The Ricochet Podcast - Ship Happens

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

When elected leaders decide to look the other way from… ya know… the matters that actually matter to us, we find out about the kinds of people America has in its reserve stock. Yes, the supply chain is a mess; but we’ve got all three hosts to chat with Ryan Peterson, CEO of Flexport, who hopes to fix it. (Take a look at what is likely the first-ever viral tweetstorm on shipping logistics... Source

Nothing? Is it square or is it kind of roundy? I have a dream. This nation will rise up. Live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal. That's for the jury to decide. I said it couldn't come in, and it isn't coming in. No matter what you think.

With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Lylex, and we have Peter Robinson and Rob along with us today to talk to Ryan Peterson about shipping and what happened and how to fix it. So let us have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 570.

One of those rare shows can be expressed in four Roman numerals. Join us at ricochet.com. Be part of the most stimulating conversations in and community on the web. And speaking of which, before we get to the show, I'm going to say something that may sound like a commercial, but it's not. And I'll tell you why at the end. NDQ stands for No Dumb Questions,

brand new Ricochet podcast. It's not that we've banned dumb questions. It's just the fact that really there aren't any dumb questions. You know, you ask the experts to get what you get. We have some of the savviest political observers out there. Next week on No Dumb Questions, our new feature for Ricochet members, Chris Steyer-Walt. You probably know him from the stint running Fox News political editor and his role in explaining the decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in 2020.

In addition, added bonus, this No Dumb Questions will be hosted by our friend David M. Drucker, senior correspondent for The Washington Examiner and the host of Ricochet's own In Trump's Shadow, the Battle for 2024 podcast. No thing about politics themselves, you might say. So join us on Zoom, Tuesday, November 16th, 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. Bring your toughest questions for Chris and Dave. Sign up today at ricochet.com slash join. Again, that's ricochet.com slash J-O-I-N. No dumb questions. And why wasn't that a commercial because it was a promotion anyway on with the show hi i'm james lalix and cold clammy dank minneapolis peter robinson and sunny california rob long i believe is uh i flan you're about the boulevards in paris with a berry in the striped shirt and the baguette and i'm in paris i'm struggling with my as always whenever i travel with my stupid equipment like for some reason the micro doesn't work i don't understand

i go into excruciating detail because it's that kind of behind the signs little stuff that people love the moment you land in france it happens every time you become suspicious of american technology yeah if only it was american technology i actually it is it is it's i'm suspicious and furious at apple computer which seems to invent new usb connections every time it does anything and then you buy them and for some reason they don't work yes when did you learn that the thunderbolt which looks like the c is not uh rob i have to ask do you know why the traditional cliched image of the Frenchman in the striped shirt and the beret and the cigarette and sometimes the suspenders,

do you know where that comes from? No, I thought it was a breton, right? Isn't it a breton fisherman? Well, we'll get to that at the end of the show, because I don't want to take a valuable palaver time here. But Peter, Rob, I think the most consequential thing going on this week, and I may be wrong is the uh kenosha trial and it's sort of like the conservative world broke down along two sides one

there's the well he definitely shouldn't have been there but he was right to defend himself the other side is well he's right to defend himself but he shouldn't have been there and i'd like to come up with a third alternative which flatters me and slays both of those from it by saying that, you know, he probably is is not guilty of murder. It's often self-defense. It's a question. It was ill advised and unwise for a young man to put himself in those situations. But the real, real responsibility rests with the rioters and the civil authorities that failed to keep the city safe. I'll sign up to that one.

I'll sign up to the Lilacs view. I mean, I'm a layman. I'm watching this trial in snippets here and there on Twitter and on Fox News. And I mean, I think I'm the father of five kids. If I had a 17-year-old running down the street in a riot with a rifle, I'd think I had done something wrong. My child should not have left home that night. And there Kyle Rittenhouse was in the street in the middle of a riot carrying a rifle. So something is very odd there. but you look at the tape he's being chased they're shouting someone says cranium him apparently cranium is a slang term for shoot someone in the head

he's knocked down um people approach him and try to stomp on him and someone pulls a gun and points it in his direction if if is if his firing under those circumstances isn't self-defense, I don't know what is self-defense. So that's the way I see it. It looks pretty obviously that way to me. I have to say, I'm more and more impressed. Am I repeating myself? I probably am. I'm more and more impressed by the simple common sense and the poise of Tulsi Gabbard, who's a Democrat.

I know she's a Democrat. I know she and I disagree on all kinds of issues. But she said the other day, the prosecution, at a minimum, they should never have charged him with murder. But she said this case should never have been brought. And I thought, it's as simple as that. The case shouldn't never been brought. And I thought, it's as simple as that. The case shouldn't have been brought. From what I can see, using my own judgment, looking at

snippets, I'm not in the courtroom, of course, but that's the way it looks to me. Have you been following it, Rob, at all? I've been completely mesmerized by the sound of your dog, I gotta say. I'm sorry. I have not been following it up i have not been following

because there is nothing in it that i find interesting at all i just don't think it's interesting look i the kid i don't know it shouldn't have been there but like boys do that there's like venture happening you know not that far away and they want to get involved in it and something bad was going to happen whether it was you know the whether i don't know how you look at it like something bad was going to happen and something bad did happen and um i'm glad he's on trial not that interesting uh no it's really not that interesting i'm glad he's on trial i think that we we should we should get we should get these things settled um i think if he wasn't on trial it'd be a lot worse um it doesn't seem to me just from reading the newspaper that um that whatever he did he was not plausibly in self-defense it just

seems like that's self-defense like the guy grabs your gun and that's what happens um but i just for me i just this just feels like this like feel like cable. This obsession with one specific case, this desire to have it wall to wall, this is exactly what's wrong with us is that we just are obsessed with like we're just chasing after this nonsense yes but as if it matters that it does not matter it is we can we know we can't it was just it's just driving us all crazy no we can walk and chew gum and shoot antifa but we don't know we can't we clearly can't we clearly cannot do that well speak for yourself i mean i find all of these things to be interesting and pertinent in their own way. They don't all have to occupy the same amount of space in my brain. I can't think about inflation all the time. But this is the first thing we started with. This is the first

thing we started with. I did because I think it's consequential. If we want to sit here- I don't. Here's fundamentally where we disagree. I don't think it's consequential at all i don't i really think this is a side show but it's a it's tailor-made for our neurotic cable news obsessed okay i don't like i'll be the guy that you used to be and say stop thinking about the media stop talking about cable put it out of your mind i don't want to i'm not watching cable news i'm not watching cable news do it and i might be paying attention a lot of attention to people on twitter except to see the ridiculous things that they say inflation we can all agree is bad the spending that we did is bad this we can tease various things out about what this moment is in our time specifically a react going back to last year when city after city after city went up and was viewed as justified

for reasons and they let it happen or they were unable to stop it from happening. And those of us who lived through fire glimmering on the horizon 20 blocks to the north because they're torching my town, find it interesting to go back and revisit his time when civil authority vanished. So that's one thing. The other thing is, yes, it is instructive about what some people say and how they view the other side, for example. And I know, Rob, this doesn't match. now you're going to tell me what the media says right no no i'm not talking about the media where are you getting your news james if you're not getting from cable news about this are you watching it on tv no i'm watching excerpts that come my way

i'm uh taken which are taken a lot posted on twitter i noticed yeah i mean you can get another great another great uh contributor to our national psychology okay uh the point that somebody made which i find and maybe both of you have seen this elsewhere saying would we be with the conservatives be famous in the same way about this case if kyle rittenhouse was a black man and he shot some white man and i say yeah in the circumstances being equal it's like when they post a picture of a nuclear family and they all have ar-15s and the kids have good you know trigger discipline and obviously this is a family that shoots together and stays together how do you feel about this white america i think it's great there's a piece of this what do you think if we made the know, men who got women pregnant required them to pay for the children instead of having them aborted?

