that you find in, you know, Amazon's warehouses, you find a different form of it for truck drivers. So yeah, there's GPS.

There's like, you know, this little computer that, you know, is tracking their time. And look, I mean, it got put in place for reasons that are good, which is that people are like, well, we don't want truckers driving too long. That's unsafe. Fine. Perfect. Good. but the problem is because truck drivers were used to the old system where they could kind of fudge their records, you know, maybe they get to a warehouse and somebody's being slow about loading their truck,

they're going to hop in the back and take a nap. Well, now that nap still counts as their workday. So they're under the same pressure to get loads from point A to point B just as quickly, but in a way they have less flexibility about how they do it. It's not, yeah, like I said, it's a sort of dispiriting kind of picture of our world. And the fact that he raised about the representation in Congress is an important one, because part of the sort of standard solution to some of these problems is, you know, yeah, there's the ruthless efficiency of capitalism that is going to squeeze everything it can out of these workers.

And then that's supposed to be ameliorated by the government setting some standards. Is there hope, whether it's in the Amazon fulfillment center, in the trucking industry for more humane working conditions being enforced, by law? Well, in the Amazon warehouse, California just passed a bill that limits the quota systems that Amazon uses in its fulfillment centers. And Amazon can't just pull out of California. So that's going to have a significant effect there.

As for truckers, the only provision that I'm aware of that's in the infrastructure bill, which may not pass anyway, came from the American Trucking Association. And get this, it is a request that they lower the age. at which you can get a commercial driver's license from 21 to 18. So the ATA is just like, hey, get us more cannon fodder. Also, teenagers with their teenage brains are going to be driving these, you know, enormous trucks on our roads. So, yeah, that industry seems very fragmented, very dysfunctional.

When you talk to people who really understand it deeply, they're like, they shake their heads and they're like, what are we going to do? And in the meantime, I am genuinely concerned that it will lead to, you know, problems in the supply chain

that will affect us all because it's true. You know, by value of goods, it's like 90% 90 plus percent of the value of goods that moves through America. It does.

It moves on trucks. You know, like that old phrase, like if trucks stop, America stops, it's true. If you can't get it at your grocery store,

it's probably because they couldn't find the trucker to deliver it. And there is this closely related part of the system, which is the individual deliveries. I don't even know what the terminology we use here, but the U. the last mile delivery, UPS FedEx and all that. UPS FedEx. And also, as you mentioned, companies like Amazon might just be building

their own networks to do this. And you paint a very vivid picture of once again how much pressure there is on these drivers to be efficient, to move quickly, and to get it done. Yeah, I mean, there's tremendous pressure. and there's a lot of variability in that industry in terms of how drivers are treated. If you look at a company like UPS, the company is more than 100 years old,

it's unionized, it's a real no-joke union, it's the Teamsters. You know, it is what academics call like business unionism, where it's not like, there two are locked in battle all the time, like the union makes concessions so that the business can continue to run

and be profitable and everybody can have a job still. But it means that, you know, UPS is pretty conscientious about training their drivers to be safe, about helping them if they get into trouble with too many packages and such. And then kind of on the other end of the spectrum, you have FedEx is all subcontracted delivery companies, so none of their drivers are unionized.

And then Amazon just copied FedEx's model to build their own last mile delivery network. So when you see those big gray vans with the Amazon logo on the side, that is a local company. It's like a franchisee almost, a local company that contracts with Amazon and then on the other end hired a bunch of drivers. You know, Amazon has recognized that the pressure to deliver so many packages so quickly, you know, has affected potentially the safety of those drivers. So their response, typical Amazon was, let's put more surveillance on the truck. Like, let's put more cameras facing out and facing in so we can watch them be unsafe. the funny thing when you talk to Amazon about this

whenever you ask them like have you ever just considered like lowering the pace of work they're like no that could just be bad messaging on their part like I think that in warehouses they probably are doing that lowering the pace of work sometimes because they can just it's just a little toggle on some engineer's dashboard somewhere like

fewer widgets but you know it's a lot of growing pains because it's a company where I don't know if I would call it growth at all cost, but it's just a very aggressive environment where it's like everybody should perform at the highest level all the time. And if you can't do it, like we're just going to cut you from the team. And maybe that works when you're kind of

