In this episode, Kate sits down with author and journalist Rachel Slade to discuss her books Making It In America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the USA (and How It Got That Way) and Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastore, and the Sinking of El Faro. Rachel’s books are incredible explorations of humanity and she deftly weaves together complex threads. We focus on Making It In America in the episode. The book is so much about where trade, manufacturing, farming, immigration, the textile industry, unions, and the history of the hoodie itself meet. We start by exploring how manufacturing made America and touching on the complex series of events that led to the offshoring of the majority of American manufacturing after NAFTA. This episode is about grit and determination and a commitment to vision by American Roots, the hoodie company featured in the book, and what entrepreneurship means and what it might mean to manufacture in America once again. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about history, geopolotics, economics and the externalities of focusing solely on the bottom line. It’s about building and re-building community and networks of support and it’s about what it means for us, as humans, to make things by hand. 

We also talk about;

Men’s mental health

Supply chains

Find Rachel:

Making It in America

Into the Raging Sea

Articles + Essays

Instagram: @rachelmslade

Made in USA Brands

Resources Mentioned:

Fields of Gold by Madeleine Fairbairn: 

90% of Everything by Rose George

Eating Nafta 

Rachel on the Julian Dorey Podcast: 

Melanie Challenger’s On Extinction

Also Check Out Episodes

-Kate’s Solo on Resources

-Melanie Challenger

Howdy. I'm Kate Cavanaugh, and you're listening to the Mind Body and Soil podcast, where we're laying the groundwork for our

land, ourselves, and for generations to come by looking at the way every thread of life is connected to one another.

Communities above ground mirror the communities below the soil, which mirror the vast community of the cosmos.

As the saying goes, as above, so below.

Join me as we take a curious journey into agriculture, biology, history, spirituality, health, and so much more.

I can't wait to unearth all of these incredible topics alongside you.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Groundwork podcast where we are exploring the threads of what it means to be humans woven into this earth.

I am your host, Kate Cavanaugh, and it is such a pleasure to be with you here each and every week.

I just got off with my guest today and had to dive right into recording the intro because I am just so fired up about this

topic that I can barely contain my excitement.

I went really deep on this episode, partially because it really challenged me to step outside of my knowledge base into a

field that felt very adjacent to ag to me and really challenged me to to learn some about economics and geopolitics that are

definitely outside of my wheelhouse and probably, let's be honest, above my pay grade.

And I just couldn't get enough of this author's work.

And so let me let me introduce this week's guest.

So this week's guest is Rachel Slade, who is the author of 2 absolutely incredible not to be missed books.

First is Into the Raging Sea, 33 Mariners, 1 Megastorm, and the Sinking of El Faro, which is about, the sinking of an American

container ship in 2016 and the the lives that were were lost.

And she does an incredible job with this book. It is harrowing.

It is a heavy tale, and it weaves together a lot of what we've been exploring in in terms of the shipping industry, with this

true story with dialogue that actually happened because all of this 26 hours of this, of the conversations that were happening

on the bridge as this ship is, is going into the eye of a hurricane.

And so it's real dialogue, and it is, it's tragic and harrowing and such a page turner.

And then the main focus of of this episode is Rachel's new book, Making It in America, the Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture

in the USA, and How It Got That Way. And we go deep. Rachel is also a journalist.

She's had some incredible pieces that I link below in the Boston Globe and in the New York Times, and in various publications.

And she, I just really respect her.

And let me say this, you know, as somebody who loves to go down rabbit holes and to explore complexity, to really tease at

the threads of how we got here and to pull in these little histories.

Rachel is a woman after my own heart in that regard.

And making it in America is incredible because it is where trade and manufacturing and farming and immigration and addiction

and the textile industry and the history of unions and the hoodie, all meet somewhere in the middle.

And it is incredibly relevant to today in so many, in so many different ways.

I think it just speaks to so many predicaments and situations that we find ourselves in and gives us some historical context

for them in a way that I really hope historical context for them in a way that I really hope can help us reimagine our world going forward.

And so she's just done an absolutely incredible job.

And for those of you that are listening that have really been along for the ride for a long time, I know that right now we're

deep in this exploration of supply chains, especially supply chains outside of the food system,

parallels in the history of how things shift from local or from, you know, manufactured in America to offshoring in the way

that the food system has consolidated and shifted away from from local over the years.

And so I think that this is something to really sink our teeth into.

And I also think that there is a big call to action in this book.

And I think that we're the people to hear it.

And I am so excited, you know, Rachel and I sort of go outside of the scope of the book to really explore these historical

influences that lead to the offshoring of American manufacturing.

And the book is really she uses American roots, this company that is making an all made in the USA with union labor hoodie in Maine.

And so every aspect of the hoodie is American made.

It's American cotton and American zippers and American grommets and how hard it is.