How do you feel about that? It's like, do you not understand where our ideas come from and how they actually aren't based in some reductive skin color idea that they actually apply to everybody? Anyway, Peter, go on. Well, no, there's a piece of this that I find reassuring and it runs as follows. If, well, it runs as follows. CNN, MSNBC, they've all been saying he was a vigilante. Clearly he wasn't. He was a kid carrying a rifle attracted to the scene of the action who probably, as I said earlier, shouldn't have been there. But there was, in effect, a media, I won't say a lynch mob, but they wanted to get this kid. And what's reassuring to me is that you put it into a courtroom. There's a common sense, experienced judge, middle American guy. Of course,

they're mocking him for that because he sounds like a Midwesterner. And you've got a prosecutor who actually hasn't done his homework. And you slow it all down. And you say there are rules by which we try people in this country. And you, the prosecutor, have to obey them. And I, the judge, intend to enforce them. And you have to present evidence. You have to do it in slow motion. You have to permit the defense to present its case. And you slow it all down. And you apply the rules of evidence and reason and procedure. And it looks as though we may get to something like a just result. So the legal system still functions as a way of, what, reducing the fever, of slowing things down, of making sure that reason is still a central component. Reason and evidence remain central components in the way we proceed in this country. If there's anything, yeah, it's just one kid.

That strikes me as significant that there's a piece of the country that still works the way it's alive to tell the story and is telling the story out of his own lips comes the story that yeah i grabbed it and i told him i was going to kill him and and i and i and i i pointed a gun at him that's when he shot right um the irony chris here it is useful i suppose just to remember in this case that that there was not an armed person surrounded by unarmed people um he pulled the trigger on an armed person he had they armed, there were guys carrying guns everywhere. Even that is reassuring. The guy who pulled the gun on him, clearly he shouldn't have been there, but you put him in court, you calm things down, and the kid tells the truth. He tells the truth.

So that, I don't know. I just, we'll see how it all comes out. I sort of love the judge because he's a common sense. He gets irascible when the prosecution tries to pull a fast one on him. Even, I don't know, maybe I'm making too much of this, but that judge seems to me to stand for the middle of the country. And the middle of the country is still sane. Yeah, I mean, the thing I like about the judge so far, and again, it's like, this is what I read, but from reading about him, is that this is what he does. He does murder trials.

Yes. And he's just seen a million of them. And so this is what he does he does murder trials yes and he's just seen a million of them and so this is just a murder trial for him he's a seasoned old pro yeah and it seems like the just in his in his reprimand of the prosecutor it seems like like the only other judges that i know i only knew one judge who did criminal cases in la years ago and who said that the only time he lost his temper was when the prosecution was not prepared right like you give leeway to the defense just in general i think as a judge that just seemed to be what they do but when the prosecution isn't prepared as this prosecutor simply was not you just lose it you just lose it because you're just it's just a waste of your time and you you

know you got other stuff to do um so it does seem to me like that's that's interesting but the rest of it again i think it's just a sideshow that we you know put on ourselves as often as we can um to avoid you know facing facing reality how many trials have we had that have been broadcast wall to wall that concern the 2020 riots urban urban disturbances none that i can think of yeah who's the first that brings it to mind I just like to see everybody reminded of the fact that when you encourage, yay, applaud for social justice, social disorder, you get social disorder. And when you applaud street violence, street political violence, you get street political violence. And New York is seeing right now a new mayor that has to stare down some activists who say, if you go back to the way the old policing is, you're going

to see riots in the street again. well listen that's another subject i was remiss perhaps in bringing it up in the first place when there are other measures so before we get to our guest i just have to ask you guys then for the you know for the record here yay or nay um inflation yeah inflation so yeah i'm opposed to it i'm opposed to it i'm against it all right so i have i have smart friends out here and i've actually reached a conclusion about this but this is simply because i borrowed somebody else's conclusion i have plenty of smart friends out here who say no no no the fed is actually right this inflation is transitory all we're seeing is temporary choke points in the economy as the economy reopens. We're going to get to a guest who

is going to talk about the choke points that are our ports here in California. Then I saw my Hoover colleague, Kevin Hassett, who was Trump's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Trump White House. Don't hold that against him. Kevin has a brilliant career as an economist, apart from his brief time in the White House. In any event, Kevin said, and I thought to myself, he's right. Kevin said, this is really pretty simple. By spending trillions of dollars, the Biden administration is stoking demand. by imposing new regulations, by beating up on carbon energy producers, he's suppressing supply. So you stoke demand and suppress supply, and what you get is more dollars chasing fewer goods and services, and you will get inflation. And it's not transitory, it's systemic.

So I thought, you you know that makes sense kevin also said this is the part i don't know kevin said people are saying this reminds them a lot of the 70s i kevin has it actually believe this could get worse than the 70s because it's a man we should stop talking to kevin has it he's depressing exactly that's your problem right there. Exactly. Exactly. I talk to the wrong people. You know, I think two things. One is that I feel like I can't get too exercised over the price of gas because I do think that is cyclical and goes up and down. We've seen expensive gas before.

We have. We have. You know, we've had oil stocks. We drive 50, 60 miles a day. No, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. I'm not saying it's not bad. I'm just saying that we have had $4 gas in the country in the past 10 years, and then it's eased, and then it's constricted, then it's eased. I'm just saying that in terms of systemic, dangerous inflation that makes certain investors want to jump out windows. This ain't it. That is not to say that there's not inflation. My second point is there is, I think, inflation.

And worse, I believe that we're going to be starting to hear more about inflation that we weren't listening to or paying attention to for the past 20 years. We've been playing around with a CPI forever and adjusting it to get to the number we want with a lot of tricks especially with with the price of gas too by the way and we may now be suddenly uh when the chickens come home to roost we may now be suddenly facing what happens when it's uh for real and here's one of the indications that you know it's for real that i think it's for real um is that uh the smart uh you know two smart people the smarty pants people in like magazines like The Economist, I don't think it's The Economist, but I've seen it in various places, are now

saying, well, you know, actually, inflation is good. Oh, I know. Right. When you get to that point, you know, you're, you know, you know, one, it's bad. And you know, two, they think it's going to be here for a while. I've heard that from old liberal friends as well. You know, the thing of it is, though, if you talk to any economist, they're going to say, no, it's bad. It's tax on the poor. It's bad. But what do you do about the people who, for example, wanted, you know, they got a lot of money sitting around. They don't know where to put it. They want to invest. They want to keep ahead of this. They want to keep ahead of inflation. But at the same time, they want

