Something You Should Know - Why Leadership is So Overrated & How Supply Chains Work or Don’t

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

Sunscreen has been around for a long time. Has it changed much? Are there advancements in “sunscreen technology”? As summer begins, I explore the newest advancements in sunscreen. https://www.realsimple.com/new-sunscreens-6831077 We revere leaders. School mottos often say something about “Developing tomorrow’s leaders today…” Everyone should aspire to be a leader. But what if you don’t want to be a leader? If everyone becomes a leader – who is left to follow? Is everyone “leadership material”? To hear the surprising science about leadership, listen to my guest Dr. Elias Aboujaoude. He is a psychiatry professor and researcher at Stanford University, and author of the book, A Leader's Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference (https://amzn.to/4b6JsOd) Over the last few years we have heard about the supply chain in the news. It’s that somewhat vague process of making and getting products to where they need to be. So how does it all work? Why does it sometimes fail? Why does it often seem so fragile? Joining me to help us understand the supply chain and explain why you should care about it is Peter Goodman. He is the Global Economics Correspondent for The New York Times and he is author of a book called How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain (https://amzn.to/3KAlQXJ).  With summer comes lightning. How likely are you to get struck? And is it true that if you have been struck once, it is more likely to happen again? Listen for the answers and details. https://www.britannica.com/question. Source: What-are-the-chances-of-being-struck-by-lightning Source: http://lightningsafetycouncil.org/ and https://www.britannica.com/question/What-are-the-chances-of-being-struck-by-lightning PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Indeed is offering SYSK listeners a $75 Sponsored Job Credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING Go to https://Shopify.com/sysk now to grow your business - no matter what stage you're in! We love the Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast! https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/business-podcasts/think-fast-talk-smart-podcast eBay Motors has 122 million parts for your #1 ride-or-die, to make sure it stays running smoothly. Keep your ride alive at https://eBayMotors.com We really like The Jordan Harbinger Show! Check out https://jordanharbinger.com/start OR search for it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, has sunscreen technology improved or is it still just sunscreen? Then we live in a leadership crazed world. Everyone should want to be a leader. However, not everybody is leadership material, and not everybody has an interest in leading. However, if you happen not to be interested in leading today, you are basically convinced that something is wrong with you. Also, it's lightning season. How likely is it that lightning will strike you? And the supply chain.

We've heard a lot about it and how it sometimes fails. But what is the supply chain? You know, we throw this nebulous term supply chain around. There are thousands of supply chains. It basically means how do we make stuff? How do we move raw materials? And how do we take finished goods and get them to your door? All this today on Something You Should Know.

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Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, and welcome to Something You Should Know. Since we're getting into the summer season, let's talk a little bit about sunscreens. Because you may not have noticed it, but over the years, sunscreens have really changed and improved. For one thing, extra ingredients are being added to sunscreens. Specifically, there's an increased emphasis on creating formulas that protect the skin

not only from the sun, but also from other kinds of light, like the light emitted from electronic screens. While that light doesn't cause skin cancer, we do know it can contribute to signs of premature aging. Still, there are myths about sunscreen. People still say, I don't wear sunscreen because I have to get my vitamin D from the sun. And vitamin D is important, but getting it from the sun may not be the best way. According to one doctor, the skin receptors that absorb vitamin D are maxed out after about 5 to 10 minutes of exposure. So if you need vitamin D, diet and supplements may be a better way to go.

The advice is still, from the American Academy of Dermatology and the Skin Cancer Foundation, wear a broad-spectrum SPF 30 or higher sunscreen every day. And that is something you should know. Leadership is a big deal in this country. It's an industry. Think of all the books and seminars and podcasts about leadership. Look at the mission statement of many schools and colleges. It frequently says something about training tomorrow's leaders,

as if we should all strive to be in leadership positions. Well, should we all strive to be leaders? Can anyone be a leader if they try hard enough? Or are leaders born? You either have it or you don't. Well, the research is pretty clear, and I think you'll find it surprising. Here to discuss it is Dr. Elias Abu-Jadi. He is a professor of psychiatry and a researcher at Stanford University and author of a book called A Leader's Destiny, Why Psychology,