the upstart and you're challenging the world's retail giants and e-commerce is a small fraction of all of retail. But like now that it is such a big proportion of it and they got a, you know, it's like we all kind of live and work in the company store, like the United states of Amazon, you know, the way that people are employed has to be changed. I mean, I totally get the critique, but if I'm honest, I love Amazon. I use it all the time. And, you know, I don't, I try to spread out my e-commerce and, you know, buy from independent bookstores and things like that as well. But it's just so convenient. Oh, my goodness. How can you help? But buy from Amazon. Well, I mean, Matthew Glacius, the former founder of Vox and political commentator,

he said something, which is funny, but I think true, he's like, sometimes I wish that a company like Amazon would become so dominant because then it would be easier to regulate this very fragmented industry of supply chains. And it's like, a fair point, you know, because like trucking is super fragmented and like, that hasn't helped those truck drivers at all. Like if Amazon had to own its entire trucking industry, like, if you have a same thing, democracy like it could make you know setting out fair rules easier and more possible and again when I talk to Amazon workers which I have with some frequency they're they're not asking people to boycott the company like the Nabisco workers who are like don't buy you know um

frost of miniweeds or whatever um they're just like we want to highlight what's going on because you know we want working conditions to improve so I don't know that it's about Amazon is evil and Amazon needs to be kicked to the curb. I think it's more like Amazon represents this new reality, which frankly is being copied by countless other companies, whether it's Walmart or Target or Lowe's or everybody who's moved into e-commerce. And kind of as a society, we need to take a hard look at what this means for workers

and the environment and everything else and make decisions, informed decisions about how we want to regulate that and when we don't want to regulate it. Well, now that we've discussed how modern manufacturing crushes people's souls, let's not neglect the fact that there are also interesting math problems that come up, which we like to talk about here on Minescape. And you just very briefly in the book, like mentioned one fact that I thought was fascinating

and worth a whole other book. The difference in the, at the sort of level of FedEx or whatever, between the hub and spoke model, where there was a few centers that everyone, drove to and everyone drove from versus more of a mesh. Like as a network theory person, this is fascinating. We're somehow learning on the fly how to optimize this network in different ways. And I'm wondering how much of that is just trial and error and how much of that is actually mathematicians or engineers, computer scientists, thinking about this. Well, if you start to dig into the supply chain literature, the amount of mathematics and engineering and

computer science in there is really mind-boggling because it's these big, meaty problems where if you can make a fraction of a percentage point difference in the efficiency of a port or a delivery network or whatever it is, you can save somebody like tens of millions of dollars. So the companies in that industry invest unreal amounts in the engineering and the mathematics. I mean, UPS spent $300 million. This was like 20 years ago. $300 million. just to stand up their Orion software, which, you know, dictates like the roots of UPS drivers every day to make their delivery network as efficient as possible.

I mean, who knows how much they spent since then updating it, probably, you know, a comparable amount. And that's just UPS. Like, UPS is not known to people as like a technology company or anything. I mean, if you just imagine how much R&D Amazon spends to optimize its own warehouses in its own network. Like, yeah, there's so much mathematics. and it's and it's all of these you know p versus mp like you could not solve this problem

the traveling sales thing problem yeah it's like you're not going to solve this problem before the heat death of the universe so how do we approximate a good enough answer um so so it is it's definitely an industry where um that kind of math uh just makes such a big difference that there's that there's so much thinking about it and so many new models and the application of new tools. You know, like, you know, I often think that AI is really oversold, but that the most boring applications of machine learning are often the best. Yeah. And, you know, predictive analytics. It's like it was just born to try to predict demand and predict seasonal fluctuations in demand and, you know, heat map where things need to go in the most optimal way. Like,

it's, this is a great application for it. And you spoke before about, um, so you, I mean, you just mentioned the, the AI, the automation part of things. Let's sort of, uh, wind things up with this, a view of the future. And I think there's two big questions here. One is, what is the role of increased automation? It's not going away. We're not decreasing the amount of automation, right? And then is there some, um, sense in which any of these innovations can actually help workers, can give them a bit more agency, or is it all just a downhill spiral from here on in? Yeah, I mean, I think what we're seeing in the kind of the nature of work in general is this

kind of polarization where, like, yes, the American middle class is getting hollowed out. And yes, a lot of people have been pushed down the scale of income into jobs that are more managed by algorithm. them. But also, you know, many, many people have been pushed up that income scale and are doing jobs that no machine can do, right? Like sometimes people talk about how do you want to future proof yourself? Like, well, like figure out how to solve problems and be creative and get an education because these are the things that automation can't do for us. So I think the sort of the real kind of challenge of our time is how do we make sure that as we incorporate more,

more automation into our economy, which does make it more productive, right? Which can make life better for everybody in theory. It certainly produces more wealth. You know, this is obviously the sort of big political issue of our time. But I think on a fundamental level, it comes down to like, for a lot of people, like, just the dignity of work and how much opportunity they have to make a living wage and have a permanent or a stable job or not. And so I do think that as we.