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He authored a thread on Twitter the other day after touring the port of Long Beach where he laid out the particulars of our cataclysmical backlog and gave us his proposed solutions. You can read the thread. It's all linked at Ricochet.com, where you happen to be now. Hey, before we get to how the ports got jammed uh where they're jammed where they're not jammed what we can do about it all that tell us what you saw when you took that boat tour of the long beach port complex it's uh hey everybody thanks for having me on um yeah well the port's really not functioning at a high level that you see a very small percentage of the cranes are actually we're operating at any given moment you know we were there for about three hours so we did a tour kind of go around terminal island it takes about three

hours to loop around a three-hour tour i've heard really bad things about these three-hour tours i've learned uh none of my employees know what gilligan's island even is so yes right just not learning um we uh and and so you you know you're not standing and observing every single crane the whole time but as you pass by basically three-fourths of the cranes were not operating at any given moment uh at or at all while we were the entire time we were there and you can see from a distance you can see if a crane's working or not by whether it's down if it's up in the air like it's not clearly can't unload any containers and they're just not they're very very much not operating and what about the ships? You can see,

you can see the ships just piled up in the Pacific. And that's what, that's what I, that's why I went there. So like, you can see it in our data that the port is like running very slowly, but it doesn't grab you viscerally the same way as when you go down and you see like, okay, here's an empty berth with no cranes operating. And there's a ship, 80 ships actually right now as of this morning, waiting to unload. And so you just have a backlog and a traffic jam that it really grabs you when you see it in person. You're like,

man, we got to fix this. Ryan, Rob Long finds all this fascinating. So he's about to take over this conversation because he loves this stuff. But before he does, just tell us what Flexport is and why you know so much about this stuff. My little reading of it is you took what the most boring sounding thing in the world, which is just stuff in containers, and actually made it into a really fascinating, very cool business. But just tell, what is Flexport? Why do you know this stuff? Yeah. So Flexport's a technology platform for global logistics. We make it easy to ship anything anywhere in the world.

We ship cargo on behalf of about 10,000 companies to 112 countries last year. So ocean freight and air freight kind of coordinate everything that has to happen and move a container from a factory anywhere in the world to a warehouse anywhere else in the world and handle all the customs paperwork all the dispatching of different modes of transport that are going to happen truck ocean this is not fedex and ups where i send a sweater to my daughter in college this is big containers yeah the difference is moving large quantities of stuff. When your shipment is too big for a FedEx driver to lift it up, when it won't fit in the truck or go down the conveyor belt,

that becomes a freight shipment and it's a whole different network. And it's not nearly as automated or it tends to happen across many different companies. There's no one company that can move it door to door the way FedEx can move a package all the way. Right. Right. And that's where our technology comes in. Okay. And so that's why we know so much. We're the third largest shipping company in the United States by volume. And we have skin in the game because those are our containers that are stuck there. We're trying to get them delivered. And our customers are pretty pissed off, calling us nonstop. Their containers are sitting out there.

And before I toss it over to Rob, just one question for me. This is me driving from Palo Alto up to San Francisco. I think this was a couple of weeks ago. And it's nothing like LA, the port of Long Beach, for sure. But you can see container ships backed up in the bay in a way that I don't recall in the last quarter century here. And then as you drive up there, and for folks who live here in Northern California, of course, if you're thinking of China Basin and the beautiful stadium where the giants play just south of that there's a lot a lot of cranes there's a and the cranes were not moving how could it be that we have all this vast infrastructure in place and nobody's operating it when ships are backed up in the bay you can see them with your own eyes how can that be yeah the it is much worse in long beach right now oakland's operating reasonably well like there's not too much backlog there there have

been there have been days so i don't want to say what you're saying is wrong i think there have been times when oakland had 10 or 12 ships backed up but as of right now it's cleared out the um but it is it is striking and it like really bothersome when you see a ship sitting there waiting at anchor with all the merchandise for our customers on it and then an empty berth it's like just you think just sail over there and unload it uh the problem has become i and i don't know exactly how the terminal got in this situation but they have too many containers stuck inside the terminal and so they're not able to unload more ships very effectively. It's like, there's literally no place to put the container.

And if you can't unload the ship, well, you can't haul away the ship, the containers that are on the terminal. So you get these catch 22, these sort of vicious cycles happening. And, um, you know, the short answer is we haven't invested in our infrastructure in this country. Like there is no port in the United States that's capable of handling a ship, The short answer is we haven't invested in our infrastructure in this country. There's no port in the United States that's capable of handling a ship even two-thirds the size of the Ever Given, that big ship that got stuck in the canal. That ship could not come to the United States of America at any of our ports.

Long Beach is the largest port. The largest capacity ship that can dock there is about 16,000 TEUs. That's about 8,000 truckloads of freight. The ever given is almost 24,000 TEUs. So it just couldn't come to America. Our ports are not deep enough. The cranes are not tall enough. And that's to say nothing about the lack of automation or all the other inefficiencies. Hey, Ryan, it's Rob Long paris right now and i i don't care what time it is this is like my junk i am so deeply into container shipping i once uh got into a not a screaming argument but a really really really a tough argument with a friend of mine who's a big tech investor and i said listen 20th century was does not brought to us by computers is brought to us by container

shipping and container shipping continues to bring us the 21st century. Uh, I took a container ship. I took a, um, a hand to the hand. I was on the hands of Miami in 2008 from Seattle to Shanghai. Um,

everything was slow because the economy had collapsed. So the, the the the guys running the controlling the ships from hamburg were sort of waking up in the morning and typing into a computer which sent a message to the master of the hanshin miami basically saying take your time do not burn oil as burn fuel as efficiently as possible there is nothing there for us to pick up. And so it took three weeks. I mean, we took our time. It was crazy, right? This is not the case now. It is quite the opposite, that there's nothing for us to buy. There's tons of us for us to buy. They're empty shelves. And there are people with money in the bank, and Christmas is coming, and everybody wants to buy

stuff. And I read your tweet, Storm, and it didn't surprise me, but it did put into relief the thing that I noticed when I was on one of those ships. And I sat in Busan for the whole day. The master gave me a folding chair, and I sat on the deck of the Panjim Miami with a cigar and a couple of beers. And I watched in six hours, barely six hours, cranes removing every container in the ship, rearranging them, sending some along, adding and putting them back into the ship, right? Unpacking. Everybody's ever been on a long road trip knows sometimes you unpack and repack and unpack and repack. That's what a container ship does at every port, right? So it should work.

Even at capacity, it should work. I mean, I get that we don't have a container port that could take a giant, you know, whatever that evergreen thing was. I get that. But that's not the problem here, is it? Is it just the fact that our cranes are too small? Because when I read your tweet, Storm, I thought to myself, well, of course, there is always, for those of us who are right-wing crackpots, there is always a regulatory problem. A stupid regulatory problem. And I think you identified it. And am I right or am I wrong in saying that if we change this one idiotic regulatory issue, certainly in California, california i mean long beach la port that

combined that's a gigantic port um we'd be okay we'd be close to a case that is that right or wrong and what do i have wrong um uh you know so the the regulatory thing that you're referring to is the zoning rule that's actually in the cities not in the port itself but in the in the cities of actually i think it's throughout most of most of California where you can't stack containers more than too high in a truck yard. And so if you don't have a place to put the containers, they sort of back up at the port because there's no place to unload them throughout the city. And if you can't unload this container from the trailer, we call this chassis. These are the trailers that hold the containers around. Well, then the containers have to sit on the chassis, on the trailers, and you don't have any trailers to go pick up containers from the port. So there is a regulatory issue there for

sure. I think those zoning laws are probably somewhat reasonable. I don't really want stacks of containers in my neighborhood. They're kind of ugly. But if you're in California, people really don't want that because it's a sign of free enterprise. These stacks of capitalism staring you in the face. But they're empty. I mean, to be fair, they're empty. It's like what you do with the empties is actually an issue. I mean, part of what happens in our normal balance of trade is we get full containers from China and we send back empties.

