The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door — Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

Episode Date: September 26, 2021

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims The Wall Street Journal technology columnist reveals the fascinating story behind the misleadingly simple phrase shoppers take for granted—“Arriving Today”—in this eye-opening investigation into the new rules of online commerce, transportation, and supply chain management. We are at a tipping point in retail history. While consumers are profiting from the convenience of instant gratification, rapidly advancing technologies are transforming the way goods are transported and displacing workers in ways never before seen. In Arriving Today, Christopher Mims goes deep, far, and wide to uncover how a single product, from creation to delivery, weaves its way from a factory on the other side of the world to our doorstep. He analyzes the evolving technologies and management strategies necessary to keep the product moving to fulfill consumers’ demand for “arriving today” gratification. Mims reveals a world where the only thing moving faster than goods in an Amazon warehouse is the rate at which an entire industry is being gutted and rebuilt by innovation and mass shifts in human labor practices. He goes behind the scenes to uncover the paradoxes in this shift—into the world’s busiest port, the cabin of an 18-wheeler, and Amazon’s automated warehouses—to explore how the promise of “arriving today” is fulfilled through a balletic dance between humans and machines. The scope of such large-scale innovation and expended energy is equal parts inspiring, enlightening, and horrifying. As he offers a glimpse of our future, Mims asks us to consider the system’s vulnerability and its resilience, and who shoulders the burden, as we hurtle toward a fully automated system—and what it will mean when we are there.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with a another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being here to see the video version of this,

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If you're watching the live feed right now, you can send us questions and they're pertinent. We will throw them at the author. We're not going to wing them at them hard. We're just softballing a little bit. We don't want to hurt our authors because that might be bad. We'd probably get some lawyers told me to say that. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets

from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold. But the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book.

And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom-made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from

beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out, or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by the show. Today is an author that we have from the Wall Street Journal, and he has published a book that just barely came out, September 14th, 2021. It still has that steaming new book smell that you get from all the fine bookstores. The book title is called Arriving Today, From Factory to Front Door, Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy. His name is Christopher Mims, and he's going to be on the show talking to us today. He's a tech columnist at the Wall Street Journal, a life enthusiast, and author of the newest published book, arriving today from factory to front door, Why Everything Has Changed and How and What We Buy.

Welcome to the show, Christopher. How are you? Great. Thanks for having me, Chris. Thanks for coming, and congratulations on the new book. I just want to comment, though. Isn't it amazing how the smartest people are named chris or some variation of chris or matt or matt okay there okay i i think judges will we take that answer i believe that's acceptable for today so christopher give us your plugs if you want to find you on the interwebs yeah easiest way to find me is just twitter.com slash mims. That has a link to the book page and also not hard to find my author page on the wall street journal with all of my

most recent articles on my work. I always surface it on Twitter first. Yeah. And you've been with the wall street journal for seven years now. Yeah. Seven years. Cool. Muck rack out there. Congratulations. A lot of journalists that we have on the show, sometimes they're, they're moving around, but that's a good thing. People have heard of the Wall Street Journal. It's been around for a couple hundred years or something like that. At least a hundred. Anyway, so welcome to the show. What motivated you to write this book? What made you say, gosh, darn it, this needs to be- The initial spark for me as a technology journalist was I was standing in a warehouse, a fully automated warehouse just outside of London. And there were literally two people, humans present. And

it was just this sea of robots done by a company called Okado. And they do grocery delivery in the UK. They're very well known there. They just got a $20 billion deal to bring their technology to the US. And I just thought this is unbelievable Like, this is unlike anything I've ever seen. It looks like the Matrix, these robots skating around, grabbing objects and carting them off. And I wanted to know more. And what I discovered as I went was, wow, there is this enormous system for getting things from the factory generally in Asia all the way to our front door. It has all these different legs. It's really like a planes, trains, and automobiles type situation, except it's ocean going vessels and ports and the biggest cranes you've ever seen. And then long haul trucking and these fully automated warehouses like the one that I saw on loan now, most of which are owned

in the US by Amazon. And I just I really got sucked in and I realized, wow, that sort of childhood question you have of where did this actually come from? Who made this? This is a question we can all answer. We can all feel more connected, I think, to our material world. And that ended up being really gratifying, really rewarding. So I thought, let's keep going. Let's turn this into a book. And you started that before the COVID epidemic? Yes, long before. This was entirely, this is just coincidence that now supply chains are on people's minds because of shortages. I really, I was inspired by other writers.