Personality, and Character Make All the Difference. Hi, doctor. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you for having me. So talk about your perspective on all of this, how you view this drive to get people to become leaders, that that's what we should all want to be. Well, my perspective is that there's a leadership obsession almost that permeates all of culture, and you see symptoms of it in schools, you see symptoms of it in corporate culture, you see symptoms of it in politics. As you said, everyone and their grandmother wants to become a leader. So there's a very healthy, very exuberant demand. But there's

also a supply in the form of really a leadership industrial complex that's out there trying to convince everyone that they are essentially reasonable leadership material. They just have to sign on the right executive coach or sign up for the right leadership minor or leadership major or leadership development camp. So there's all these forces unfolding and happening before our eyes. And what is suffering along the way is our very notion of what a good leader is and how a good leader happens. We have lost sight of that. And so let's start with what you said. Is everybody leadership material? Because my sense is not only is everybody not leadership material, but a lot of people don't have no interest.

Absolutely. Not everybody is leadership material and not everybody has an interest in leading. However, if you happen not to be interested in leading today, you are given an inferiority complex. You are basically convinced that something is wrong with you. And what is it about you that's not making you want to become a leader and sign up for all these leadership-making opportunities? So no, not everyone has what it takes to become a leader and to succeed and be happy as one. So when you think of emotional intelligence, for example, these are personality traits that have been associated with the emergence and the success of leaders. And these are traits that are really either there or not. And if they're not, it's very hard to develop them.

Yet again, there's an entire industry that's out to convince us that this is possible. We can give you a personality transplant and turn you into the leader that you want to be or that culture is convincing you you can be. Has anyone considered the fact that if we all became leaders, there would be no one to lead? You're absolutely right. I mean, the world needs followers and a good leadership culture, I would say, starts by respecting, promoting and nurturing followers, not giving them an inferiority complex, which is what our current approach to leadership is doing. Yeah, well, that's the thing, what you just said, because you're almost made to feel bad.

What do you mean you don't want to be a leader? Well, it's just, I mean, leadership is in and of itself like a career. It's a thing. It's something you want to do. Maybe you just want to make widgets or own a business that makes widgets, but it doesn't mean you want to become this big world-class leader because that doesn't appeal, I think, to most people. Absolutely. And not just that, but what if you're a cello virtuoso who's applying to college? Well, you're made to feel inferior now because you can't count, you know, 10 groups that you were the president of in high school.

I mean, this thing really permeates all of cultures and starts very early. And as I see it, is very unhealthy. So what is it you think needs to happen is that we need to go back to psychology as being really the very basis of how leaders happens. You need to have a certain psychology and leadership either aligns or doesn't align with this psychology. There are many other ways to feel worthwhile, to contribute to society, to build your self-esteem that don't go through the corner office or the C-suite. foundation of leadership and is something that cannot be easily manipulated by executive coaches and TED Talkers and the whole sort of leadership industry. And more importantly, we need to stop looking down on followers, including on ourselves, if we happen to identify more with being a follower than an alpha leader. Well, are leaders, do you think leaders are born, are you a naturally natural born leader or is leadership something you, anybody can develop if they really, really want to, or is it maybe a combination of all of that or what?

I would say it's a combination, but I definitely lean more in the direction of either having these traits we were talking about or not having them. And if you don't have them, then it's a very difficult process to develop them. Now, there are things that you can be coached about. you know, body language, the importance of posture, the importance of nonverbal cues, eye contact, those kinds of features are indeed coachable. But when you think about things like empathy, self-knowledge, social awareness, wanting to lift others, wanting to serve, these are the traits that we really look for or should look for in leaders, and these are not teachable or are very, very difficult to teach. When you look at great leaders in business, in politics, in history,

can you look at them and say they all share these very similar traits, or are great leaders great leaders because they lead in their own way? That's such a great question. I would say they're leaders in their own way, but they all seem to have this EQ, this emotional intelligence piece that seems to unite them, even though their biographies are so unique, their trajectories are so different, and the circumstances of their rise cannot be replicated. So you do have this sort of undercurrent of traits that seem to be present across any number of them. But their stories are so unique, and they're unique in a way that makes you wonder about, again, the effectiveness and the efficacy of all these courses out there that seem to