Or they're filled with animal feed or scrap metal or something. They're not filled with American- About 60% of the container, we they're not filled with about 60 percent of the container pre-pandemic about 60 percent of the containers going back were empty leaving the united states on the west coast uh it's now more like 80 our exports have declined and imports have gone up wow so it's not a safety issue i assumed that you can't stack these things more than too high because if you put three or four, they'd collapse on. Also, they wouldn't collapse, but you might get a big windstorm, knock them over or someone might do a job, bad job stacking them. They might not lock them together.

There's there's some there are some definitely some safety issues. I don't like I said, I think it's a decent I think it's a good a good bet to make on a temporary basis to relax the thing long term. Like there's no reason to have containers sitting around like let's let's get them moving. They should be moving. We have a real shortage of chassis. There are some regulatory issues for sure. First of all, the ports themselves are owned by the government. So I don't think you can make a classical libertarian argument here that we should just like anybody who has some beachfront property should be able to open a port. Like it is geographically constrained.

Where can you put these things? There's a natural monopoly there. Certainly, there could be a role for more private sector involvement the government is definitely under invested in these ports and it's a subject of sort of like u.s federalism to an extent because they're owned by the local cities like the port of long beach owns this is owned by the city of long beach same here in oakland in the bay area like what are the odds that oakland's government government is going to make the port a priority it's a national economic priority not a local one that got the oakland has too many problems to be thinking about their ports don't vote port yeah right union members certainly

do and put a lot of pressure on these local politicians as well so you definitely um that that's the unions want to milk them. I assume, right? The unions are asking for two things right now. The, the launch is the, um, ILWU international longshoremen and warehousing, uh, warehouse men association, uh, union. Um, the ILWU has got two demands. Their, their contracts have for renegotiation next year. So I don't think any of this is going to get better by the way. Uh, they have two demands. They're not asking for more money. Um, I think they must acknowledge that they're pretty well paid with the average worker making 195 000 a year um that's the average that's the average i'm pretty sure that statistic includes like uh

overtime of which there's been quite a bit but um but that's the take-home average they're asking for um no more automation in the ports and no more robots. And they don't want any key performance indicators. They don't want any KPIs on their work. Can I just go? I just want to give people listening just a short, brief history. In the 50s, mid-50s, a guy named Malcolm McLean was a shipping guy, trucking guy. And he's sitting there wondering why it takes forever for his trucks to empty into the, I think it was the Port of Savannah. Because at that point, there were stevedores, big old cargo nets.

That's what a cargo net is. It's a net that you patch to a thing, and someone had to load that ship. And he said, well, what if we just put everything you want, put it in a box, and then take the box off the ship or on the ship and put the box on a train or chassis or a truck chassis? What if we just did that? And that was this incredible light bulb moment and it was a huge problem for the longshoremen union then as stevedore's unions because that was automation um and it was going to put them all out of work and nobody at that point imagined even factoring for inflation that you'd have a a longshoreman in america at a very busy port making close to two hundred thousand dollars a year but now they what's the same story right because eventually i mean correct

me if i'm wrong right eventually and on a ship a ship itself has like six masters and 20 um uh crew which you don't need. You only need like the thing, you know, if Tesla can make a driving car. I can't say this. He has to work with these guys. Well, the ship is, you know, actually that's pretty efficient ratio.

If you think about these ships, they're moving 20,000 containers with 20 people. Like it's not the best place to apply automation in all of society. But, and actually most of what they do is like maintenance, which you still might even need more of that. that's fair but i'm saying it's like well there's still there's still an automation pressure on uh the longshoremen um what a progress of technology i mean if you take the container the container is i agree with you

rob i think that there's no technology of the 20th century that lifted more people out of poverty worldwide than the shipping container and that what it did for business, like you can ship anything, reduce the price of shipping by 95% or something. So it's incredible invention, but we haven't advanced it since the 1970s. The cranes are still like pretty much the same. In some cases, literally the same machine. They move one container at a time. It's incredibly slow inside the containers like looks like it used to look inside the ship it's people using rope to tie stuff down yeah there's a lot of opportunity to apply robotics here and and frankly it's not new tech like rotterdam has been fully

automated for over 20 years with self-driving trucks and everything is it more efficient because of it yes it is. And certainly you see it in the cost. So to unload a container at Rotterdam, they charge the customers $200 in the West Coast here at 600. Well, one of the things I hope that they're not bringing over from China is raw ground beef, because at this point, the dry ice would probably be melted. Yes, my meat is not in a container cargo somewhere. It's in my fridge and it's frozen. And I'm going to have some this weekend and it's going to be great. You know why? Because it's butcher box. You never know what life is going to throw at you. I think we've

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I don't want to completely ignore Rob's automation point of view, but you said one thing that bugs us all, that the stuff coming over here from China, the containers are full and what we're sending back is scraps and stuff and junk and whatever, or empty containers. So we know what the effect is here, empty shelves. What's the effect of the backup on China? Has this stalled their economy because they can't get their goods out? They can't sell stuff because there's no way to get it to market? Yeah, well, I do think it's worth reflecting here that what we really are seeing is demand-driven, that there's more volume than ever coming into the ports, that there is actually more cargo hitting the port and it's backed up and it's created these delays and it has started to slow the ports down and it has congested the ships, which has reduced the supply of shipping. But overall, number of containers moving since before the pandemic are up about 20%. It's just for the last month or so that things have really started to

grind and slow down. And what has me so worried is if you have a system where the input's the same, where like, you know, for the last six months, volumes have been about steady of number of containers coming out of China. But if this volume is the same and the delay is getting longer and longer, that's a very worrisome sign in a complex system that you might have some kind of negative feedback loop that's going to keep extending. So I'm more worried about the future here than I am... Currently, volumes are pretty high. Consumers are buying more stuff than ever. And it does come back to the pandemic of people locked in their houses, not being able to go travel, spend money at restaurants, bars, services. They're buying stuff instead. So I think overall, that's been very good for

China. They're exporting more stuff than ever. The US business is buying more things from China than ever. Now, if it stays like this and there are 60 days, it's taking like 70, 60 to 90 days to get cargo delivered from China to a warehouse in the US. You can't run a responsive supply chain like that. So if these delays persist, it's going to be very bad for China. I do think the Chinese government is actually aligned here. They need to help get this fixed in any way that they can. Right. I've been trying to get a stove and oven for an awful long time. The last time I checked, they said, well, if you want this one that you got, that's the one. We're looking at March, which is un-American. It never used to be that way.