I was inspired to just do an explainer. I really wanted to unpack this and make it accessible for readers. And then as I was maybe two thirds of the way through the research of the book, the pandemic hit. And at one point I was standing on the dock of this giant port in Vietnam and news was just trickling out about the pandemic happening in Wuhan. Honestly, I got out of that country just before they locked it down. It was all coincidence from there on out. And then I ended up doing a bunch of reporting masked with other people masked in the middle of the pandemic. And that really made it visceral and real. And frankly, I think it remains contemporary because a lot of the conditions that I saw persist to this day and

frankly, aren't going away anytime soon. Yeah. I mean, we're in chip shortages and everything else. What gives an arcing overview of the book, if you will, or whatever tips you want to touch on just to tease out to readers. Yeah. So if you'd like an overview of the book, it really is this path from factory to front door. Most of these factories, obviously they're in Asia, way more than I think people realize are in Southeast Asia or South Asia, as opposed to China. And they begin their journey on a truck and getting stuffed into those ubiquitous shipping containers. And that is its whole own amazing technology, the way that ports are organized, the amount of automation there, the surprising amount of robotics. You get it onto a ship, a ship is basically a giant robot that floats on the ocean. It's almost entirely automated.

That's why they have such tiny crews these days, even though they're these enormous vessels. It gets into the port of LA and Long Beach. Here again, there's a ton of automation. But this is the point at which the journey becomes really labor intensive. It becomes a human story. It gets onto a truck. That's an intensely human story. I spent a lot of time with long haul truck drivers. I did ride alongs. I really got to know their world. What are the struggles there? Why do we have a trucker shortage? It gets in an Amazon warehouse. I spent a lot of time with people who actually work in those warehouses. And I tried to give people a balanced view. Why do some people stay with those jobs?

And yet we get all these media reports about it being this absolute sweatshop that no person can possibly endure for any length of time. And that's true for some people. From there, it goes through parts of the supply chain that nobody ever sees because they're so highly automated that there's the odds that you would know somebody who works in those facilities are very low

because they're mostly robots. That's the middle mile. Then it gets to a delivery station. It gets onto a truck. And I spent time with this amazing UPS driver in Connecticut, Jenny Rosado, did her route with her. And that is just an amazing thing to experience firsthand because throughout the supply chain, there's really no such thing as an unskilled job.

There are a few, maybe at Amazon where they've de-skilled them so much that they can train you in a day. For the rest of the links in that supply chain, it's really hardworking people who really know what they're doing and have to be very dedicated or they couldn't survive in those extremely physical jobs that are very demanding. And so just bringing so much of the personality of the people who do it into the book, but putting it in the context of all of this automation, all of this IT, all of these algorithms that now rule the work lives of millions of Americans, all the people who in the old days we would have considered middle class.

But now that's challenging because our economy is becoming more and more polarizers, inequality. What's the experience of everybody who participates in this supply chain? That really ends up becoming the story by the end of the book. And even interesting, there'll be robotic trucks soon, or I think there's some on the road, isn't there? Yeah. So, you know, I devoted three chapters to my first love, which is technology and AI. And I spent a lot of time really going deep with the companies that are making that happen. I spent a lot of time with Too Simple,

which is one of the big automated trucking companies along with Aurora and others. And I really got to know how that system works. And I spent time in Arizona actually riding along in one of those fully automated trucks. So I've seen it do its thing from launch to going out and coming back. And I think there was only maybe one or two disengagements at some moment where the safety driver has to take over. So I've seen that truck make visible on its internal monitors, its thinking and how it functions and how it evaluates what's on the road. And I got to really relate how those kinds of self-driving systems work. I think we hear a lot about Tesla's self-driving system, but how do you like real industrial grade self-driving systems that are not intended as a science project,

but really are intended to take the driver out from behind the wheel as soon as possible in a context where people are actually trying to make money on it. I also spent time with the smallest of autonomous vehicles, right? Like the Starship Robotics, the six-wheeled coolers. They're all over America's college campuses. And it was really incredible to see how that business works, how quickly a technology that seems magical becomes mundane, becomes just the way that you order a drink from Starbucks and boom, it's right outside wherever you're studying or your dorm in 10, 15 minutes. And the only humans