incorporate more and more automation, there is an opportunity to do it in a humane way. And there are examples of this in other countries in the U.S. at other points in history where automation has increased productivity, but people have enough agency and enough security in their jobs that it is a net benefit for them. But, you know, obviously we kind of haven't been heading in that direction for most of the last, let's say, since the 70s. I do take Solis and the fact that like we are experiencing now the so-called great resignation and people are kind of seem to be revaluating their lives and have you know some savings and what else so that they can make these job changes um i do think it's kind of forcing a reckoning uh and i am hopeful

that it will then force a lot of companies and a lot of engineers to look at the on the ground impact of the automation they've created and make it more humane. And my final thought on that is I actually know somebody who turns out is the type of like process engineer who does this kind of stuff on a consulting basis. And she told me, you know, I've worked on these warehouse systems before. I had, I'm so glad that I read this part of your book because I'd never thought about it from the perspective of the worker. This person is not a psychopath or an unkind person. It's just they're thinking about it in terms of my job is to optimize this system. But, you know, we have.

have to take this more holistic view. And maybe to just get on the table the most obvious thing that you didn't even bother to say, but there's this very old idea, which has always thus far been wrong, that if you decrease the number of hours it takes to perform a task, people will do less work because they don't need to do as much work to get the same stuff done. And, you know, people a hundred years ago were imagining that by now, we would have three-hour work days and three-day work weeks. but the work always expands to fill the space in some sense, right?

Because our demands always expand. So, yeah, I mean, if we all were content with, you know, leading the live that our ancestors had, you know, in the 1950s, given the increase in productivity since then, like, yeah, we could all work like three days a week. But we wouldn't have, like, you know, kidney dialysis machines or MRI vaccines or the internet or anything else. So we just keep making our material culture more complicated

and the energy and complexity embodied in, you know, our consumer gadgets, for example, represents all the extra labor that has to be performed in order to maintain our modern standard of living. And there seems to be no end to that. So, yeah, machines don't take away jobs, but they can change the nature of those jobs for good or for ill. And I think understanding that process and being aware of it gives us the opportunity

to kind of bend the arc of history toward making work more humane and more dignified. You mentioned creative jobs. And I always, you didn't say this, but let's just air the idea. I do think that there's in some circles a kind of utopian idea that maybe someday will all be writers and poets. But once all the menial tasks have been taken up by. robots and computers. And I think that that's a very almost elitist kind of attitude. Like, I think that there are people who just don't want to be writers and poets. Or, you know, they, on the one hand, like to work. On the other hand, they're happy to do something that is sort of a solid, predictable work because it's not their lives. Like, they get the meaning out of their lives

somewhere else. They just want to go to work, do a good job, and be safe. Like, they don't want to work in terrible conditions, but they're not, you know, rebelling against the fact that they don't produce great works of art. And you had, again, one little sentence in the book. It's a very rich book in terms of individual threads you could pull out where Amazon had a program where it would let its workers train to be higher skilled laborers. And number one, the workers are like, I don't have time for this. You're working me too hard. But not. Number two, the kinds of jobs they thought of training for were basically to be a truck driver. It wasn't to be a coder or a manager, right?

And you had the most popular certificate was the truck driver's license. And so, I don't know, maybe you mentioned the great resignation. You know, maybe we are on the cusp of a transition where some people won't have to work at all. I did a podcast episode with John Deneher who really just sort of intentionally pushed the most utopian. automation is going to free us from drudgery kind of point of view. But you need, on the same hand, to have some basic income or something like that. And maybe the stimulus checks were the first step in that direction. I mean, so anyway, I've just blabbed a bunch of things. Do you have some big picture visualization of how the future of all this is going to shake out, let's say 50

years from now? I mean, I can't predict how it's going to shake out because there's so many contingencies that I can't anticipate the impact of like, you know, extreme weather and accelerating climate change and stuff. But, but I do think, I do think, you know, that we kind of have the opportunity to, yeah, I mean, work shouldn't be exploitative. It shouldn't be unsustainable physically. Like, these are basic, I mean, it occurs to me in this moment that maybe we should consider them rights, like a humane work environment. should be a right. We certainly have the resources, the productivity in our economy to accomplish that. And we used to have stronger labor protections, which sort of treated this as a right.