suggest that leadership is linear, follow these steps, and you're all but guaranteed the position of your dreams. Is there a path to leadership? If you're somebody who is destined to be a leader, how do you get there? How do you get to the top and lead? Well, if they're destined to be leaders, and if it aligns with their psychology, they are more likely to succeed, and they are more likely to be happy leading. I think a lot of the time, people are driven into leadership through all sorts of pressures we talked about, including, you know, the cultural pressure, the intense marketing, the leadership industry. And if it doesn't align with who they are, then they are miserable leading. And as I'm a psychiatrist, I see people in my clinic, including leaders who see themselves as misfits. And it's always really striking to me how unhappy they can be personally, even when you look at metrics of success, they're actually doing

a reasonably good job. So to be happy leading, I mean, there's the issue of, you know, making it to a leadership position and succeeding as a leader. But success is not just how you are viewed externally and the metrics by which you are measured. It's also whether you are happy leading. leaders in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, who are very unhappy leading and feel trapped in this role, even though they worked for a long time toward achieving it. And they shouldn't be leaders or they're leaders, but something else is wrong. So they could be happier doing other things, and they will be the first to acknowledge that. They were driven to leadership by the wrong forces and for the wrong reasons. And even if they're doing a good job leading in terms of, again, the metrics that society and their boards, you know, are measuring them on, they are personally unhappy leading because they don't have those personality traits that align with leadership.

We're talking about leadership and why some people are cut out to be leaders and some people just aren't. My guest is Dr. Elias Abu-Jadi. He is a psychiatrist and author of the book A Leader's Destiny, Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference.

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So take a moment and think about what you're building for. We've got the financial tools to help make it happen. Wealthsimple. Built for possibilities. Visit wealthsimple. Built for possibilities. Visit wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. So Elias, so what you're saying is you kind of have to come pre-programmed with the leadership thing, because if you don't have it, you don't have it. And this have studies now. We have studies that are 40, 50 years long, where they took school children and ranked them on 30, 40 personality traits and observed how these traits changed over time. And, you know, interviewed them again 40 plus years later. And it was striking how much stability there was in their personalities. So I can point to at least two long-term studies

like that. One that looked at Harvard graduates at the age of 22 and re-interviewed them again at the age of 67. Another study that looked at students between the ages of 6 and 12 in Hawaii who were interviewed again some 40 years later. And again, the stability and personality is very striking. And that's personality as a whole, including, you know, the kinds of traits that we are talking about when it comes to leadership. And, you know, in my field of psychiatry, when you look at the history of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, of course, you know, the Freudian school of psychotherapy dominated the early history in the 20th century of my field. And Freud himself used to say that psychotherapy and the business of changing people's personalities

is not for the commitment phobic. This is a long-term commitment. It's a long-term commitment. That's a long-term pursuit and not something that you can achieve over a weekend's boot camp in leadership training. What does a leader do? And I guess what I mean by that is I've always thought that one of the reasons people don't want to become leaders is there are a lot of people who would rather do than manage other people who do. They like doing the work. They don't want to manage other people and lead them to do the work. They just go from doing the work to inspiring others to do it. So there is that ability to inspire and move people to work with you and follow you toward this goal that you've set for them. So that's the transition to leadership. And absolutely, not everyone has it in them to be able to fulfill this role and move others this way. Do you have any idea from doing the work you've done and looking at the research, any idea of what percentage of the population is really cut out for leadership. And that's why mathematically, there's more followers than there are leaders. of the chess club has much more stature than a member of the chess club. The president of your

high school class has much more stature than just a member of the high school class who may have done really well in school, but he's not a leader in that sense. He doesn't have the title of leader. Like we hold that up as being so spectacular and something to envy and strive for. But as you're pointing out, not everybody is cut out for that. In fact, most people are not cut out for that. But yet we revere those people as if we should all be that way. Absolutely. I'm so glad you bring up schools specifically because, yes, some of that has always been the case. But what's happening

is that this brainwashing has totally, you know, infected schools, and that the number of schools that are changing their mission statements, and their visions to mention leaders and the future leaders and developing the future leaders and that kind of thing. The number of these schools is staggering. You know, what happened to wanting to develop the best, you know, citizens that you can, you know, to educate the citizens of the world, the voters of the world. All this seems to have taken a back seat to wanting to develop the leaders of the future. And again, think of the majority of their students who either aren't interested in being leaders or don't have what it takes and the inferiority complex that this could give rise to.

