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Peter Goodman on the show who's the New York Times's Global Economics Correspondent. He used to be at the Washington Post. He was the Shanghai Bureau Chief. He has been all around the world studying supply chains. I think that when we're selling, designing solutions, it's really important to look at things from a systems level. If we zoom out, then Peter has the highest level view of how supply chains operate. We deal with the minutiae of location and asset identification.
But the big picture is super interesting. Not just from a business perspective, we're all human beings who lived through COVID and seen what happens when supply chains go horribly wrong. His latest book, How the World ran out of everything inside the Global Supply Chain. He looks at that phenomenon, explains what happened, why it happened, and brings it to life with some very personal close-up storytelling from the point of view of an entrepreneur who's trying
to build a business that is being really challenged by what happened. He looks at a lot of the history and the systems that impact the way supply chains work and what happened. He's written other books. Another one that I recently read is Davos Mayna, How the Billionaires devoured the world. To me, I think this is a really important book too. It's a really great prequel to How the World ran out of everything. I encourage you to read both. I encourage you to
listen to this conversation with Peter Goodman. The Mr. Beacon Ambient IoT podcast is sponsored by Williott, bringing intelligence to every single thing. So Peter, welcome to the Mr. Beacon podcast. It's a real honor to have you here. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. You are an unusual guest for us. We're an internet of things, an ambient internet of things podcast, but this series is about 200 episodes plus now. I came out of a book that I wrote where I tried
to be holistic and so I ended up being a poolingly long. I realised the only way to be holistic is to actually be episodic and allow people to pick and choose what they want. But I've always been a firm believer when you're implementing technology, you need to see the big picture. We've spent a bunch of time with guests looking at supply chains in the micro, but you're dealing with them in the totally macro. We've got a pool back and we're looking at the
globe and you're the New York Times global economics correspondent. It seems like you've taken an interest in supply chains in particular. What is it about supply chains that fascinate you? Well, I got to be honest. I never thought I would write a book about the supply chain. It was always a central part of a lot of my reporting going back to being based in China for the Washington
Post right after China entered the World Trade Organization. I remember doing a series at one point on illegal logging in China and spending months and months drilling into the supply chain for wood and discovery that even giant sophisticated companies like IKEA, which had signed all sorts
of forestry pledges and had top shelf auditors digging into their supply chain. In the end, they were not fully aware of who their suppliers were doing business with and they were actually bringing in logs that were illegally harvested even though they were unaware of this. So that, I think, was the beginning of my fascination. I've written about the textile and apparel industries around the globe in South Asia, in Africa, in Southeast Asia, in my various
reporting wanderings. I've always been struck by how, in the same way after the 2008 financial crisis, people talk about banks being too big to fail that the supply chain is like too complex for anybody to regulate. I've chewed on whether that's a kind of organic feature or in some ways by design. Certainly, the bad actors, large multinational brands that just want the cheapest goods,
do try to insulate themselves from liability to the consequence. I mean, they use complexity as a way to kind of insulate themselves from responsibility for child labor, for fires that will pop up in places like Bangladesh in dense. I feel like I'm giving you a long-winded answer to a simple question. But basically, it's been at the center of a lot of my journalism for a very long time, but it wasn't until we ran out of all of this stuff in the pandemic and something very
personal happened. I was living in London. It's April of 2020. My wife and I, we have our third child born in a hospital in London. My wife's very stoic about the fact that her parents can't fly over from New York to help out with the baby. We can't get an appointment with a pediatrician because all the offices are closed. We can't even register him. He doesn't exist on paper because all government offices are closed. But where my wife finally loses it is where she says, well,
let's order some hand sanitizer and we can't find any in our London neighborhood. And then we even go out looking for the ingredients to make hand sanitizers ourselves. And we can't find those. Walking all over town can't find anything in my wife's as well. You're supposed to know how this kind of stuff works. So what's going on here? And I realized that I didn't fully understand.