involved were the ones who made your drink. I also spent time with a neuro in Houston. They're doing a car size autonomous delivery vehicle. So I saw that whole range and it's really interesting to see both how far it's come and how many challenges are yet to be overcome. So in other words, I'm always really skeptical when people say these, you know, drop jobs and delivery and trucking and all the rest are going to go away soon. I'm like, not in the real world. It's going to take a long time. Would you say 10, 20, 30, 40 years? It really depends. So the challenge with autonomy, I think the thing that people don't widely appreciate is for it to work at all, the scope in which it operates has to be really limited. In other words, okay, it's not going to operate in this kind of inclement weather. It's not going to operate at night. It's not going to operate outside of this particular

geographic area. It's not profitable to run it in this other context because the risk reward just doesn't work out because these things are going to fail sometimes. Even if they're safer than humans, they're going to fail sometimes. So you could see it on particular routes. I don't know, 10, 15 years. It depends on how the regulations shake out really more than anything. But how long until you're going to see it outside your house? That's anybody's guess. It's dependent on so many different things.

So let me ask you, is this book really important for a lot of people to read and understand? Because there seems to be a lot of fantasy people, especially in the political world, who believe that stuff just magically shows up. And there's this narrative that certain political parties have of we need to bring jobs back here. These things in China where they have Foxconn and stuff, that needs to be brought here. Is that just fantasy to think that we can somehow replace

the whole system of what you've tracked from Southeast Asia to South Asia? It would take us probably, I don't know, what, 50 years to rebuild something like that here, even if it were financially feasible? Yeah, as Steve Jobs told Barack Obama, those jobs are not coming back. Yeah. They're just not. You can't relocalize an electronic supply chain from East Asia or Southeast Asia anytime soon. And it would be almost impossible to do, even if you had absolute government fiat and a mandate to make it happen. Yeah. The idea that you're just going to move that back to the United States is a fantasy.

Also, I would question, why do you want those jobs? They're not, by the standards of most Americans, good jobs. Why wouldn't you want... China doesn't even want those jobs anymore. That's why they're going to Vietnam and Southeast Asia, as I saw. So with countries like China trying to upskill, as they put it, and get more people writing software and making intellectual property and stuff. I in america that's what we do better than anybody why wouldn't we want more of that why do we want more of this other type of job that even china is trying to get rid of yeah if you watch the workers at foxconn in china and stuff that's not like the funnest looking thing they live in dorms they get woken up at 2 a.m to to fulfill so they can build the iPhone 13 by the millions in order to satisfy consumers all over the world.

I can't imagine Americans adopting those work policies. Let's all go move to a work camp so we can make iPhone 13s domestically. So is this book really important for a lot of people to read and understand? Maybe we need to teach it more in school so the people don't have this fantasy that, like you said, the Starbucks cup just shows up and they're just like, wow, I ordered it from space and it just landed. They need to really understand how much work goes into this process. Yeah, look, every author thinks that their book is super duper important. And I could name 100 books right now that I haven't read that I know are as important or more important than mine. But I think if you have any bit of an interest in where things

come from, how the nature of work is changing, how automation and management by algorithm is changing the nature of work, you know, how our global supply chains work, how we got to this point in history where, you know, globalization has really led to a reduction in global inequality, but an increase in economic inequality in the US. If any of those questions are of interest to you, and you like robots and technology and stuff, yeah, you should pick up my book. I honestly, it is a long journey. But I think that there are individual chapters about all of these topics, all of these legs of the journey that I think are going to be worth the entry price alone for individuals who are interested in how does shipping work? What's it actually like to work in an Amazon warehouse? What is the future of autonomous trucking? Those are all their own

kind of things that people can skip around and just pick up. Frankly, as a curious person who enjoyed reading books like this, when I had the opportunity in seminars in college and stuff, I hope a lot of educators picked up and are like, here, students, read this chapter. This is the thing that I want you to know. Yeah. I mean, and I think it's really important for people that are cow-toed around by political parties that are telling them, hey, it's just, the jobs are over there. It sounds like what you've documented in your book is a lot of the jobs in America are still here in the supply chain, like the truckers and the specialized workers that you mentioned. So there's still, it's not like the job just disappeared and there's no connection to America anymore. And I don't know, the stuff flies in from a store from China and gets dropped into Walmart.