Well, this is so interesting. And it's almost like you're giving people permission. Like, if you haven't wanted to be a leader and told you should be, here's your permission now to just say, screw this. This is not me. I'm not cut out for this. The evidence is pretty clear. And so leave me alone. Absolutely. It's okay to be a leader, but it's also okay not to be one. Do what aligns with your psychology and don't tie your self-worth to a leadership position.

You wonder how many kids have really, and grown-ups, have struggled with this because of the message of you need to be a leader, you need to lead, that's where the money is, that's where the prestige is. But if you have no interest or aptitude for it, you're bound to fail. And we have fully embraced that message, unfortunately, at so many levels, and we are paying the price. Again, look at recent stories from, you know, leaders in academia, look at corporate culture, look at politics, our approach to leadership is broken. And there's so much that, that that that hangs on this, because we face such overwhelming challenges. And if we are to meet these challenges, we need good leadership. And to get to this good leadership, you know, that's what you aspire to. And it's really essential, I think, that we've got to rethink that whole approach to leadership because, well, there'll be no one to follow the leaders if we're all leaders. But some of us just aren't meant to be leaders, and that's okay.

I've been speaking with Dr. Elias Aboujadi. He is a professor of psychiatry and researcher at Stanford and author of the book, A Leader's Destiny, Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference. There's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes if you would like to read it. And I really appreciate you coming on, Elias, and explaining all this. Great, thanks. Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure. I enjoyed the conversation and the great questions.

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and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. Have you ever thought about how the stuff you own made its way from wherever it started to you? It does that through the supply chain. Everything you buy, your food, clothes, your car, everything you have got to you through a supply chain.

And the supply chain is something very few of us really worry about much or think about until it stops working. Lately, there have been some real issues with the supply chain. Products not getting where they're supposed to be when they're supposed to be there. And that can be a little scary.

It's something we should all be concerned about and understand better. And I have just the person to explain it. Peter Goodman is the global economics correspondent for the New York Times, and he's author of a book called How the World Ran Out of Everything, Inside the Global Supply Chain. Hi, Peter. Good to have you here. Thanks so much for having me. So I have heard the term supply chain and throw it around once in a while, but I have to admit,

I don't really know what it is. I mean, I kind of have a sense of what it is, but what is the supply chain? You know, we throw this nebulous term supply chain around as if everyone's clear on what it means, almost like, you know, it's something designed. A bunch of wizards met at the top of a mountain and engineered it. And of course, it's this thing that's kind of grown of all of its own volition. Almost there are thousands of supply chains. It basically means how do we make stuff? What are the processes that go into making stuff? How do we move raw materials and parts around to factories that manufacture?

And how do we take finished goods and get them to stores and eventually to your door? So essentially, it's making stuff and getting it to you. Yeah, yeah. When you think about all the steps along the way in a supply chain, you know, building things and getting them where they're supposed to be, it seems like it could be a fairly fragile system that it could break at any point along the way. Yet it doesn't really seem to very often. I mean, we didn't really notice it or really talk about it much,

I guess, until COVID when we started to see that things weren't getting where they were supposed to be. The supply chain is actually one of those rare things that in a time when we disagree about so much, everyone loves to talk about our political polarization and how divided we are. We all do pretty much take for granted that you click here and you wait a day, a couple days, whatever, a truck shows up at your door and your goods are unloaded. You go to your local superstore and there are all of the goods you could possibly imagine. And then some. And I think that experience during the pandemic and some of it was stuff like toilet paper, breakfast cereal, and some of it was, you know, life saving things like medical gowns, medical devices, when we ran out of computer chips. It was beyond bewildering to discover that in the midst of the worst public health catastrophe in 100 years, something as basic as the supply chain buckled as well. And basically what happened, and it's a long

story, is that the works of the supply chain got swamped by the demand. So at the beginning of the pandemic, particularly in the United States, but this is really a global phenomenon, economists anticipated and people running businesses anticipated, okay, we get it. People can't go to work. Unemployment rate's going up. There's less spending power. People will buy less stuff. So those in control of factories reduced their capacity. Shipping companies took ships that normally carry containers from factory towns, especially in Asia, across the Pacific Ocean to ports like Los Angeles and Long Beach for Americans, said we're not going to need as many ships. We're going to idle them. Computer chip manufacturers said we're clearly not going to need as many of those because we