And as I dug in journalistically, you know, realize that essentially our familiar mode of globalization had really broken down and it required book length to explain what what it happened. Well, I'm glad you are interested in it. And I'm glad you wrote the last two books that you did because they're amazing. So how the world ran out of everything inside the global supply chain. And then the kind of the prequel to that or the one that came before Davos Man, how billionaires
devoured the world. I have been consuming them and it's just been the beautifully written. But also important books. And I really think if people care about the world they live it and you know, are frustrated by some of the acrimony they see, some of the injustice that they see. And also,
I just want to understand how it works. Then both of these books and in particular this last one for us as Internet of Things enthusiasts, I think a lot of us, you know, we've heard about just in time, we've heard about lean, may have heard about containerization, but you really unpack that in a very interesting way. And so what I'd like in this conversation is to go into those subjects. So just to help you help us understand how lean, just in time, precision, works, containerization
pieces, also fascinating. And these are just great ideas, but they went horribly wrong. It seems. And I'd love to get your sense of how and why and then how we fix it, but maybe we should kind of pave the way and start off with this concept of just in time and lean. And where did that come from? And what is it? Because people that are working with businesses to sell them technology, they need to understand the kind of the construct that that technology is going into and you explain it very well.
Yeah, I appreciate that. And I think your framing is just right. These are good ideas that have gone terribly wrong. So take just in time. This is this concept pioneered by Toyota at the end of the Second World War. It's a reaction to the kind of mass assembly mastered by Ford in particular. And Toyota, the family, is studying the Ford model at the end of the Second World War. Japan's been devastated by the war. Japan is a heavily mountainous archipelago. There isn't a
lot of developable land, capital scarce. And the company concludes, we can't just make as much product as you possibly can and worry about how to sell it later. We need something much more calibrated to our circumstances. And they conclude, we got to run our company sort of the way supermarket manages milk. You want just enough of it on the shelves that no one leaves, no customer leaves unhappy that they can't buy milk, but not so much that a lot of it goes bad and you end up
spilling it. You need just enough to replace what you've sold and you need your suppliers to bring the parts and the raw materials to your supply chain just as you need them so you don't waste a lot of space and capital with warehouses full of things that you won't need for a long time. Toyota does this really well, becomes by many measures the most successful car company on earth,
and then along comes the logic of financialization. So the concept of just in time and so-called lean manufacturing, this takes the international business world by storm in the 80s and the 90s,
there's lots of books, business seminars and consultancies. I spend a lot of time with McKinsey in particular are proselytizing about it, but they then give us this mutant form that's tailored to the interests of corporate executives who need to make their share prices go up immediately, who are answerable to investors who are only interested in the quarter by quarter time horizon.
And this becomes a very crude imperative to just like slash inventory. You know, don't waste capital sticking parts and raw materials in a big warehouse as a hedge against trouble, do away with your warehouse and entrust the internet, a container shipping, long supply chains across oceans to replenish what you need. And this works out great provided there are no shocks,
but guess what? Life is full of shocks and every time there's a shock there are disruptions, there are shortages, but it's never bad enough that it changes how this is done and it works as planned. Share prices go up and investors are happy and corporate executives by the time the next shock comes with any luck there, you know, on a beach somewhere with a cocktail in their hand line in hammock. Yeah. So, I mean, the concept when I first heard about it seems like really scary.
So you're going to kind of rely on your suppliers and you're going to have slash inventories and how can they make that work when it is working? How do they, what are the things that have to be in place to make just in time work? Well, it's kind of amazing the extent to which it does work. And by the way, we should pause and note that Toyota would not have allowed their supply
chains to go far. And this is the part of Justin time that got intentionally ditched by the consumer class because it didn't help them in their in their approach to just making share prices go up quarter to quarter Toyota insisted that their suppliers be clustered close at hand to their
factories. So they weren't vulnerable to the parts of the Justin time global supply chain that we got those parts are container shipping in particular, which allows you to pack goods into the standard size steel boxes at factories and then lift them with cranes onto the backs of trucks onto trains carry them off to ports use more cranes to put them onto ships. It's seamless. It bypasses dock workers whose militancy has always been a potential disruption to supply
chains because dock workers are really important. They're well paid. And it used to take you know, before container shipping shows up in the mid 1950s used to take days and days off into to to load and unload a ship. And every job was a custom job. It was really dangerous. It required lots of working hands. They'd have to figure out you know how to take this side of beef and stick it in the hull of a ship alongside barrels full of liquor chemicals and manufactured parts and non-standard
size boxes. It was like a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle. It was very dangerous. And again, when the dock workers decided they didn't want to do the job because they felt they were underpaid or under appreciated. They could hold the whole works up. So containerization removes a lot of the friction. Everything moves a lot faster. It's much cheaper to load and unload ships. And then
you add international trade deals. And finally, you add the internet. And suddenly it is possible to sit in New York or London or Tokyo or wherever and pretend that a factory that's thousands of miles away across the ocean might just as well be down the street from you because as long as you have those elements, you got internet connectivity, you got container shipping and this whole transportation
network, you got trade deals, you can run it just in time supply chain. Very good. And what so what went wrong? We had the containers that allowed us to split up these supply chains between continents. You could leverage this incredible low cost workforce and amazing infrastructure in China. That's something that you pointed out in the book, whereas maybe there's other places where they have low cost workers and they don't have the infrastructure. You're not advocating
going back to bloated inventories and access. What's wrong and what are you advocating that should be done? What went wrong was we lost common sense. We gave our common sense away to shareholder interests who were not thinking about running companies in an intelligent way over the long haul, but just making share prices go up in the short term. So, you know, I'll give you an example. I spent time for the book with a company out in Minnesota that makes industrial generators.