I think if we move in that direction, yeah, like, look, this whole idea that we're going to get fully automated luxury communism or whatever you're going to call it and everybody's just going to be a poet. Like, I got news for you. Like, half the people are just going to sit around, like, smoking weed all day and be very unhappy. Like, you know, doing stuff, the dignity of work is extremely important. People need to feel empowered by like, I did this thing and then here's the result. Like that is, that's instinctual for most of us, I think. So, yeah, this idea that we're just going to end work seems silly to me.

And it also just completely misreads what automation does to economies. And I think that no matter where people are on the political spectrum, everybody gets this wrong. It's so aggravating to me. It's like I want to write a whole book about just this and other myths about technology and its effects on society and just be and just shake people and be like, look, listen, what technology does is it changes the nature of work and we need to be aware of the way it changes the nature of work so that we can continue to maintain like humane, dignified work. And yeah, not everybody has to like derive their life's meaning from work. And frankly, more of us should stop trying to derive, you know, our,

life's meaning from our work. I think that's the other thing that the great resignation is about is people pulling back and being like, yeah, I'm in a creative profession, but it doesn't define me. Like, I'm not my job. Like, oh, maybe I should go connect with my community. Maybe I should spend more time with my family. Like, maybe I should have a hobby for the first time in my life. But so I want to, I want to complicate that. I like everything you just said, but I'm going to complicate it just a little bit in two ways. One way is I absolutely believe that there are plenty of people out there who derive dignity from work, even if it's not creative and fulfilling in and of itself,

the very act of doing work and contributing something and occupying that part of your day is useful. And we need to have an economy that lets people do that in a meaningful and well-compensated way. On the other hand, there will be some people who want to sit around and smoke weed or sit around and play video games and actually are happy because of that, right?

And maybe that should be okay. Like maybe we can change society, And, you know, like I say, usually, once we're past the one hour mark in the podcast, we can just say any crazy thing we want. Can we change? Instead of saying that, you know, automation and productivity gets rid of jobs and work, I mean, maybe it gets to the point where it allows us to imagine changing society so much that work becomes less of the linchpin of our lives. I do like that idea. And I do think we need to do that because I think that if you, I mean, I have my undergraduate degree is actually in anthropology. And, you know, one of my professors' favorite things to tell us about was that, you know, Hunter Gather societies or the original affluent society.

Like the number of hours it takes, you know, a Kung San tribesperson to gather enough calories for the day and do their chores or whatever is like four. And the rest of the time they're going to sit around like, you know, chewing the fat. with their neighbors. I mean, look, we have had, you go read the book bowling alone. Like, we've had this real kind of tragedy, this death of civil society. At the end of the day, I think because people are just too busy. So yeah, like, if we can take some of this wealth and this productivity we've created and figure out how to distribute that, you know, whether it's through higher wages or,

you know, other government subsidies or whatever your political orientation, leads you to want to favor, then yes, I think we should aspire to return to a world where everyone doesn't have to work as hard because we will have a healthier world, we'll have a healthier planet, we'll hopefully reverse the trend of more and more people reporting that they're anxious and depressed every year. I mean, I do think that we have, the industrialization of our economy and Taylorism and the spread of all of that. this has created a, you know, a cultish ideology that everybody should just work, work, work, work more. And the highest value is, you know, X, Y, Z measure of success. And, you know, we, I don't think anybody actually,

most people actually really don't want that. So whatever we can build to get us there, whether it's, you know, universal basic income or however people want to attempt to get there, or, you know, my favorite thing is like, we really should change our labor laws to allow, to make it easier for workers to unionize again because I'll tell you what that's how we got the 40 hour work week that's a really fast way to get wages to go up so that people don't have to work as hard whatever your preferred solution like yeah we should do that everybody should be working less i like it that's a perfect place to end up so christopher mims thanks so much for being on the mindscape podcast sean this is generally a pleasure i you have had the best questions of anybody so far all right

don't do any more this is it let's let's go out on the top