And there's always, I always love the people who are like, you know, we need to quit having China build our stuff. Meanwhile, I got to go buy some stuff at Walmart. And there's always, I always love the people who are like, yeah, we need to quit having China build our stuff. Meanwhile, I got to go buy some stuff at Walmart and I want the cheapest prices Walmart can deliver. And you're like, wait, you tell the market, you demand the market what you want and it delivers. And then you want something else politically. Yeah, there is some irony in there's this thing that a lot of people don't know about, which some in the industry call Fulfillment Center Alley. And it is this cluster of these giant fulfillment centers where all of our e-commerce goods are fulfilled, whether that's Amazon, Walmart, Lowe's, Home Depot, Chewy, you name it. And they're all clustered in this area, especially on the East Coast where America's population is dense, where labor is cheap, land is cheap, but they're all within an hour's drive of major American population centers. You have similar things in middle America on the West Coast. And there are a lot of people who work

in those fulfillment centers who in another era would have been working in manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt. So there has been this kind of direct transfer from America used to make stuff. Now America has to distribute a lot of stuff. And that's where a lot of our middle class jobs have gone. The ones that haven't gone to the service sector or to hospitality. I think on balance, it's probably good that these jobs are moving into the supply chain because at least they pay more than minimum wage hospitality and service sector and fast food jobs. There's a lot of screaming and crying about my local checkers can't hire people. And it's your local checkers really isn't paying people very well, nor is it

treating them very well with its shift scheduling algorithms. Wouldn't they be better off making $18, $20 an hour at a facility where they might have a little bit more control over the circumstances of their work. That said, Amazon is notorious for not giving workers very much control over the circumstances of their work. As Amazon matures, that is changing. I think really notable that California just passed a law kind of dictating that Amazon has to be transparent about the quotas for workers and its warehouses and the amount of units of work they have to do per hour and may limit those quotas in some ways. I think that's a sign that this industry is maturing. And I don't know if

Amazon workers are ever going to unionize like the United Auto Workers. Certainly, Amazon doesn't want them to. But it does mean that these millions and millions of supply chain jobs that didn't exist before the rise of e-commerce, because we all went to the store, all that labor of going to the store and buying stuff ourself, like that has to be done by somebody else. Now, if it's going to get delivered to your house, that's millions of new jobs. Yeah. I hear they're going to put covers on the pea buckets the Amazon employees use on the floor. I'm just kidding. No. So you did go find what it's like to be an Amazon employee. Tell us what that is so we can break up some of those jokes and misnomers that I have. Yeah. So the experience varies a lot. Like I said, like any big corporation,

it really depends on your immediate managers. That said, there is a remarkable consistency because so much of it is what people call management by algorithm. And so literally, the algorithm is your boss. The rate at which you're pulling stuff off shelves, which is called picking, or putting it on shelves, which is called stowing, or putting it in a box, which is going to go out the door, which is called packing, That rate is dictated by the algorithm floats according to an average of what everybody in that facility is doing. But Amazon has made no bones about it. They say, we're proud of the fact that we're a tough place to work. We're like Marines. We'll train you in a day. Let's see how long you last. I think that they are dialing that back a bit because frankly, they just need so many warm bodies that they can't afford to just churn through bodies that they can't afford to

just churn through people. They can't afford the rate of turnover that they had before. So that's one reason that you see them raising wages, making promises to change working conditions. They just need to make it a place where more people can work, not just the industrial athlete, the young person or the older person who is really physically fit, who can keep up with that pace and doesn't mind the monotony and frankly, the isolation. If you work in one of these facilities, it's a 10 hour day.

You get a half hour break for lunch. You get two 15 minute breaks. If you're taking any other breaks longer than a minute or two, that's time off task. You get dinged for that. If that happens often enough, you can lose your job.

Meanwhile, in most facilities or almost all of them, you're not allowed to listen to music even. There's nobody standing close enough, you can lose your job. Meanwhile, in most facilities, or almost all of them, you're not allowed to listen to music even. There's nobody standing close enough to you for you to talk to. So it's 10 hours a day of really being isolated in this kind of cubby where it's just you and the machine. And you're doing the same task over and over again, hundreds of times an hour, which is also why people get repetitive stress injuries.