And a very common sensical guy talked to who was working at this company for 20 years, describes the crew from McKinsey showing up one day. And it's a bunch of fresh out of Ivy League, university kids, one older guy in Slicksooth from the Chicago office. And they basically start talking down to the people running this business and they say, you're doing it all wrong, you're wasting all this money on inventory. We need to strip down inventory. And so they persuade this company
to stop warehousing $5 sheet metal brackets. And as a result, they keep running out of these $5 sheet metal brackets and they end up being late on the completion of these giant industrial generators that have to be installed by crane at places like hospitals. You know, talk about just in time. Like you better have that ready to go the day up. And they're constantly late. So then they're having to, you know, pay extra to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars,
to make stuff faster, to deliver stuff faster. And at one point, after Cummins, a publicly traded company takes over this factory, they start gaming the inventory process. So one of the metrics that Wall Street really looks at as a supposed marker of efficiencies would turn on asset. They like share prices. They will buy the stocks of companies that have good return on asset. Turn on asset is a metric. You take the amount of revenue you got, you divide it by the asset
on your books. Well, when you reduce inventory, you lower the denominator, right? You're net, you've got a smaller asset number. So your ratio went up. So you just showed on paper that your return on asset is higher, which tends to make a share price go higher. Well, the way they were doing this in many instances was refusing to accept shipment of inventory until the quarter ended. So they're parking lot would be full of these containers full of stuff that they actually needed.
But on paper, the transfer wouldn't happen till the end of the quarter. So they're basically stealing from themselves in the form of resilience. They're running out of things intentionally so that they can jack up their return on asset. This is an example of shareholder interests
taking a very sensible concept of just in time and making it go haywire. In fact, McKinsey itself eventually discovers that auto companies, including Toyota in Japan, have gone to the point where they're limiting the number of parts on their assembly lines at work stations that have room for additional parts. So that again, on paper, they can say, look how lean we are, even though this requires having to replenish the parts more often. I mean, this is purely
a manipulation of their own books. So even McKinsey says, yeah, you should knock that off. If you got room for 25 sets of whatever parts you need at this station, bring 25 sets over. Don't bring 15 now and 10 later. That's actually inefficient. But that's the kind of thinking that perverts this very common sense of idea of just in time and turns it into something that's good for stock prices in the short term and bad for resilience for companies and for society in general. What we
run out of stuff we actually need. I mean, there's one London Business School professor put it to me in explaining this gaming of the return on asset. He said, look, if you need a ventilator in the middle of a pandemic and you can't make a ventilator because you haven't kept the parts on hand, you can't say what at least our share price is high. Yeah. Well, and you follow this craziness into another channel, the railway business, which you know, the railway seems to be, we should
be setting more things on the railways. It's a very efficient way of transporting things, but this industry seems to be in a real state. And and lean and just in times seems to have morphed and had its own instantiation there. Can you describe how they implemented it and, you know, what made sense and how did it go off the rails if you'll bog them upon? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a perfect example. So they came up with something about 10 years ago called precision scheduled rail
roading, right? Who could be against precision? But this is really a fancy way of saying, let's fire lots of people and then stick to the remaining people with more work, which will keep them away from their family. So, you know, I spent time for the book with traveling maintenance crews and these are people have no idea what their schedule is until a couple of days before. They're having to miss doctors appointments. People are out on the road for weeks at a time, a missing spouses
birthdays, births of children. And you fire all these people and you make that problem worse, which hurts morale. You then the limit the numbers of trains, you actually reduce service, you make the existing trains longer, which is a scheduling hassle. And it's an invitation for really dangerous accidents, a lot of the accidents that we've seen, including this big explosion in East Palestine, Ohio that happened while I was writing the book, are made much worse by the