think sales for everything from iPhones to cars to appliances are going to drop. Well, long story short, what happens is people do stop spending money on all of the things that involve mixing with other human beings. We don't go to Disneyland. We don't get on airplanes to go to Europe on vacation. We stop going to movie theaters and gyms, but we don't stop living. We go out and we buy exercise equipment instead of the gym that we put in our basements and our garages, and that stuff comes from China. We go and outfit our kitchens to compensate for the fact that we can't go have a restaurant meal. We buy appliances, baking goods. We buy all sorts of gadgets to amuse our kids. And it simply overwhelms the works. And at the same time, and we can talk

about this, the supply chain was already quite fragile because it had been governed by something called just in time. This idea that, you know, why waste money if you're a company warehousing goods against some trouble that will probably not happen anytime soon? Let's just go lean, have minimal inventory, and we'll take the extra money and give it to ourselves through executive compensation or to shareholders through dividends. So when the pandemic hits, inventory is low and we had devalued a lot of the labor. So we supposedly run out of truck drivers, which is just a fancy way of saying we run out of people willing to live the miserable life of the truck driver because we downgraded wages. Same goes for warehouses. The same goes for lots of industries involved in moving goods to our doors.

But doesn't the, generally speaking, when the, because you can't run your business planning for the next pandemic to hit. So when these things, disruptions happen and we run out of toilet paper, it fixes itself fairly quickly. And then we're back to equilibrium. Well, yes and no. I mean, toilet paper got fixed because it turned out we didn't really have a shortage in the production of toilet paper. What we had was panic buying, and people started hoarding. So we had this imbalance that, yeah, that fixed itself. The impacts of a lot of these supply chain disruptions are still with us. I mean,

computer chips, even a year after the shortages, you had people who needed medical devices. I mean, I tell the story of a guy in San Diego who needed a medical device for sleep apnea. It's a guy whose next breath literally depended upon having this device. And he couldn't get one because the manufacturer in San Diego discovered that four layers of the supply chain down, like the company in Australia that makes a little piece of a part that gets sent to Dubai for processing that eventually gets sent to Taiwan to be turned into a computer chip. Well, that company didn't have enough computer chips and they were not prioritizing medical devices. They were prioritizing the biggest customers. The biggest customers are

Google and Apple and other electronics gadget makers. The same goes for contractors who still can't get hold of things like doorknobs or shades of paint or coatings. And this is part of the reason why we have this housing unaffordability crisis in the US. We can't build as quickly as we want to. So yeah, market's correct. And some markets have indeed corrected. We ran out of boba for boba tea. Well, that's not true anymore. There's plenty of that. There's plenty of breakfast cereal on the shelves. But some things that we really need are still in short supply. And what we've learned is that this web of connections is really fragile. We don't know what the next shock will be,

but there will undoubtedly be one. And we're still vulnerable to the next disruption. When I think of the supply chain, I think about things being moved around the world. You know, stuff from here goes over there and stuff from China comes here. And I know you talk about some of the milestones. The invention or the development of the container ship has to be huge in terms of the supply chain and moving things around the world. Instead of, you know, centuries, literally, of technology not changing much, where people on the docks did these incredibly dangerous jobs, took days and days to load and unload ships.

Everything was essentially a custom job. You got to put this big hunk of beef over here, this big barrel full of oil over there. Well, the container ship allows you to put anything you want in a standard size box and stack it like children's blocks. It fits on the end of a truck, fits on rail, makes everything move much faster. And you get the rise of China as a trade colossus. China enters the World Trade Organization in 2001. Well, so if you're a CEO of a company, you're sitting in a boardroom in New York or Seattle or wherever, and your job

is to make life good for shareholders. The best way to do that is to lower your costs. Well, you now, between the shipping container and the rise of China, which has what seems like a sort of inexhaustible supply of cheap labor, you can make incredible amounts of stuff at really cheap prices and get that stuff on ships. And shipping is effectively free because most of the shipping companies are connected to the state. They're keeping their, and by state, I mean, you know, South Korea, I mean, Taiwan, I mean, China. It's about keeping shipping prices low to boost exports. So you have this perfect apparatus to get stuff made cheap and ship it over to the United States until it breaks down. And when it breaks down, we wake up in the middle of the pandemic to discover, oh, something like