And I can barely sit at my desk for eight hours a day because I'm older than 40. So these jobs are definitely not for me without feeling soreness in my back. Imagine if that's your entire job. Amazon is starting to recognize that this is not physically sustainable for most people and that just burning people out and then sending them on their merry way is not the best way to determine who gets to work there and who doesn't. Wait wait to get 50 in your bladder is not going to work with the amazon system there's lots of p breaks when you break 50 it's true imagine that you you use that break and 10 minutes of that break gets used just walking to and from the bathroom it wasn't much of a break i would just install never mind imind. I would be, I would be, I just almost admitted

being more maniacal of a boss. I'm like, I would just install a little toilet right at the citizen, but I'm going to hell clearly. One thing I'm seeing up here, especially in Utah, I've heard there's some pressures in Vegas. I don't know other parts of the country very well. I'm not getting feedback from friends, but here in Utah, we're having severe problems with employee shortages. And there's a huge competition for pay structures, like you mentioned earlier. We're usually seeing it on the 24-hour businesses. We had one hotel, which is a major hotel here. They just had to tell people, hey, man, you're just going to have to fend for yourself. We'll change your room about every three days if you're here. And yeah, there's a thing for

the soaps. And like at one point they had an event here, like an event at the hotel convention, if you will. They didn't have like service. They couldn't do the morning stuff. A lot of our, we had a 7-Eleven closed in my town because they couldn't keep that open 24-7. A lot of the 24-7 gas stations, you go in and like, you know, get a Coke in the middle of the night or something. And those have cut the arrows down. We're still seeing the COVID hours here in my city. And everywhere you go, there's like these signs for, we pay this, come on in. And it's kind of funny to watch because this guy's 13, this guy's 14.

You're like, yeah, you guys aren't getting it. All right. Somebody else has got 15.6. Are these issues that we're having in our supply chain right now? Is that a supply chain? It's related in that a lot of supply chain disruptions are due to shortages of workers to do these jobs. What you're describing, it's universal. I see it everywhere. That's really visible because it's in the service sector. But now keep in mind that you're seeing those kinds of labor shortages in the invisible supporting infrastructure, which I write about. For example, just to go deep for a second on trucking, because I think it's a fascinating example. Trucking is a highly

fragmented industry. It's lots of small trucking companies. There are a few big carriers like Warner and Swift. But at the beginning of the pandemic, the demand for goods transported by truck just crashed because the stores were closing and everything was shifting. Very soon after, of course, we started to have shortages. Then demand exploded. In the meantime, lots of those small trucking companies shut down. In the first year of the pandemic, the number of truck drivers in America actually shrank.

But then demand came roaring back higher than it's ever been. So now you have many fewer truck drivers that are supposed to carry significantly more freight. And you have these huge imbalances. Like so much of the freight is coming from the West Coast because it goes through the ports on the West Coast because goods coming from Asia. But keep in mind that on the East Coast, people aren't making a ton of goods that people want to stuff in the trucks and ship back to the West. So you have these crazy imbalances. 10% of all loads that shippers want to ship in a truck from the West Coast right now are just getting refused by truckers because they're like, nope, I'm on the wrong coast. This isn't on my route. And so it shows that there is a real shortage there of people to move these goods around.

And that causes a lot of these shortages. So absolutely, the labor crunch is in every field you can possibly imagine. And it definitely affects our ability to get things. And it depends on the segment. This is also why Amazon has had to hire so many new people. They just announced 125,000 more people. That's on top of the hundreds of thousands they added throughout the pandemic. And they grew their permanent labor force by 30, between 30 and 50% over the course of the pandemic.

And so much of that isn't even visible in their actual employment numbers because all those drivers in those trucks with the Amazon on the side, they don't technically work for Amazon. They work for small delivery companies that work for Amazon. So they are just, they're hiring like crazy

because they just, they don't have enough capacity to make all of our deliveries. And everybody I talk to now has, I had a package get lost or it got delivered really late. That's even when it's available. So step one is, can I get it? Step two is, can I get it to me? And in a lot of ways, I think that's only going to get worse over the coming months. Yeah. And I, like I mentioned in the green room, my book, I keep getting all these messages from everybody actually, just not even my book, but from the publishers where they're like, it's going to take longer for shipping. Oh, and the prices are going up too, which you're like, wait, what? And they're just supply chains or issues and stuff like that.