fact that the trains are much longer. But you justify this again by delivering to the shareholder class progress on metrics that you've convinced them show that you're so efficient. And again, there are clear evidence that the interests of society, of shippers are being undercut for the benefit of manipulating these metrics. My favorite one is so called dwell time. So dwell time is the amount of time that cargo sits in any particular place. The railroads tell the investor class,
we're going to give you progress on dwell time. So I talk to an engineer who's out in Idaho for Union Pacific, Giant Railroad out west. And he discovers much to his horror that he's actually pulling rail cars to the wrong destination, not by accident on purpose. Because the guy running the giant rail yard in Nebraska has heard this corporate mantra, we're going to deliver on dwell time, we're going to lower dwell time. And he decides, perfectly rationally, I don't care where the next
train's going, wherever it's going, I'm attaching as many cars as possible to that train. So I will have reduced dwell time. And this engineer discovers, yeah, I'm carrying auto parts that are supposed to be going to Southern California. I'm taking him to Oregon. They're going to have to be rerouted back through Idaho to get to their destination. I'm carrying barrels full of chemicals that some paint manufacturer needs to make their product. They're contractors who can't get the right paint
for the couple that's renovating their kitchen. Because some engineer has decided to lower dwell time. So here's an example of where efficiency in the Wall Street sense is not all that efficient for the rest of us. I think you're putting out a bunch of issues and a lot of this comes back to dysfunctionality at a lot of levels. But a lot of it is at the government level, in a lack of oversight is one of the key ones. I just want to give you the opportunity. I won't
be able to read both of these books. But my biggest fear is that they get to think this is a you know, pinco communist kind of New York Times writer who just doesn't believe in capitalism. My sense is that's not you. You actually celebrate a lot of the great things about capitalism. And it's not like you're just criticizing one side of the political aisle. You've got a lot of criticism for folks on both sides of the aisle. And you know, I'm interested in how you see
where you're coming from in terms of that. I don't want people to think that this is the product of a kind of political agenda. It's why my sense is you just want things to work properly and not see the everyday work as suffer. And the basically there really is a win-win-win here for almost everybody if we can re-inject some co-incency. Would you like to speak to any of that? Yeah, I really appreciate the question. So I have a card carrying capitalist. As was Henry Ford,
by the way, whose story I tell in the book. Henry Ford was not someone we should celebrate. He was a racist and anti-Semite. He crushed organized labor, but he knew a lot about supply change. And he knew about making stuff at scale. And he famously doubled the wages of his workers back in 1914 when he was trying to really push out the bottle tea. And some people called him a
communist. And he said, no, no, no. I recognize that if I want people showing up to work giving me their best effort, that's something I have to, that's a privilege I really have to pay for. It's about, as he would have put it, resilience. He also understood that he didn't want to be at the mercy of shareholders who just wanted short-term dividends when he wanted to invest in his business. So, you know, that's my first point. But also, you know, I think this bleeds into my last book,
and I appreciate your putting this spotlight there. Davos men have the billionaires to power the world. The beneficiaries of the status quo who have monopoly power and who have tilted our markets so that they work for a very narrow set of interests would have us believe that we can either have the status quo where we've got wonderful things like central air conditioning and
vaccines against pandemics and the miracle of e-commerce. We can have those things where we can monkey around with the formula that gave us those things and then we may as well be Venezuela. You know, that's just absolute nonsense. It's a very good way to stave off any kind of regulation, fair taxation. The rest of us would do well to remember that there are no markets without
some form of regulation. Markets without regulation become monopolies. And we see incredible market concentration in many industries and we see the people running those industries than using the money they've gained to inject money into the political system so that they can then make sure that the rules don't change. That's not capitalism. That's kind of corporate welfare for the people who can afford to write the rules. And for the rest of us, we end up paying higher prices. We end
up being cheated as working people. We end up not solving the problems of our time, whether we're talking about climate change or inequality at the anger that permeates a lot of our democracies. We can absolutely have capitalism and innovation and great rewards for the people with the best ideas.
