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information visit dignity memorial.com. This is fresh air. I'm Dave Davies.

Do you remember how in the early months of the pandemic you couldn't find toilet paper or cleaning products on store shelves? And then soon enough all kinds of other products were hard to get, from building materials to exercise equipment to new cars because automakers couldn't get

computer chips. Our guest today New York Times correspondent Peter Goodman has

spent a lot of time rummaging through the wreckage of those

disruptions in the supply chain, discovering things less well known, like the one

billion pounds of harvested almonds that California growers couldn't get to foreign buyers

because hard-pressed shippers were busy with more profitable traffic.

In his new book, Goodman explores the business decisions that left the economy vulnerable to a disruption like this, and

the erosion of government regulation over critical transport industries that left their capacity

to move freight, weak, and brittle.

All those issues, he says, were exacerbated by the corporate drive to maximize short-term

profits.

The ultimate threat to the supply chain he writes is unregulated greed.

Peter Goodman is the Global Economics Correspondent for the New York Times.

His new book is How the World Ran Out of Everything

inside the global supply chain.

Well, Peter Goodman, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thanks so much for having me.

In April 2020, when all this, the pandemic really hit us, your wife was about to give birth to your third child and she'd

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