It used to be we got a whole bunch of warehouses. It's going to be there on Thursday. But here's my question. I mean, a lot of people say, look, those aren't the only ports in the country. Why not just drive them through Panamax, take them to Texas somewhere, offload them into the port of Newark? But you as a logistics guy, it's got to be difficult to do that because you then have to rearrange, don't you, what happens when it gets to the other side of the country. You've got everything plotted. So it lands here with this barcode or this Q code or this number, and it goes to this place, and you got that figured out.

How reflexive and adaptive are you and other people in your industry to be able to say, okay, now it's coming in for here. We got to get it over here. We got to move the trucks. We got to get it on that train. That seems like a clusterfark. Yeah, to move the trucks we got to get on that train that seems like a clusterfuck uh yeah to say the least and like a lot of the the the ships have sold space space they've sold the contract says the cargo has got to be delivered in long beach so if they bring it somewhere else they're they're gonna have to truck it or train it back to long beach uh by the contract so it

now if the ship hasn't left yet so that's what you're going to start seeing is that new sailings are starting to redirect and head to Oakland, so they don't have any contract. Oakland and other ports that are running a little bit smoother, so they don't have that contract issue. At the end of the day, if you re-diverted all the container ships that are in Long Beach, they would just create traffic jams everywhere else. There aren't enough.

It's the biggest port by far, so no one else has the capacity. Wasn't the Port of Houston, five, six years ago, I seem to remember that somebody, the capacity. How come? Wasn't the Port of Houston five, six years ago? I seem to remember that somebody, Texas, I don't know who owns the Port of Houston, but they were pouring a ton of money in the Port of Houston, and the idea was that they were going to attract a lot of traffic from California. They were competing. They were intending to compete with the port in Los Angeles.

Did that not happen? It's just so far out of the way. You pay the panama canal fees and now all the extra delay of going around it you don't really see much happen um there are some i know uh some of the big bags retailers in that area do come in through this through there um you're also going to see it that those investments probably gonna pay off next summer if if the west coast goes on strike if there's union negotiations right well then everything's gonna close okay so i got two questions one practical question again and then the other is a more

political practical sort of practical question um containers are simply packets inside the packet is stuff and when we send packets of data that's what we're doing right now on zoom it goes a bunch of different ways and it's collected at the end um my picture and my audio and my email and my texts and your text and email it goes crazy over the network um it is part of the problem accepting the fact that you didn't take my bait which i really feel disappointed and this is all because we're you know we live in a two regulated society okay you know what you're talking about um isn't part of this problem that we have, like we do not have any redundancy or any,

or what would Nassim Taleb say, anti-fragility to the system, that we have this gigantic trading partner in China sending us Christmas 2021, and it's got to go either Long Beach, LA, Seattle, or Oakland, or that's it. And doesn't it seem like, and the West Coast, and the East Coast is even worse. Doesn't it seem like there is an agile software solution

along the lines of what we did with sending electronic mail that would be perfect for this? Funny you should say that. That's a lot of what Flexport's building is to start running containers on schedules. So that instead of it, because actually put yourself in the eyes of the customer. Say you're like one of these new direct-to-consumer brands, a customer of ours just went public called Allbirds. They make shoes.

Right. And if you're Allbirds, you shouldn't care what your shoes go through or which boat it's on or anything you just need the shoes in a certain place at a certain time and they're you know you know where they're made and you just as long as it gets there you're fine um and this is what we're building towards is that you can actually just like just tell us where you need to stop and we'll get it there we'll handle all the routing we'll decide which boat it goes on. Is it a packet? Do we split it across six different boats? And then as long as it converges at the end, it gets there. So that's some of it. I think more to your point around anti-fragility, absolutely. All of the companies that are public in the United States, seemingly

all, have adopted this mindset of maximizing return on invested capital, return on equity, return on assets, whatever you want to call it. And the way that they try to maximize that ratio of profit over equity and profit over assets, unfortunately, instead of aiming to increase profits too often, they try to decrease the denominator, decrease the amount of assets in the company. They're just trying to optimize this ratio. And that's what Wall Street rewards. If you don't do that, they're going to fire you and put someone else in there. That's the game that you play. Wait a minute, Ryan, you're this hotshot entrepreneur. You're starting to sound almost like a socialist. What are you talking? I absolutely think you should aim for higher returns. Go for more profit, but it's okay to

have some assets in your company. Have a safety cushion, have some inventory if you're a brand, have some raw materials on hand to make more of your product in case order surge. Or if you're a shipping company, have some extra capacity, have extra trailers. Like as a country right now, we don't have enough trailers. Okay. Here's the thought. This is all to the good, and here's why. It's because we really need new supply chains. China is our adversary, let's face it. We buy a lot of stuff from them, but now for purely economic reasons. Wait a minute, this thing is not working. Let's think about Malaysia. Let's think about Mexico. Let's think about bringing some supply, some manufacturing home. So this is all to the good, to which Ryan says. Well, you're certainly going to see prices and market forces respond to prices. And so if it becomes way too expensive to ship from somewhere, they're going to find new places to ship from.

And so, yeah, to that extent, you definitely create a new price mechanism that's made this much more expensive. My personal view is cheap stuff is good for Americans and raising prices is a risky thing to do. Now, if it's just market forces taking place and that's the natural occurrence of things, but I kind of agree with Rob. I think there's a lot of regulatory stuff. I don't think this is just pure free market at play. I think that if the government is going to run these ports

or is going to own the ports, then they have to do a good job with them. And if they don't, you're good. You know, like, I don't know that crappy infrastructure can ever be good for the economy, regardless of who your trading partners are. I'll go with you. The government should own the ports because they're sort of a national security

issue, as we sort of see. I get that. Why should it be the city of Oakland? That's the wrong unit, isn't it? I know. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Go ahead. It's on Oakland. You know, Oakland has that marshland. the city of oakland that's the wrong unit isn't it i know okay sorry sorry sorry sorry go ahead it's on oakland you know oakland has that marshland it's just a development real estate development um my idea of hell or the thing that will keep me up at night is the secretary of transportation um the current secretary of transportation and the current president united

states sitting together uh one afternoon to try to come up with a way to solve this problem. My idea of hell, my secondary hell, not quite as bad, but pretty bad would be even a president that I liked and a Secretary of Transportation that I liked doing it. I'm just not convinced that the government is the way to think with an entrepreneurial, smart kind of skin in the game kind of attitude. So my question is, why aren't there more riots? This is an important issue. Why aren't these gigantic business leaders, these sort of corporate titans who rely entirely upon these things, why aren't they coming up with a plan that I can get behind that's practical in real life, but I don't have to say, well,

in addition to all the other things I got to vote for, for the Biden plan, I've also got to vote for a lot of climate change times that I don't like. Why can't we just have, I guess what I'm saying is, you know, tonight, do it, just write it down. And like, I i'm behind it i'm just telling i mean that's what i think as a citizen i want i want people who have skin in this game who know about this issue who now we now we all know it's a problem tell me how to solve it absolutely uh why aren't there more people like me i don't know man i'm kind of a freak i feel like sometimes like i decided to send a taco truck to the port of long beach is how this all started and try to interview the union workers to tell them to get their side of the story and i don't think you know i don't think

our education system has created a lot of people like me who think that's a good idea everyone at flexport thought i was joking i was like no i'm actually serious send a taco truck and i don't know just a bit of an idiosyncratic thinker um where are the titans of industry i don't know i've talked to a bunch of them. They're definitely pissed off. I think they are looking for sort of leadership. And I'm very tempted to play that role and sort of come and say, okay, here's a plan. It's very capital intensive.