You know, I got no problem with the fact that CEOs of companies who've pioneered great ways to do things, you know, get the benefits, but we absolutely need, we need any trust enforcement and other common-sensical regulations in order to make sure that everybody actually benefits from these things. Ryan Reynolds here for I guess my hundreds mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, honestly,
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credit. That's LinkedIn.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be. Very good. So I want to shift a little bit and talk about what you're seeing in terms of the response to the dysfunction that you catalog in how the world ran out of everything. And we all experienced it. They're just the crazy waiting for for for for everyday things. And there was a lot of people that suffered and died as a result of all of that. That's right. So what is
COVID isn't over, but it's hopefully under control more. What's happening now in terms of our alliance on China and how are we trying to fix this? Well, there's definitely a move afoot by major companies to diminish their reliance on China. And take a look at Walmart, for instance. So 15 years ago, if you were trying to get your product on the shelves of a Walmart super store, and you flew into Bentonville, Arkansas, that's Walmart's corporate headquarters, you have to go
in and see them. It's like going to visit the Pope, you know, they don't come to see you. If you went in there and you offered them your product and they said to you, where do you make this product? The answer was anywhere other than China, you had a problem because the assumption was you couldn't possibly be getting the lowest price. You couldn't be making it at the most efficient scale because only China has this incredible combination of huge numbers of relatively low-wage
people, investment into ports and highways and infrastructure. Well, today, if you fly to Bentonville Arkansas, you have the same sort of conversation and they ask you again, where you're making this product. And the answer is, only China, you have a problem. They want to know that there's some sort of backup plan that they're not dependent upon this single country that the US has decided to have a trade war with for production. So we do see Walmart in particular shifting some of their
production in the book I write about Mexico. I've since spent some time in India. Walmart's moving pretty aggressively into India. I spent time with Columbia Sportswear, the big outdoor clothing brand that followed their people to Guatemala. They're looking to shrink the distance between their markets and their customers. And then a lot of supply companies are having to go along whether they like it or not. It's but a lot of time in Mexico for the book and at one point
I was in Monterey, which is the city in Nuevole, and state. It's a border state. And I ran into a lot of South Korean companies. The sorts of companies most of us have never heard of because there's suppliers of parts to other manufacturers for parts. And I remember talking to one guy at the South Korean company who said, yeah, we're here because we sell parts to John Deere, the construction
equipment and tractor company. And they have a big factory in Victoria, Texas. And they've told us because of the incredible disruption during the pandemic with shipping prices going up, you know, 10 fold the space in a few months, giant floating traffic jams off of ports and places like Southern California, they want us to be within a five hour highway or rail journey of their factory in Victoria, Texas. And they've said, if we don't make that happen, they're going to go find some
closer supplier. So they were there looking to set up a factory in Mexico. And I discovered that a lot of companies are in that situation. So some of that is happening through the marketplace. Some of this is happening at the level of government policy. So of course, the Biden administration is now dispensing tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to companies that are making semiconductors in the US, electric vehicle, parts and finished vehicles as well. I mean,
part of this is strategic, right? So we've decided that it's probably not a great idea to take the brains of industry semiconductors and concentrate them on this single island that happens to be 90 miles off the coast of mainland China. I'm talking about Taiwan and island that not it's dentally is claimed as part of its own territory by the government in mainland China. And so some of it's strategic, some of it's the market, but certainly there's a reemergence
of the importance of place that is happening. So looking at India, you've been out in India, you've been filing reports from from there and they go with the truck driver there too. You know, what was that? What was that like? Because those roads are pretty crazy. I'm I've spent a little bit of time in India, you know, a lot and that was the most uncomfortable I've ever been in my life. I climbed in a cab just outside of Delhi, rode as far as Jipore,
just like an eight hour journey. It was 105 degrees Fahrenheit. That's 41 degrees Celsius. In this cab with no air conditioning and that was the least of my problems. I was under the bunk where the driver and the assisted driver sleep and I had to remain in this just horribly uncomfortable position to fit under there and every time we hit a bump, my head would smash a pipe
directly above me or be sliced at by this sharp plastic fake thatch material. Never been so uncomfortable in all my life, but I learned that yes, the roads, they need some work in India. So I guess that really comes back to the question of when they've got the people, when are they going to have the infrastructure? Do you think that it's even feasible given that they're not a totalitarian state in the same way as China is? Is it possible for them to build all the
infrastructure they need to provide a viable alternative? It's possible and they are actually building the infrastructure. There's been a dramatic build on the highways. They've gone to things like digital toll systems, which have eliminated a lot of the cues at the borders. It's actually not unlike what the European Union did 25 years ago where used to be that every Indian state, you had to stop and submit to an inspection and pay customs. Now that's all gone.