90% of our face masks that we need to outfit our frontline medical workers in the middle of a pandemic, they're made in China. And guess what? We're having a trade war with China. Well, that's somewhat inconvenient. But it would seem that you cannot possibly predict everything that might go wrong. So we have trouble with China getting things from China. So even if we fix that, something else is going to happen that we weren't prepared for because you can't prepare for everything. True. But you can have a hedge and you can make sure that you do have some warehouses with backup parts of important things. If you're running a factory, I mean, this goes all the way back to Henry Ford and the beginning of mass assembly. You better know, who am I depending on to get me my goods? And what could happen

such that I won't be able to produce at all? And you better have a backup plan. And for decades now, we have had people running major businesses who've been so incentivized to cut costs and make stock prices go up in the short term that they've just completely abdicated that basic responsibility. But it seems that companies would have learned just from the pandemic that things have to be changed. People can't just go, well, I'm glad that's over and let's go back to the old way of doing things and wait till the next time things go down the drain. I mean, there must have been lessons learned from this. away from heavy dependence on Asia and move stuff closer to their biggest market, the United States.

Walmart is in the process of moving production to places like Mexico. You don't have to depend upon shipping to get your stuff into North America. There's a push now to look at India, which is the one country that's big enough that it might actually be able to replicate some of China's supply chain. So some of that will happen, but history is not comforting. I wrote my first supply chain disruption story back in 1999 when there was a big earthquake in Taiwan and it hit the computer chip production there. And a lot of people said, oh, whoops, we're too dependent on this one island for computer chips. We should take a look at that.

And then nothing really happened. The landmark in this story is the Fukushima disaster after the tsunami in Japan in 2012. Again, we ran out of computer chips and other electronics. And a lot of people said similar stuff. We're really too vulnerable. We've overdone it with just-in-time manufacturing. We need a more resilient supply chain. And here's the problem.

The basic incentives for companies, especially publicly traded companies, have not changed at all. I mean, if you're the CEO of a company and you say, hey, I think we should actually add to our costs by warehousing more stuff as a hedge against the next disaster, whatever that might be. Or I think maybe instead of just leaning on China, we should go set up production facilities in Turkey or Mexico or whatever. And that's going to cost us some money in the short term.

That's an invitation for the board to turn on you when your stock price doesn't perform well. Whereas the guy who says, hey, let's just cut costs to the bone, it might be five or six years or 10 years or whatever when the next crisis hits. And by that time, that guy's on a hammock somewhere drinking a cocktail and it's somebody else's problem. And that fundamental structure has not changed. And it doesn't seem like it's likely to because it isn't really human nature to prepare for something that you can't see, that you don't know what it is.

That, yeah, I get that you could stockpile stuff in a warehouse so you have some inventory in case something happens, but it just doesn't really seem like that's the way the human mind works. That's why there needs to be a serious look at workplace conditions for people we're depending on to drive our stuff around, to keep our rail systems moving. Shipping is the area that's sort of least regulated. I mean, we are living in a moment where three alliances, think of this like airline alliances, you know, like your Star Alliance or One World or whatever, three alliances of shipping container companies dominate 98% of the traffic from China

to the West Coast of the United States. And so during the pandemic, we see the cost of moving goods from the factories of China to the West Coast of the US, and I should add LA, Long Beach, these two ports, that's the gateway for 40% of the imports entering the United States. Well, the cost of moving one container goes up tenfold in the middle of the pandemic. So what happens? Amazon, Walmart, the largest companies are able to pay the freight. They can charter their own ships. And everybody else gets whacked and consumer prices go up.

That's a failure of regulation there used to be rules that would prevent that sort of price gouging and there just aren't anymore so if the current system isn't working and causes breaks in the supply chain what's a better way to do it as consumers we have to think about place, again, in a way in which we haven't. I mean, I think most of us walk into a Walmart or a Target or a supermarket or whatever, and we're just thinking, we're assuming that someone's looking out for us in terms of basic product safety standards. We're comparing prices, we're taking a look, and that's as far as we go. It's time to start thinking about where things are made and to give a little bit of thought to the conditions under which they're made.