Like you want to run a port, buy an ocean carrier, buy all the chassis. There's a bunch of stuff that you can do with technology to make these things run better. But you have to control and own the asset. And again, American business is afraid to own assets. Wall Street has trained us. Assets are bad. We only want to make profit with no assets. So it's all software. Flexport has really struggled over the years. People think we're this darling technology company that everybody wants to invest in, but we've really struggled to raise money because our business is like a real business. We're not this like pure software company that you can use your imagination and dream that everything's going to go to the moon automatically with no work.

And I think our capitalists are a little bit lazy in this country. They don't want to own any assets. They don't want to do any work. They don't want to hire any people. You're like, well, you know, you're not going to solve a lot of real world problems if you have that attitude. Ryan case study. I don't know the answer to this question, but something tells me you will.

The people who run Walmart, they're the biggest retailer in America. They're really smart. They will be all over their supply chain. Why aren't we hearing from them? Are they afraid of achieving a public profile and saying this, this, and this should be done because they're concerned about getting caught up in the union negotiations that are coming up? Is it just politically poison for a Walmart to say the government is causing some problem here and we could, we'd like, they have shareholders. It's a giant operation everybody in america shops there everybody has a more or less some feeling of goodwill toward walmart if why aren't why isn't walmart taking some sort of position on all this i i could for example i couldn't speak to walmart in particular i i don't know what's what i haven't spent much time with them but i you know actually you could ask a

different question of walmart is hey why didn't they put a wall up and make the back quarter of every store a fulfillment center? Ten years ago, they would have had two hour delivery and Amazon wouldn't exist. Right. There's sort of like lack of will in some of these companies. The obvious thing. Well, you're right. For the same reason that newspapers didn't get ahead of the Internet when it started happening. It made great list.

I just think like, you know, one thing Craig's list rather than an asterisk. I just think one thing the pandemic has exposed is a lot of these institutions, and I'm not commenting on Walmart or any particular company, but a lot of our institutions are pretty hollow. They're not led by dynamic people who have some job security and can take risk and go do things. They're optimizing for short-term metrics. And you can make a business look great stripping out all the assets over a period of a couple of quarters or even a decade. But when a hundred-year storm hits, your business is going to either have to get bailed out or it's going to miss an opportunity of a lifetime. And nobody's playing those long games in corporate

America. They're tending to optimize for what the, you know, what the streets are. And we think they're going to be here forever. Walmart will be eternal. Walmart will be around in 50, 60 years. When you look at the, you know, the blade runner, 2001 space odyssey effect, all the brand names they put in the sci-fi movies end up vanishing by the time we get around to, you know, the actual present Ryan, last question here. You said we don't have enough trailers,

which is something I don't think about. And people say we don't have enough trucks and we don't have enough drivers. I mean, our family business involves a lot of things, but one of it is fueling the trains, the car, you know, the, the trains that come roaring through the North Dakota have got to get diesel somewhere. So we got a guy who gets up at three o'clock in the morning and fuels up the trains, but we're having trouble getting those guys for a variety of reasons. It's hard to get them and you got to pay them a lot of money. So this train proceeding forward actually depends on our company. The guy who owns it getting up at three o'clock in the morning and doing it instead of an employee. So you have all

of these parts, trailers, the drivers, all of that. So how last question is, how do you running flex support, how far out are you presuming that things aren't going to get better? Is that just baked into your analysis now that we're not going to get more trailers? We're not going to get more drivers. We're not going to get more trucks, you know, hope so in the future, but how far out are you looking at this and saying it's going to be this way? I'm much more comfortable with uncertainty than normal people. So I'm like, I don't really know. And I'm comfortable with that. There's a couple of factors that are almost unknowable that are going to be real factors here.

The first is this union negotiation. What happens? Do they go on strike or not? If they go on strike, you're going to see way more backlogs and way more chaos. And the timing of that is? July 1st, the contract is up that they're under right now. So I'm told they're going to start negotiating that around May. And typically, these contracts of renegotiation periods have come with work slowdowns and stoppages and other things like short of a strike uh and then and and the

strike did happen the last when this contract was negotiated in 2015 they also went on strike back then for three months um so so that's a huge thing next year the other one which is going to get you guys really riled up on this show uh is january 1st of 2023, the International Maritime Organization, that's a division of the United Nations, that is the oversight body for global ocean freight shipping. They passed a rule November of last year, right after Trump lost the election, they passed a rule that says that all ships in the world, all container ships in the world must reduce their emissions by 13 percent, their carbon emissions by 13 percent on January 1st of 2023. That's around the corner. That's tomorrow. Yeah. Shipping times. There's no way that's going to happen. Right. The rule is going to happen. There is no possible way under the laws of physics to reduce the emission of an internal combustion diesel engine by 13

that we don't have technology to do that other than what rob was talking about going very slow now it's a nice way to travel by the way if you go much slower and i'm told you have to go 30 slower to achieve a 13 reduction in carbon, you either need that many more ships to move the same amount of cargo, or you just move less cargo. Because that's the nature of a network. If you slow it down, you've reduced its capacity. And so if you reduce global shipping by 30%,

you are going to trigger the worst economic collapse. I mean, it's just an unbelievable rule. And all adherents to United Nations, all member states of the United Nations are going to have committed as of right now to enforce this. So no container ship will be able to dock at any member state of the United Nations on January 1st, 2023, unless it can show that it has reduced its emissions from current levels by 13%. So we're we're gonna it's a game of chicken then right because it'll be the the standoff between the world's biggest seller which is china and the world's biggest buyer which is us i mean to see who's gonna blink first right on this

rule i'm not sure who really wants this rule it sounds good but it's like if you don't actually have technology to implement it it doesn't help you know it's it's like if you don't actually have technology to implement it it doesn't help you know it's sort of like you you roll out renewables before there there's enough of them or before the technology gives you the baseload that you need you end up you end up just increasing energy prices and making everybody poorer without actually reducing emissions which is what actually they kind of sort of want they want energy to be expensive so it's not consumed and they don't want consumption to decrease because you don't need that stuff that's coming over from China anyway. Do you really need that? Do you need 32 varieties of deodorant? No. It does feel like

that's part of it. Now, it will increase the price of shipping and the shipping companies are going to make a ton of money. So there's a lot of forces that want this to happen. But with those two giant variables, like to me, it's unimaginable. Oh, the other one that is unimaginable that this law will actually go through, we have this thing called AB5 in California that makes it, it was for Uber drivers

and DoorDash drivers and stuff. They have to become employees instead of contractors. Well, the way that law was written, it applies to truck drivers too. And most of the truck drivers that do port trucking in the United States are owner operators. These are entrepreneurs who own their own truck. And that's now going to be illegal.

They've got it postponed for the moment. You are kidding me. I don't know the exact status of that. But under the law, they didn't carve out truck drivers. And most of the truck drivers, I don't know if it's the majority, but certainly a huge percent. Most of the ones we work with are owner operators. They own their own truck. And now they have to sell their truck and get a job as an employee of a truck driving company.