You can just sail through as if it's all one big country as it actually is. The real problem though is that when China was investing heavily in poor infrastructure in highways, there wasn't another China out there that had to compete with. India, of course, has to compete with China. Moreover, and this is a part of the story that people don't like to focus on too much, there was a leveling phase post-1949 in China, regardless of how one feels about the Bau years,
which were full of chaos and mayhem and death. It's certainly not a period any of us would want to live through. But the net effect of that was there was gender balance to a large degree. There was a lot of primary literacy and primary healthcare. When China begins to experiment with market embracing reforms, first in the late 1970s and it really picks up speed into the late 80s
and into the 90s, you've got this giant workforce that can easily be trained. You've got people moving from rural areas to coastal cities who are fairly easily set up to go work in a textile factory or a shoe factory and eventually an electronics factory. In India, you've got very highly skilled people, lots of engineers at the high end. Then you've got a lot of people who have basically no skills at all. You have women who've been systematically excluded from the workforce.
That's not to say they're not doing work. They're working their butts off, but it's at home taking care of children. It's in the fields, as agricultural laborers. It's a much more difficult proposition for women in particular who've been central to the manufacturing boom in places like China and more recently Vietnam to go and work in factories in India. Very good.
Peter, how did you go from Davosman to this latest book? Obviously, a lot happened in the outside world, but what is the connective tissue between the last two books that you wrote? Well, I'll be perfectly honest about it. I had no desire to write another book quickly. I had moved from London to New York with my family in the summer of 2021. I was still working on Davosman. I had begun Davosman with a newborn baby in the house and two school-aged children
dealing with distance learning. The last thing I wanted to do as I near the end of Davosman was writing another book. My agent called me one day and said, do you have another book? I thought it talked to me in a year. Then I found myself writing a lot of stories about the supply chain disruptions I was writing about, the shipping industry, the rail industry, trying to understand
how it was that so many usually important things. Personal protective gear in the middle of the pandemic, basic medicines, parts for ventilators, and then less important things, but things we noticed, exercise bikes, workout gear, tapioca beads for boba tea. All this stuff was missing. Everyone was asking me what's going on. I had a walk with my wife one day and I said, well, I guess
the supply chain stuff, that's a book. She said, oh, definitely. I called my agent, sure enough, that interest was feverish, got a deal immediately, and then quickly realized that in some ways, the supply chain situation was just a perfect up close examination ground for a lot of the themes I'd been exploring at Davosman. In particular, the importance of shareholder interest.
The monopoly power that explains a lot of the shortages in the global economy, this kind of engineered scarcity, comes directly out of the stuff I was wrestling with in Davosman, how wealthy people have managed to monopolize most of the bounty of globalization and international trade and capitalism in general, and have used the money they've gotten to purchase political power, and they've used political power to make the world friendlier to their business interests.
And the pandemic and the supply chain disruptions were a perfect manifestation of that. So once I saw that a book had sort of been thrust upon me, I was very enthusiastic about it. I think they work so well together. The second one really kind of takes these, almost an abstract concept of these billionaires and how they're distorting the systems, and then you basically show how it really impacts us and it impacts the people. I found it really
maybe angry, I have to say, just sort of hearing about. Yeah. How one of the things that really impressed me was this, how close you got to the actors in this play that you allowed us to look into, like the truck driver who's life is being made, a misery couldn't even find a place to go to the bathroom and eat healthily. And it's almost like I kind of have this omniscient view, but presumably you were in the
cab with them. How did you organize that? What was the practicalities of that level of research? And how did you find them? And then we you literally in a cab with them for three days though. Yeah. Yeah. Spent three days and two nights, slept in the bottom bunk at the back of the cab. You know, I'm a big believer in field reporting. I think if you want to know what's really going on, you have to test out the the tidy propositions that you get
when you talk to experts academics. I mean, that's really an important part of the reporting to,
don't mean to degrade anybody, but life looks much neater from your desk. And on an Excel spreadsheet, then it tends to when you get out to see what people's lives are, are really like, so I knew I wanted to ride along with the truck driver because I'd been exposed to a lot of trucking industry talking points that one of the reasons why the supply chain was in such distress and why products were in short supply was because we had supposedly run out of truck drivers.