And she really uses this incredible family, the Waxmans, Ben and Whitney Waxman, to to tell all of these pieces of history,

all of these threads of history and politics of of so many different things in the context of the book.

And we don't touch on that as much because I really want you to read the book.

You know, that's a big goal of mine here on the Groundwork podcast is to invite readers into the work of these incredible

authors and and everyone on the podcast to just invite you in.

And so I really encourage you to do that.

I want to give, this is not a disclaimer.

I think it it it's just a statement.

I do not talk about politics on the podcast, very often.

And there there are a variety of of reasons for that.

But first and foremost, I, and I've said this in solo episodes before, especially as I set up our exploration of supply chains,

that it has been my pleasure, truly, to straddle a lot of different political spaces in the work that I have done over the

last 15 years, that being in agriculture, it really represents a pretty diverse political spectrum.

And I feel that for me, that has brought me into a lot of connection and stories of people that I might not have known otherwise, and just having that opportunity.

And I know that my listenership is diverse in their political beliefs as well.

And this is something that I celebrate and am excited about.

And so we touch on some politics in this episode, and I know that I know that for me personally, there was a lot I didn't

know that is contained in making it in America in terms of unions.

And it really, it really fascinated me. I went I went very deep.

I looked at a lot of outside sources in preparing this episode, and it really affected me.

And so I'd encourage anybody that's listening to listen.

Listen to our conversation, because I think that and I told Rachel this, her work is so good, and Ben and Whitney Waxman are

a mirror for for so many of us here in America, and I saw some of my own struggles as an entrepreneur, and I saw some of the

struggles of agriculture as a whole in this book, and it also illuminates something I'm really trying to tease out with this

sort of journey that we're on looking at supply chains outside of the food system, which is to talk about how we got here.

I cannot tell you how important this is to me that we better understand how we got here.

And I feel like this is a question I hear people ask all the time.

We hear it when we talk about ultra processed food.

We hear it when we talk about our communities, when we talk about our politics, when we talk about manufacturing, how did we get here?

And I think that making it in America really highlights some of how we got here.

And this really is an exploration of that and a championing of what it might mean to manufacture in America once again.

And I could have talked to Rachel probably for 4 hours, but but she did have a bit of a time limit.

There were a

lot of trust questions that I honestly didn't get to.

And those of you that have been with me for a while know that I always like to just be present to the conversation.

But I hope that maybe Rachel might come back and, and let me pick her brain a little bit more.

And so I also want to remind you that this podcast is in no way comprehensive.

This is such a complex subject matter, and I think we do our best in what isn't really that short of amount of time, and this is also a long intro.

And so I really appreciate the time that you're investing in learning about this with me.

But we do our best with what is a very complex topic.

And I think what happens is pretty amazing.

And I think what happens when you keep your dollars in your local economy is pretty amazing.

And I want to anchor this into this, you know, first of all, that we're we're exploring supply chains.

We're exploring how resources move to our bodies, how waste moves away from our bodies.

But we're also exploring what it might mean to reimagine this world.

That when we say those words, how did we get here?

So often what we're saying is, this here that we have arrived at isn't good.

And I think it's really important that we take the next step and say, how do we change it? How do we make it differently?

And I've said it before, but David Graeber's work is always an anchor for me in this.

And so I have a different David Graeber quote for us today.

And it's, every day we wake up and collectively make a world together.

But which one of us, left to our own devices,

potential to reimagine this world. And so this is reimagining manufacturing in a way that might be a little bit of an old

way of imagining manufacturing is really important.

I hope that we get to explore this topic more.

I really appreciate your attention in this, and and your investment in this.

Again, I know this is a long intro.

I know it's a long episode, and I appreciate you sticking with me.

If you are excited about this adventure of learning more about supply chains, more about what it means to be humans woven

into this earth, just smash that subscribe button wherever you are, whether you're in Spotify or Apple Podcasts or in YouTube,

so that you can get upcoming episodes.

And if you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend. Most podcasts are found by word-of-mouth.

And here at Groundwork, I want people to hear these incredible stories, dive into the work of these incredible authors and experts and farmers.

And so I can't encourage you more to share.

And if you would be so kind as to leave a rating and review, it really does make a difference.

And a reminder that this is a one woman show.

And so I do all of the the production with Josh and, and all of the research and all of the reading that makes these incredible conversations possible.

I cannot stress enough how much you need to run Not Walk to pick up both of books.

There are all kinds of resources in the show notes with some of the books we talk about, some of her articles and other podcasts that she's been on.

If you want a different view, this was a a very different interview than the ones I've heard her give for the most part.

So so there's lots more out there.

And thank you again for being here with me today.

Without further ado, here is Rachel Slade, author of Making it in America and Into the Raging Sea.