Would we have been, let me see what we wrote here. We have been worse without these, the robotic systems and the system being so automated during COVID, if it hadn't been automated, would we have really been screwed if it would have been maybe 20 years ago or 10 years ago, or is more people oriented? That's a great question. Many more of us would have gone to the store. I think one of the challenges here is that you automate a system and you don't use, this is all of history, right? People don't use less of something when we automate it. They use more because it gets cheaper. And so paradoxically, all of this convenience,

all of this automation made e-commerce easier than ever. It made it easier for people to stay at home, to not go to the store. So we just use that more and more. People got in the habit of ordering. People who'd never ordered groceries before, I think the number of people who regularly order groceries online went up 30% over the habit of ordering. People who'd never ordered groceries before, I think the number of people who regularly order groceries online

went up 30% over the course of the pandemic. That is a sector that just hadn't budged for years. No one can figure out how to get more people to stop going to grocery stores and start ordering via Instacart and Amazon and all the rest. And in a funny way, the pandemic made all of this worse in two ways. Obviously, it interrupted supply chains, but it also just shifted. It shifted up by 10 years, adoption of e-commerce and delivery of every kind. And the biggest problem in supply chains these days is us. The biggest problem

is that there is record demand month after month and it doesn't go away. Yeah. I remember when the thing started and delivery services really popped and I'm like, wow, this is interesting. A huge shift. But then even then they got inundated overrun. If you were doing like Grubhub or there was a bunch of these delivery services in the area, it suddenly shifted. Like we can get your groceries in seven or eight days and just everything went off the rails. But yeah, I shudder thinking about your book and what you did, how much worse it would have been without a lot of the automation. I remember I still have everything uh went off the rails but yeah i i shudder thinking about your book and what you did how much worse it would have been without a lot of the automation i remember i still have my pictures

of going into the store and i'm like oh where's the freaking normally is you couldn't even get with the crap bread the wonder bread or whatever not to i guess so we we lost wonder bread as a sponsor and it just now we couldn't you couldn't even get you're like what's going on man like eggs are gone people are hoarding stuff and i just think how bad it would have been if it hadn't been for the alternative. But I think it's important that people understand these things and what comes to market. I think about six months ago, sometime in the last six months ago, we had a trucking company that they're a huge trucking company where they use the Wi-Fi systems or the satellite GPS systems on trucks. And so if they're independent truckers, they make sure they've got a load coming back when they go one way so they can make sure they're not running empty.

And there's like a huge just network and automation of making sure that goods are coming back and forth and truckers are making their, they always got a load on their system. But it's crazy, Like just how big the system is. And people just really don't think about it. They're just like a burger and it shows up and yeah, it's just, it's a miracle. Yeah. And to be fair, like that's all of us, right? We've all really been able to take these systems for granted because there weren't these huge fluctuations in demand. And when things just change slowly or predictably, the system works. Everybody can adjust. Everybody

makes their forecast for the next year and they meet demand. Or if they can't, then they pay a little extra on the spot market for capacity, whether it's containers, shipping containers, or ships, or ports, or trucks, or warehouses, or whatever. But these huge swings, this absolute whiplash that the entire economy has gone through, where so much spending shifted from services to goods, where so much more home delivery happened and continues to happen. It really has created so much congestion.

It's thrown so many things into question, again, because it's record demand. Everyone's scaling up, but then others are wary of scaling up. So one of the problems you have is there are plenty of players at different points in the supply chain who are like, we've seen this movie before. We are one recession away from demand collapsing. We're not going to build extra capacity because then we're on the hook for it, for these huge capital investments as soon as that demand goes away. So I'll give you an example.

Shipping companies, should we buy more ships? Because these things are enormous. Literally, it's the size of the Empire State Building laid on its side. Do I want another one of those? Do I want to service the debt on those when I think that tomorrow a recession might happen and all this extra demand might go away? Probably not. You got tons of companies who are worried about other kinds of issues.

