Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. Chances

are that the technology that you're using right now to listen to this podcast was built

somewhere else. It's very likely that whatever country the phone or tablet or computer

you're using to hear me talk right now was assembled in a different country than you're

living in right now. If not, then some piece of it was some dongle or some wire or something

like that. We take for granted that we rely on stuff whether it's high tech stuff or clothing

or everyday household appliances that was built and manufactured and assembled somewhere else.

Since we've had a pandemic and we've been in lockdown we've been increasingly used

to having stuff delivered directly to our door, whether it's books or groceries or food

for the evening. This is an incredibly complicated system as you might imagine and it's really

kind of a monument to human ingenuity that we've built a system of global commerce that

really uses the whole globe. That we build things in one place, we get the raw materials

in another place, we consume them in another place. So how does all this work? This is the

problem tackled by Christopher Mims, who is a journalist at the Wall Street Journal.

In his new book called Arriving Today, From Factory to Front Door, Why Everything is

changed about how and what we buy. I'm sure you remember the ever given disaster, right,

or at least snafu, maybe not disaster, but this giant container ship that got stuck

in the Suez Canal a few months ago and slowed down all of global commerce. So that's a

reminder on the one hand that there are fragile points in this system, but it's also just

amazing to look at these ships, right, these jai humongous vessels stacked with these containers

and these containers are part of the intermodal transport system, the containers, the boxes

that are on the ships need to be unloaded incredibly quickly in some very busy port and

...