You did such a it was incredible to read about, especially having looked at Rose's work and having thought a lot about shipping containers.

And of course, I think it's really relevant.

Now, I think we're kind of seeing that.

But we just saw a little piece of it.

I think we saw some during COVID.

But with the Francis Scott Key Bridge, I think we saw another little piece of both infrastructure, which we've been talking

about on the podcast and shipping and cargo ships. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that was just Yeah, the Francis Scott Key Bridge, disaster is personal for me because I actually when I was

reporting into the raging sea, I took a container ship from Rome,

that

to Baltimore. And so we actually what we traveled up, you know, the Chesapeake Bay, so we obviously must have gone under that bridge.

And, what would what was shocking to me about that story actually is that there were very slim tolerances.

Like when you look at the shipping lane under that bridge, and you think about how massive these ships are.

I was kind of shocked at how close the shipping lane came to that critical, strut.

So, I mean, a lot of people have been talking about, you know, why weren't there tugs on on that ship?

And the truth is that you only use tugs at in that port to spin the ship around, which is quite an amazing thing to watch. You have this. How long was that guy?

Like, I don't know, I'm gonna say 1,000 or 1200 feet long.

And so, you know, 2 tugs, 1 on either end, and you're actually just spinning this thing. It's amazing.

But, but then they they drop the tugs, and the ship just goes on its own power, which means that, there's no backup. Right?

So if you do have a catastrophic failure, whatever, I don't know why the engine quit.

But, if you do have a catastrophic failure like that, there's no plan b.

Fascinating.

It doesn't happen that often. Right? Sorry.

No, yeah. And and I have to wonder, too, you know, into the raging sea, you talk about El Faro, the building El Faro, and

you talk about I think it's sun ships.

I have it somewhere too, you know, and and some of the manufacturing that happened for those ships in the mid seventies.

And and then you have an infrastructural boom through Eisenhower, and I wonder if there's a mismatch now as we're bringing

in astronomical amounts of stuff, something that that you, you know, twice the weight of the moon into the ports of Los Angeles

and Long Beach alone inside of a year.

That if if those infrastructure of of ship and stuff that's coming in and the built environment that they're coming through

is a little bit mismatched at this point.

That's actually that's very that's totally accurate.

Yes, these ships are obviously getting bigger and bigger, because it's more economical to do fewer trips, bigger ships.

And so they have widened the Panama Canal at tremendous expense.

I don't know what it costs, to to get these they're called Panamax ships, which are just enormous.

Like, I mean, they're they're floating cities.

And, so, you know, I haven't done too much research on the Baltimore tragedy, but presumably, that was one of the Panama Max ships.

But you're right, you've got old infrastructure, these bridges that were built over, you know, major river highways.

But the presumption then was that these ships were much narrower.

And now you have these really wide ships.

And so that's why, you know, when you look at the shipping lane, maybe it made sense when the ships were like half the width.

But, at this point, yeah, the tolerances are super low.

And, so maybe that was wait an accident waiting to happen.

You know, there's this anytime you have a major maritime disaster like this, you have a massive investigation on jointly conducted just like with El.

They jointly conducted by the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board, and it'll probably take a year or

2 for them to understand everything that happened.

But there there are 2 for me, there are 2 key factors.

One is, you know, why did the engine quit?

You know, I'm desperate to know that. I think everybody is too.

You know, presumably that was a diesel engine.

It's interesting that happened right after I pulled out

a port.

So I suspect that something happened in port when they were getting turning the engine back on or you know, changing fuels or oils or something like that. I don't know. It's just a guess.

But then the other, I think the other outcome of this will be, oh, you know, most of American infrastructure is actually not

designed to handle the load that's coming in?

No, not at all. And I mean, our infrastructure grades, I think it was recently upgraded to a C minus from a D a couple of

years ago, oh, it's just a lot of aging. It's a lot of aging concrete. It's a lot of aging rebar.

There's water that has gotten in it, it has shifted when we're talking about dams or roads or bridges. This is not new stuff. And our world is very different.

But I you know, I think it's my hope and hopefully, we'll get to this some towards, you know, as we go through the interview,

that might be time to reimagine some of this based on how we might reimagine our world and the way that we bring stuff to

our bodies, resources to our bodies and cart our waste away from some opportunity to see it differently.

I hope and you've you've done a lot of work in that regard.

So I'm excited to dig into that.

Absolutely. I mean, this is a this is a far reaching kind of global reckoning, right?

Not only just on the individual level, or just or or on a in sector level, like we're talking about manufacturing.

We're talking about logistics, but also just, like, you know, who we are as a nation at this point and what are our objectives?

What do we want for our people?

How do we want to assert ourselves in the world?

What, you know, there's so many questions.