And this is why we have shortages of things that you never traditionally have to think about, like copper or aluminum. You have tons of companies that are like, we don't want to invest in finding new sources of this or extra capacity because we're not sure how long this demand is going to last. Plus, they're all making money hand over fist, right? The price goes up. They're doing great. Maersk, one of the world's largest shipping companies,

just reported record profits. They're doing fantastic. It's not necessarily in their interest to ease these supply chain bottlenecks for everybody else. And then finally, some of them are just things that take years to fix and we weren't prepared, right? Port capacity, that's determined by cities, by how much cities and states want to invest in making these ports bigger. You can't enlarge a port overnight. That's a 20-year project. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I've been to the port in Long Beach. How do you expand that port? That thing's insane. Yeah, a lot of it is just asking terminal operators to get more efficient. That means

bringing in more automation. And then there's all kinds of other bottlenecks there. That means you got to renegotiate your contract with the union, or you got to battle them if you have an existing contract. All of these things take time. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. People need to read your book to find out most of it, but can you touch on anything in the future of what's going, us going? Is this fantasy world from politics that we could bring jobs back. Just never, ever. I don't understand why we're so hung up on bringing jobs back when we have so many jobs are empty. We were at basically full employment before the pandemic happened. The recovery has been extremely fast because of so much stimulus. I don't understand why we need to bring jobs back when we have all these jobs and we could just make them better. One of the things that I discovered in reporting this that I really didn't understand before I went

into it was that so many of the jobs that we have, there are very few protections for these workers. And I know the counter arguments, right? Lots of people are like, why should you protect the job of an Uber driver or Lyft driver? Because that'll make Uber unprofitable. Then half the people will lose their jobs and then they don don't have jobs anymore, blah, blah, blah. It's the age-old debate between regulation and just pure free market economics. But the simple fact is that we used to have more labor protection in this country. Workers used to have more power. And whenever somebody wants to wax poetic about the days when America was all made in America, and that's why we had solid middle class families. And it's,

yeah, it was made in America. You did a solid middle class families. And all of those workers belong to a union that negotiated a livable wage for them. So it's very strange to me that people like we want to bring these jobs back. But also, please don't make it any easier for people to organize, even though we've had 50 years of laws changing to make it harder for people to organize in all kinds of unexpected ways. These two things are at odds, right? We got plenty of jobs in America. We have plenty of wealth. We got corporations sitting on record amounts of cash. They're doing huge stock buybacks.

That money could be plowed back into creating more jobs through research and development. It could be put back into wages. It's not because of the incentive structures within our political system and our economy as a whole. It was interesting to me how many years leading up to the COVID crisis and people like, we need to do 15 bucks an hour. And people are like, no. And all the old darks like Jeff Bezos is like, we're going to do that because I need another boat. But yet here we are. It's totally flipped on its head. bucks an hour and people like no and all the old garks like jeff bezos is like we're getting back because i need another boat and but yet here we are it's totally flipped on its head where here we are companies have no choice but to pay those higher wages when i go into 7-eleven or wherever the store is they're like you know we can't afford people

late at night i'm like you just got to pay them more but then i understand what's going to happen that that means my coke is an extra dollar the The gas is extra. So what can you do? Anything more you want to touch on, Christopher, as we go on your book? This has been an amazing discussion. I think it's really enlightening to a lot of people. Yeah. And I think it's the sort of larger context here. It's really worth digging into where all of the automation and the technology is going. I realize we haven't talked about that part as much, but I think it's really interesting because it's both utopian and dystopian at the same time.

When you talk about more and more automation in Amazon warehouses, there are two ways that that automation can happen, right? It can happen in a way that makes those jobs harder for the people who are doing them, or, and Amazon itself recognizes this now, there are new types of kind of human-centered automation they can do where they say, hey, what if we built these systems

not just with efficiency in mind, but also with worker safety in mind? That's possible, right? If you have those goals, you can meet them. You can do anything you want with robots. That's what's wonderful about them, right? If you want to enhance physical labor with robotics, you can do that. It doesn't just have to be about this kind of relentless drive for efficiency at all costs, which frankly, in the long run, doesn't necessarily help these companies because like I said, they end up with such high turnover. Wouldn't it be better if they spent a little bit more time and were a little bit more conscientious about making this automation work with humans so that those humans can stick around, right? So you can establish a long-term labor force

so that maybe they can start to build some expertise. I think you see that throughout supply chains. I think you're going to see that in the nature of work. So much of my book was about the way that management by algorithm, you know, working alongside automation is changing the nature of all jobs. You and I don't think about it, but even if you're a white collar worker, you are working with automation. It might be in your computer. It might be in the cloud. It might be an IT thing. It has to do with the way that you process and exchange information