Do they not understand the flexibility that is provided by owner-operator rigs going around and setting their own schedule? But somehow with Uber, it's the same argument, but it doesn't fall. 80% of Uber drivers don't want to be employees. They like being entrepreneurs that work on their own time, but that didn't matter. So, uh, but with Uber drivers, it's like, okay, fine. Like we won't have this beautiful new magic taxi service that we didn't have 10 years ago, but with truck drivers, like we won't have trucking. Like that's something we've always had. Oh, grand. Listen, we could go on forever about this. This is fascinating. This is this, this is the, you know, the arterial system of the country. This is the heart that pumps the account. This is great stuff. And I've learned so much, especially what's coming up in 2023. That's going to be fun to watch, especially the enforcement mechanism. Can I see your papers to prove that you're, oh,. Right. Great work. It does not reduce net emissions.

Like on a per shipment basis, you just need more boats. So you end up with the same amount of carbon. Right. Or sales. I mean, the idea of the progressive vision of the future with all of its technocratic possibilities is giant ships with sales again. It really bothers me. I was hoping we would get out of this without describing either equity or climate change. But by God, we got one of those in there because no subject can possibly not touch these things.

Ryan, we've got to let you go because we've taken a lot of your time, but we would like to have you back at some point with good news, perhaps in a year. Take a second. Yes. Ryan, reach over your shoulder, pull down that book, take a second and sell your book. Yeah, so I wrote this book. I have a daughter. She's just turned one, and i've been reading her a lot of children's books and i saw that this the bar was not very high for these kids books they're really full of nonsense

so i thought i'd write a book to educate kids about global shipping how where all this stuff comes from i thought yes uh and uh it's it's the story of that ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal. And it's about, it's also a story of naive optimism. The idea that people were making fun of this guy with the digger, with the excavator for trying to dig it out. And I was, I think that's inappropriate. I think when you have a machine, even if it's insuitable for the job, you at least got to try to do the right thing. And the guy, and so I kind of turned the book around

and made that guy into a hero. Hey, good job trying to dig him out. And the title is? You know what? It could have worked. It could have worked. That thing could have worked. That's what I would say.

It's a Pixar movie waiting to happen. So I think you should probably show the rest of it. Yeah, hold up the book. So what's the title of the book? Ryan, you're a lousy pitchman. The title of the book is? Oh, well, it's called The Big Ship and the Little Digger. The Big Ship and the Little Digger. The Big Ship and the Little Digger. And those of us who can see your bookshelf see that you put,

you keep The Big Ship and the Little Digger right next to Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations. I presume you're also reading that to your one-year-old. No, she hasn't got to that topic yet. But the bookshelf is a great way to do propaganda. Exactly. Exactly right. We're going to put a link to that in the show notes like it sounds like i finally i've met somebody you not only

are into container shipping but you've written a children's book about it it is the only thing i'm truly obsessed by uh um so um i don't know next time you go on a tour of the harbor give me a shout all right rob drop me a note when you're in san francisco i'll take i will i will ryan peterson flex support thanks so much for joining us thanks guys have a great day take care right say how do your brother will do you just hate to think of those container cargoes containers going to china empty why can we fill up you know what do we have here in america we could fill them with well i know we got we got agricultural products and being from north kota i could tell you one thing we got lots of, and that's beets. What are beets good for you?

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at supporting normal blood pressure as a healthy lifestyle alone. So do more for your heart and treat yourself with Super Beats heart chews. Join over 1 million customers, get free shipping and returns, a 90-day money-back guarantee. And right now, right now, this very moment, you can get a free 30-day supply, free 30-day supply with your first purchase at superbeats.com slash ricochet. That's superbeats.com slash ricochet. And we thank Human N and their Super Beats for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now, Rob, if I could, I would like to revisit a previous point and beat it into the ground. When we talk about gas prices and you say, yeah, we've had $4 gas before, but let's look at the reasons why we did. We had a refinery would crash. California

would change over its blends. There'd be some cluster bleep in the Middle East. There'd be a pipeline accident. It would go up and down and up and down. I mean, yes, we have that volatility. It's bad. It's bad for everything because the price of gasoline adds the cost to everything. But what people seem to perceive here, and Joe Biden even didn't, wow, have you ever seen gas this high before, as he said the other day, is that it's a combination of things that people seem to be willfully imposed, not just the market working here, but the debt, but the shutting down of the American energy industry is what people perceive. Regulatory burdens being placed, leases being yanked, pipelines being canceled. Europe, you can have yours. We can't have one here.

I know that gas and oil are separate things, but in the people's mind there's this constellation of government efforts that seek to reduce energy usage and it why would we think that that's some secret plan because that's what they want that's everything that they've been saying that they want us to do i i don't disagree with that i think that's true i all i mean is that the the price of gas itself it does go up and down so it may not be it's a it's a it's an unreliable indicator of 1970s style institutional inflation that's all i meant was that it that's not the that's going to go up that could also go down but but but the fundamental problems of the economy and and and inflation we may be looking at an inflationary period, and that would be really bad. Price of oil will go up. But in a good economy, the price of oil,

price of gas can go up and then go down. So I'm just talking about it as an indicator of one thing is what I would want to use. Right. But I would ban the administration with this. I would use it as a cudgel. I mean, when you have the guy in Belarus telling Europe, you know what? I got my foot on the throat of your gas supply. Maybe I'll turn it off if you don't like what I'm doing with the migrant situation. We ought to be able to turn around to them and say, here's a bag of sand and here's a hammer because we have liquefied natural gas. Pressurized containers strewn out of Brownsville, Texas, your ports all the time. But the administration doesn't want to do that.

No, that is absolutely correct. And like a lot of things, they have managed to take success and throw it away. It's not traditionally what often happens when you get a very liberal administration like Obama or even Clinton, they kind of look the other way at some Republican or conservative initiatives and regulations because they knew they were actually to actually work. So they kind of turned away from them. I mean, Obama, Obama stayed out of the way of fracking because he really did lift the economy. He stayed right out of the way right and it totally worked and so the best thing for them to have done is to sort of they can talk all they want but look away and busy yourself with something else you know fam paid family leave for

16 years and give us fracking right but they they don't do that because unfortunately they're at the end the bitter end of this there are only the true believers left. More and more on the left are starting to say, look, if we're serious about climate change, we've got to be serious about nuclear, which leads us to La France. Vive le nucléaire. Yes. Right? That's true. Rob, you're there now. Give us a little praise.

Give us a thumbnail sketch that sums up the entire country and its mood from the view of one guy who got here. Who got here at eight in the morning i can tell you this it's not any more efficient than um than the united states in terms of the pandemic although uh but they you know you're hustled and you gotta show your your uh vaccine card to get in once you're here everyone does exactly what they're doing in new york they're like i have a mask in my hand do i wear you want me to it inside? And they kind of roll their eyes and say, comme vous voulez, monsieur, as you wish. And they kind of look sad, and I hold it. And then we do the polite

thing, like, well, if I should I start putting it on? And then I did that this morning, and then the lady was like, she sighed, like this loud sigh. She said, okay. All right. God damn it. I can put mine on, too. And then I was like, oh, I'll take it. But then you can't take it off. put mine on you and then i was like oh but then you can't take it off so it's like it's it's super awkward um but it's reassuring that they are uh

being french about everything which is like ultimately very practical and i think that's um that's what you want and then and didn't macron didn't uh what was it two in sometime in the last two weeks they announced new nuclear reactors isn't that correct yeah he's not they're building down on that yeah he's like the germans next door are shutting down their reactors as fast as they can and the french said no no that there is something strange about the french when they're serious they're really serious the french military don't mess with them no when it comes down to, we need a reliable source of energy, don't talk to me about the environment. Don't talk to me about goodwill toward the Soviet Union.