And then in terms of labor, I think we should welcome this wave of labor mobilization that's allowing working people to get a greater share of the bounty of our very successful form of capitalism. And then the government is going to have to step back into markets that it's essentially relinquished since people like to start with Reagan in the 80s, but it's really Carter in the 70s. Carter started the deregulation of transportation systems, trucking, shipping, rail. And the result of that is we've got monopoly markets. We've got very limited supply. We've got big companies. I mean, rail is a subject we could talk about for hours. We have rail systems that from the beginning of American history have really been engineered for

the investor's interests and not the interests of people who need to move stuff around. And we've done better at other times in history. In the middle of the 20th century, we did a decent job of gaining the market forces. I mean, we don't want to live in a society where the government dictates everything, but somebody's got to be on the job preventing price gouging, preventing monopoly power. And if we did all of those things, we would have a more resilient supply chain. But at what cost? Seems like things would be much more expensive.

Well, they might be more expensive on individual products at any given point in time. But what was the cost of suddenly having to pay ten times as much to move a container full of goods in the middle of a pandemic? What was the cost of not being able to get medical devices in the worst of the pandemic? What was the cost to people who bought cars in 2021 and 2022 who had to pay $10,000 more than the list price for a new car and just as much for a used car because the auto manufacturers couldn't deliver the goods. I mean, if you've telescoped the sticker price at any given moment in time, it might be marginally more to shift some production from China to India,

from China to Vietnam, from China to Mexico. But we know that when this system breaks down, there are social costs that are not easily captured in numbers. And the numbers themselves go up when companies that effectively have monopoly control over our lives jack up the prices. What about the companies that move the merchandise, the railway and more interestingly, maybe the shipping companies, the ones with those big cargo containers on them that travel around the world, it seems like they would have a lot of power over what gets where.

In the book, I tell the story of talking to this guy, Dan Maffei, this former congressman from upstate New York, who Trump first appointed to the Federal Maritime Commission, a body that I'm sure no one has ever heard of. And it became very important in the middle of the pandemic because it regulates shipping. And suddenly, Dan Maffei is supposed to fix the global shipping crisis. Biden has a ceremony where he thanks him as he signs this piece of legislation called the Ocean Shipping Reform Act that's supposed to give this obscure body the right to get involved when shipping companies really seem to be giving American importers and exporters a raw deal.

Almond farmers in the Central Valley of California are sitting on a year plus of inventory that's sold to places like the Middle East, Japan, and they can't get their product there because the shipping carriers aren't even bothering to stop to pick up their nuts at the port of Oakland because they're making so much money moving factory goods from China across the water to LA Long Beach that they're emptying the containers and then just putting them back on ships empty to go back to China to load them with more stuff as quickly as possible they can't be bothered to go up the up the coast to oakland to you know fill up with some almonds that they're going to take so these almond farmers are totally screwed and dan mafe the head of the federal maritime commission is supposed to fix this and when i start talking

to him about this it becomes clear he's like well i better not push these companies too far because they might you know they might stop serving the american market really so you think that uh mursk the giant danish shipping conglomerate might decide to just bypass the world's largest consumer economy if you try to scrutinize their business too hard but that is the situation that we're in we are at the mercy of these foreign carriers well it's interesting how the supply chain conversation is something that we kind of hear about a little bit in the background we don't most of us don't really pay much attention to it don't really understand it and yet it impacts everyone I've been speaking with Peter Goodman he is the global economics correspondent for the New York Times, and his book is called How the World Ran Out of Everything Inside the Global Supply Chain. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you so much, Peter. I appreciate you explaining all this. Oh, I loved it's right now.

Lightning strikes peak between April and November in most areas of the country. So how likely are you to be struck by lightning? Well, according to the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the odds are that you will be struck by lightning in the U.S. during your lifetime are 1 in 15,300. On average, 270 people in the U.S. are struck by lightning every year. Only about 10% of those people actually die from the event. Around the world, approximately 2,000 people are struck by lightning every year. Lightning strikes are most frequent between 4 and 7 p.m., which unfortunately is the time of day when many

outdoor games and events take place in open fields and near water. Is it true that if you've been struck by lightning once, you're more likely to be struck again? Well, sort of. But it's more of a lifestyle statistic. If you've been struck by lightning and continue to engage in lightning-attracting activities like golf, you're more likely to be struck again. And that is something you should know. I know you're busy, you have a lot of things to do,

but if you would please take a moment and leave a rating and review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn, CastBox, wherever you listen, it would be greatly appreciated. I read them, other people read them, and decide whether or not to listen. So it would help us if you would leave a rating and review. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? We're serving up four hilarious shows every week designed to entertain and engage and,

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and Friday. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors

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