and work with others and collaborate. But there's automation there. You're working alongside machines, even if those machines don't have a physical body. So I think it's worth digging into, as I do, the history of where this came from, because a lot of what's going on now is all too familiar from the old days of the beginning of automation and mass manufacturing. And thinking about how do we make work better for everyone in the future? It's not just a pipe dream. Economic necessity is making it a reality now because companies are realizing to take your example of the 7-Eleven worker who's working in the middle of the night. It's not just about wages. One of the reasons companies can't hire is that if your working conditions are bad enough or just

unacceptable compared to other people's working conditions, then you can't hire somebody at any wage within that local economy because you're limited, right? You can only hire somebody for a service job if they're within range of commuting to that job. So there too, there are tons of opportunities for companies to make these jobs more sustainable. I think they just haven't thought about it until now because they weren't forced to. Occasionally they would get shamed by a report in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times about their, their major offender is the algorithms that schedule people's shifts. There were a few years ago that Starbucks got really shamed by this New York Times expose about workers being forced to close the store and then come back six hours later to reopen it because this scheduling algorithm,

not a human being, had decided, oh, this is the most efficient way to schedule these workers for this store. It's literally inhuman. Those kinds of algorithms, they still exist in many other jobs. And it's just one example of how work has been made unnecessarily difficult for people because of unaccountable bureaucracy is really what management by algorithm is at the end of the day yeah and algorithm automation this is the devil that i've learned to live with every day where i'm like how do we game the algorithm you and i are both authors so we're looking at right now how do i get a better how do i get on amazon better how

do i get on google plus better better seo all that good stuff you're like you're like this has become a thing that i have to think about every day is how do I game the system? And like you mentioned earlier, now a lot of these gas station, other places have to compete with stay at home models where a lot of employers have said, no, if you work for us, you can stay at home. And so people are sitting back now and going, you can pay me $15 an hour, but do I work at your place or do I work from home and I

can eat Cheetos half the day and play video games or something? I don't know. Take care of my kids. Right. What's the monetary value of that flexibility? And keep in mind, it's not just about eating Cheetos and working in your underwear. For a lot of people who are parents, for example, it's about what is the actual monetary value of being able to keep your kids around versus paying for daycare, which, by the way, is less available than ever because they're having a labor crisis as well. So that's the other thing is that there is a sort of emotional and psychological, but also monetary value to making work more flexible. Because if you don't have to commute, those are hours you have that you can be doing other types of work. You can be doing household labor versus paying somebody else to fill that gap in your life. Yeah. Some child supports or child babysitting stuff, whatever it's called.

Clearly, I don't have kids. It's more than a house payment sometimes. What they pay the daycares and all that sort of stuff. Absolutely. And tons of families made that decision during the pandemic. What would I rather be doing? What makes the most economic sense for my family? And what was interesting to me was we saw a huge pop like you normally see out of recessions in people trying to start their own businesses and be entrepreneurs and a huge jump in that came out of this little thing that we went through with coronavirus. So it'll be interesting to see how that develops. And I know a lot of VCs have

kind of positioned themselves because normally when these things happen, there's a huge jump in some sort of innovations that we saw in 2008, the Twitters, the Facebooks, the LinkedIn's, all that sort of stuff that came out of there. So it'll be interesting. Christopher, thank you for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate it and sharing all that interesting stuff with us. Thank you. Yeah, Chris, thanks so much for having me. There you go. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs and order up your fine book. Yeah, so if you just go to twitter.com slash mims,

that's M-I-M-S, you'll find right at the top a link to my book, links to my columns at the Wall Street Journal, and that's really my home on the internet. There you go. There you go. Order up the book, guys. September 14th just barely came off the presses.

Arriving today, and if you order the book, it will arrive probably within a day or two. Arriving today from factory to front door, why everything has changed about how and what we buy. Thanks for being on the show, Christopher. Thanks for my audience for tuning in. Be sure to go to YouTube.com to see the full arriving today video of the live version of it. YouTube.com for Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification. Go to goodreads.com for Chris Voss as well. If you return, it will arrive today. You can go to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all those different groups. Thanks for tuning in, everyone. We'll see you next time.

So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well.

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