No, we're going to build new nuclear reactors. The French have also, I believe, have been asked to join the space effort, the space commission, the federation that we're putting together. And that's interesting because we forget that France has their own rocket program, the Ariane. They've been going their own way on that for a while, too. So, yeah, bring them in, which makes you think that all the guys are getting together because there's something out there that they want to make sure that we're all on the same page about this. So, Rob, here's a big question about France. My across-the-street neighbor, the late and great René Girard. Oh, sure. All right.

René was a Frenchman to his dying day, although he lived in this country from the 1950s on. But he used to argue that France ended when de Gaulle left the presidency in 1968. That is a conservative. Yes, exactly. But right up to the last moment of de Gaulle's presidency, France as an independent entity and French civilization as a force in the world remained plausible. And the moment de Gaulle disappeared, France is just another unit of Europe.

Does that feel right to you? I don't think it is. I think that I don't, I understand what he's saying. Although to say 68 and de Gaulle, I think, you know, France made a couple of deals with it, a couple of bad deals. One made a bad deal in the 19th century with the Prussian, with the idea of like, we're going to get big. And they were repaid by two subsequent invasions in the early 20th century.

And then they made sort of a larger deal, which they didn't really like, with NATO, and they pulled out of NATO. That was de Gaulle, by the way. Right. And then they realized, well, you you know they have uh these i mean um they weren't calling algeria was not a colony it was a department it's a state it's like hawaii uh and when algerian independence happened it was really convulsive here you could still people still get angry you can still see old people at dinner getting angry about it and and to go himself was was betrayed the cause i mean

this is gonna i know we want to wrap it up i haven't been long so france itself has been trying to figure itself out for a long time um even the country as it was a unified language is not that old we tend to think of like france is like it's always been that shape and that language really hasn't been um i think that and then the most recent deal the french made was to uh hook up with um a pacifist um cowed germany occupied germany still you know in a lot of ways uh and create a european union and hoodwink the english the british to go along with it for a little bit uh until the they've lost up um and they're always trying to find a way to sort of punch above their weight right um and i and and whether they uh whether they succeed or they don't i don't think it's

fundamentally different now than it was in 68 or 62 or 55 even i just i just don't think it's that i don't think you can point to something and say things are now now it's on the decline i think france has been in what what that would be considered decline for 200 years since napoleon so last question frenchman you're at dinner you're smoking your galois you're having a lovely wine, your cocoa vin, etc. And you say to a Frenchman, do you feel French or do you feel European? Has their identity inside their minds changed? What do you think the answer to that might be, Peter? Based on the number of French people that I've known, I'm pretty clear where I... I got into some pretty heated arguments right here in Northern California with some English people.

This is in the lead into Brexit, younger English people. And they said, no, no, no, I feel European. And the Germans will always tell you, younger Germans will always tell you they're European, not German. Well, for understandable reasons, you'd rather not be associated with that history. But French, I think French still feel French, which is a remarkable thing if it's true but i just plain don't know i think i i think that you know the french have an enormous capacity for for delusional thinking yes yes yes so my guess is that they will feel they will say and it will be a lie that they feel european and then they will go and list all the things about them how they feel that are purely french right the the eu was simply a vessel for which they believed they

were going to be able to sort of control as the sort of marionette of the big lunking now completely defang germany which they've always wanted they've always thought the germans are you know big and stupid and loud but strong um i remember talking and remember talking and they've always been very clear eyed about their neighbors. I once, as a joke, after dinner with a little too much wine, said to my friend Hubert, I said, Hubert, let me ask you something. You know, if the English and the French had another war, you know, they had wars for centuries. Like they've only not been having war for a few centuries. Who would win? And he said, huh. And I said, you know,

because obviously I think French technology, French military technology is very, very good. It's very sophisticated. Like, who would win? And then he sort of looked and swirled his arm and yuck and looked and then very seriously said to me, well, you know, the English, they are very brave and that i thought it was exactly right they are and you're not it's like ultimately yeah i get it i get it i understand how this is going to shake out so um

uh you know look i think that the future the future of i think the americans would do better to pay attention to french strategy and french policy because they they they tend to be right they were right about iraq we always forget freedom prize they were jaw the jerks they said they were absolutely right they said he doesn't have them. They're not, he's not, they're not dangerous. They said,

well, here's our evidence. Our evidence says the hate is this, this, and this he's not dangerous. And it turned out they were right. We were wrong. Or France wanted to protect the oil contracts that are handed to the Rocky companies.

Yes. I mean, I tend to think a lot of the high mindedness is, is a, is a fake for national self-mindedness is is a is a fake leave for national self-interest which is of course fine all nations behave that way france has been getting along with this we are the soul we are the you know the the philosophical spirits guiding light of the world for an awful long time yeah okay all right um but you're right about you know as peter said whether or not they're french or european a German walks up and punches a Frenchman in the nose.

The Frenchman's reaction is not going to be, but you are my European brother. It's going to be a boss to the bear. You instantly reduce it down to that. But again, I agree with Rob. I'd rather have France as our partner going forward than some country that's getting wet and wobbly. I mean, if you mentioned, as Peter did, that the Britain, young Britons feel that they're European more than they are British, it's because they've been inculcated by 40 years of liberal, of leftism over there, to believe that national identity is a horrible thing that leads to wars, and that the only thing we can do is subsume all of our peculiar and yet, in the end, inessential cultural differences into a great big pot of a European identity, and all will flow from

that. But of course, that cracks the minute that there's any pressure and people revert to tribe uh hey rob i mentioned before about why we think the french all wear striped shirts berets and the rest of it right right right your assignment for this week perhaps is to ask all of your french interlocutors uh what they believe is the cliched american garb and why that's so because from what i understand about what we believe about you know that they all the striped shirt the beret and the rest of it it comes from something that's quite surprising it comes from lower class terms it comes from you say the bretons comes from the. It comes from criminal gangs. It comes from the Apache dance. And that's a whole thing maybe we can get into at Ricochet 4.0, where we have all kinds of comments.

And yeah, maybe we'll talk about it there. There's so much to talk about. And friends, if you want to discuss these issues, Ricochet.com, joining it is how you get to do so. Because you've got to pay money to comment. That's what keeps it sane. It's not a lot, but you've got to. And it makes it all worthwhile. What else makes your life worthwhile? Well, going to donors, trust in ButcherBox and Human, and support them for supporting us. And of course, did I mention

you should join Ricochet today? I did. Did I mention that you should go to Apple Music, Apple iTunes, Apple Podcast, whatever you call it now. We give us five stars. I didn't, but I just did. So thank you both. It's been great to have Rob back in the podcast. We'll all be together next week, I guess, for another round of this for number 571 and until then i'm james minneapolis peter robinson in california rob long and we'll see everybody in the comments at ricochet 4.0 next week next week boys Au revoir. By the light of the crosses that burn Drawn by the promise of the women and the lace And the gold and the cotton and pearls It's the place where they keep all the darkness you need

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