There were not enough people willing to drive trucks. And I quickly discovered having to just a little bit of reading that we had been chronically short of truck drivers for decades. And that in fact, we had plenty of people who had commercial driver's licenses, roughly three times as many people as we need to move freight in the United States at any particular time. But we had one out of people willing to to sign off on the increasingly miserable bargain that driving a truck entails. And I
wanted to see that for myself. So I've been talking to people in the industry. I somebody reached out to me with a report from a trucking industry consulting firm based in Tennessee. I had a good conversation with the CEO there. And he had told me that he had managed to ride along with the truck driver. I said, well, I'd love to do that. He said, you definitely should. He connected me with this outfit in Kansas City. And I was out in Kansas City for some other reporting for the book. Talking to
a guy who was operating a shipping yard for a general motorist plan. And I took a couple hours and dropped in on the trucking company had a good conversation with the CEO there. He said, yeah, we'll see what we can do. And so sure enough, right after New Year's in 2022, flew out to Kansas City, didn't know where I was going. Arrived at the trucking company's main yard in Kansas City.
Was introduced to this fellow Stephen Graves, spent a little time having coffee with him. And the next thing I knew I was in his truck and we were off on a journey that took us down to Texas. Next to Dallas Fort Worth Airport made a bunch of stops along the way, stopped for the night in a couple different places and talked for hours and hours and then drove back with him to Kansas City. I mean, that is so rare. I mean, you're talking about a number of industries that have been
hollowed out. The trucking industry, the railroad industry. But your own industry really has been hollowed out as well. And I don't know how you do you feel like privileged? It seems like, yeah, you know, I feel like you're like the Taylor Swift, the Brutal Mars of journalism. Because, you know, there's a lot of people that they want to be a sports star. They want to be a singer and how many people get to do it and doing the kind of journalism that you do. It seems
like there's hardly anyone is able to do that. I feel very fortunate in that, you know, when I was coming up in journalism, there were lots and lots of mid-size, daily newspapers that did serious field reporting that had big enough staffs that they could detail people on projects that might last weeks or even months. And there's still people out there doing that work, but it's pretty lonely. And I am fortunate enough to work at a place that has a healthy business model and really
values a serious independent journalism field reporting. And I'm lucky enough to work for people who don't blink if it's a good story. And I can make the argument that it's worth going somewhere and taking extra days just to see what will happen. They understand that that's where the best discoveries come from and we're lucky enough to write for an audience that's willing to pay real money to support journalism. Journalism is an expensive proposition and somebody's got to pay
for it. So yes, I feel very fortunate. Yeah, the New York Times is remarkable in being able to get a figure out how to turn it into a business model that's self-sustaining, but that's very rare. And I think we all need to subscribe directly to the huge channels that are left to appreciate that to support the good work that you're doing. I could ask you a ton of questions about the making of, but we do have this tradition on the podcast. I wanted to get into that
because your time's short, but I'm intrigued. You spend a bunch of time in England. You probably, I don't know whether you spotted the connection between Desert Island discs and the three questions, but that's kind of where I stole the idea from. It's recycled and it turned into what three songs would you take to Mars, but then everyone was giving me space odyssey and David Bowie and so they kind of got a bit boring. So I like to ask more broadly, what three songs have meaning to you
and were you able to think of those? Yeah, yeah, I came up with three for you. So I've got Al Green, Jesus is waiting, which strikes me as one of the only songs I can imagine where I would pay serious money for the privilege of going to a concert to hear that song played for like eight hours straight without a break. It's just every note is so perfect. Every vocal is just wonderful
and perfect and so yeah, that would be the soundtrack for the rest of time. Similar vein, Isaac Hayes by the time I get to Phoenix, as a guy who likes to write long form, I'm touched every time I realize that that's a song that was recorded and pressed on to a record at 18 plus minutes and earns every second of it. It's just delicious right until the end. And then finally, all three of my kids have gone through periods where they had to listen to the same album
over and over again, a long car rides, often in Europe when we were living in London. And I have tried to find albums that I'm willing to listen to over and over again, less we go crazy, listening to gummy bears songs and other sorts of synthesized. So for a while, it was the Beatles Abbey Road. And I can tell you you could do worse than listen to the Beatles Abbey Road over and over and over again. And I suppose because of their kids and they don't always get all the way
through, I've probably listened to come together more than any other song of the album. It's the first track and it's never the wrong thing to be listening to. Wonderful, wonderful. Yeah, that music or connection with your kids. My oldest son, basically, if I like something, he doesn't like it. My youngest son actually has his youngest, he's 21. But we get a concert together and that's sort of, it's a wonderful thing. Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, what are your feelings about
