This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

We're based in beautiful downtown Oakland, California, which is a port city on the San Francisco Bay.

Massive container ships travel across the Pacific and end up here. From miles away,

you can see the enormous white cranes that pull giant, uniformly sized metal boxes off the ships.

People say the cranes are the inspiration for the ad-at walkers and the Empire Strikes Back,

but that's not true. It's just a good story to tell when you pass by on the bridge.

The port of Oakland and its container ships have always captured my imagination,

and it turns out they also captured the imagination of my colleague and friend Alexis Madrigal.

I went out, I visited a ship that was docked in Oakland, and when I went out on the ship,

I walked into this room that was all wood-paneled and this kind of old Romanian captain

walks in with his marble reds and he sits down on the table and he looks right in my eyes and he goes,

what is your intent?

And I was just blotters in love. From this love at first sight, I was just like no one ever hears

these voices. They're so amazing. There's two head people on a ship. One is the captain,

the other is the chief engineer down in the engine room. We looked at the bridge and we went

back to that wood-paneled room and the chief engineer comes in another Romanian dude and he goes,

you visited the head of the ship and he taps its chest, now visit the heart. He takes us down

into the engine room, you know, with these wrenches that are like five feet tall. And I honestly

really could not imagine not doing a series of stories after that. And I went home and I had

some wine and I was like drunk tweeting about how amazing would it be to just tell the stories of

all these people in the supply chain and that's what happened. Alexis decided to embark on an

eight-part series called Containers about how the shipping container has changed the global economy.

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