having lived in the UK? You lived in Shanghai, of course, for a long period of time. But how do you feel about the UK? What was it like coming back to New York? It was tough. I miss London. We lived in in a neighborhood in North London, Hamstead, that I'm sure will be the nicest place that we'll ever live. And we lived about seven minutes from the Hamstead Heath, which certainly has to be a
contender for greatest park of a major city on planet Earth. And just loved it. In fact, in many ways, living in London made it hard to live in New York because London is the only other place I've been that gives you that feeling of like, it's the center of the universe. You could find anything in this city if you go look hard enough for it. But it's a much easier place to navigate the New York. And we went to the theatre all the time. It was reasonably prized. You could get a reservation
easily. It's some restaurant nearby. You learned, you know, you don't have to run for the tube. There's another one in three minutes. If you miss your train, there's a park everywhere. There's a pub everywhere where you can sit and relax for a bit. It's just a wonderful city. And I will confess it. It was it was hard to move back to to to these parts. Yeah. You're in New York now. I see. Yeah. Yeah. About an hour north of the city in the lower Hudson Valley. Yeah. So you've you've experienced
the national health service personally, I guess. And it would really live all of its limitations and wonderfulness at the same time. Yeah. It's America. Yeah. Yeah. It's I mean through through the American lens. It's it's it's a miracle. And you come to see that having a national health care service, even one that has in recent years been decimated by austerity is just so important
that it shrinks other problems. So I mean some of the stuff that we can we can talk about the of course of these two books that we mentioned, you know, it's very difficult in the US for workers to transition to their next thing because if you've got health care, you're stuck. And if you if you lose your health care, you're desperate to take whatever job you can get that will give you your health care in most of the rest of the developed world. And of course the UK led led the
way with the creation of the NHS. You you have health care regardless, which actually makes it easier to take the sorts of risks that Americans love to tell ourselves were so good at is supposedly swashbuckling capitalist were actually limited in our risk taking by the fact that we don't have national health care. I totally agree and I having grown up in England and you know on one hand they had the class system and I kind of don't get above yourself kind of thing that and and and not
the same appreciation of entrepreneurialism, but they had that safety net. So actually you could go out and do it and take the risk. I just can't imagine if the United States had the NHS the the number of startups and entrepreneurial unlock of value would just be amazing. Oh sure. I mean you you think about the fact that you know we've got the de industrialized Midwest and trade experts in places like Washington and New York, which is well you know it's just move out of there and
go to Arizona and become a solar installer. Well that sounds great, but you have this not minor reality that people are tied to their communities. They've we don't have help with housing. If if housing prices all go down at once in one particular community and again you're stuck thinking about health care. You can't just pick up and and move and and take that risk. What part of England are you from by the way? Well I grew up in in in our London so I mean in the
suburbs and then I lived in Islington and Richmond and yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh fantastic. We can't out there. But people just it's amazing how misinformation and propaganda can just cloud people's perception of that. And I remember you know my father sadly passed away during COVID in one of the old people's homes that the you allude to in your book. But he was living on his own for a while. Broke his leg stuck on the floor,
almost died. They card him off to hospital. We we kind of get him in there and they patch him up in in like a few days. He's back. He's he's he's got a pin in his leg and they resuscitated him. Now his wallet was still in his house. No one looked for a credit card and I do they just did it and that's that's the sort of thing we're missing. Anyway we're with the lots of other things in in this conversation. I want to thank you Peter for it's been all I have in you on the show
and a real pleasure. Thanks so much for having me really enjoyed it. So that was our conversation with Peter Goodman. It was a real honor. A privilege and a pleasure to talk to Peter. It's it's amazing how this ability to synthesize a lot of information and make it understandable and interesting. It translates not just from the written page but also to the podcasts. Peter's actually been on the daily. The New York Times podcast at least a couple
of times did a great job there as well. I'm so glad that he was able to join us. It was it was a real gift. Having you actually listened to gift as well. So thanks for doing that. Please be safe, be kind and do join us for our next episode. Thanks for being part of the Mr. Beapin podcast. Q the fireplace and your favorite fall movie. There's nothing better than a cozy evening at home with a class of first leaf wine. First leaf is a personalized wine club that delivers right
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