And, it's a crazy time to be asking these questions, of course, because we have this presidential election coming up, which,

in a way is is like a, you know, it's it's whatever the the outcome will be a major commentary on, you know, one version of one vision versus another.

And, you know, I'm just gonna jump right into the political because I think it's important to talk about

President Biden's plan, he actually has an industrial policy in place.

His proposal when he was first elected was very broad and far reaching it and included infrastructure, green energy, all different

ways to support manufacturing in the city through I mean, city, country to revive this very critical part of our existence of our nation.

Some of that was not passed, you know, because government works slow.

But a lot of it has been put in place.

But it's it's it requires long term investment, long term thinking, and that's what's happening now.

And those who are paying attention are really starting to see the fruits of this industrial policy.

But I think I think there's also, well, there I think there are 2 things, you know, one is just impatience, like, show us the results.

Which, by the way, can be quantified.

I mean, there are results coming every day in terms of investment in so many important sectors that wasn't happening before.

But then the other problem is just kind of folks connecting the dots, understanding why this kind of investment is important,

why it takes a long time to kind of reverse trends.

And, you know, the the number of entities required to pull this off, you know, tremendous amount of coordination required.

I mean, this is I can't help but think about what you just said about those 2 tugboats turning a ship around in in a narrow space like this takes time.

And it takes finesse Faro us to maybe return to some practices something something that you said in an interview with, I think,

is Julian Dorey, who I hadn't I listened, that was a great conversation.

You said something that I really loved, which is the history of getting Americans to manufacture is the history of America.

And so I love that story. Right?

It's it's just so compelling when you start to think about why didn't why did the colonists, you know, fight the revolution? What did they really want? What was their goal?

And then you look at us now, and you're like, wait a minute, this does not align. Do you want to? Should we briefly talk about that?

Yeah, I think we should. I think it's I kind of want to set the stage, I kind of want to lead us into NAFTA and into Ben and

Whitney's story and weave some shipping and some textile industry into it.

Because I think that to understand where why where we find ourselves now in a political climate, kind of have to know where

we've been and what has happened to really consider where we might be going.

Absolutely. I'm a true believer in understanding history so that we either do repeat it or we don't repeat it. But, you know, it's amazing.

It just is just like this beautiful buffet of options. Right?

And you can actually see many of the outcomes. So, is this desirable? Yeah.

So, let's, let's just go back to, you know, the late 1700s and the colonists, the British saw the American colonies as like

a big mall Faro British imported goods, right?

So, the British were making all the stuff, but they were making a lot of stuff.

And they were importing a lot of stuff, obviously, from India and other places around the world.

And, yeah, so the colonists were buyers, basically.

And so they were restricted from producing most things in America.

And that was obviously deliberate, it was protectionist, it was so the British had this, you know, mall full of a captive audience, right?

Such a great analogy.

Right at the mall, and then Americans were expected to, you know, produce raw goods then got shipped over to, to Britain, and other places.

And that was very frustrating for folks who actually didn't want to buy imported goods and also didn't want to pay all those taxes on imported goods.

So yeah, you have the here

we are

in the book, and it's right.

So we're about to get to that. So so they fight this revolution.

And again, it so much of it is about being politically and economically free of English imported goods. Like, as simple as that.

That's why they dumped the tea in in, you know, the the Boston Harbor.

I mean, I which is very close to where I live.

They didn't want that in British imported Chinese tea and the tax that they had to pay on it. Right? Yeah.

So right after the United States wins the revolution, George Washington appoints Alexander Hamilton, very smart guy, and says,

figure out basically an industrial policy for this new these new United States.

Like, figure it out, figure out how we can stimulate manufacturing and deliver a report, and we'll make it happen.

Or I hope we can make it happen. We'll figure this out.

And so, yeah, so Alexander Hamilton spent a year, reading and talking to people and talking to financers and talking to people

who maybe knew how to manufacture a bit, like, what do you need?

And a couple of things came out of that. One was a national bank.

So manufacturers need a source of cash, right?

Because they need to invest in people and infrastructure so that then they can produce their their wares. So

Yeah. Exactly. And so, you know, the American government was like, oh, we can we can pull capital, like, we need to figure

out a way to pull capital capital to make this available to people who are willing to manufacture that ended up being something that Andrew Jackson, I believe killed. It during his term.

There was this by the time by the by the 18 twenties, actually, so what was that? It was like 30 years later.

There were there was evidence that it was being abused by New England industrial powerhouses, which really pissed off the

south and they were like, why are we doing this?

You know, why are we supporting the the New England industrialists? We're we're agricultural down here. So that's, you know, that.

Okay.

Yeah, that was one of the first riffs. Yeah.

Between forget slavery, like, just the idea that like, what is government for and when you have the agriculturalists versus

the industrialists, this is one of those first moments where there's this real tension.

Fascinating.

And so he kills

right that.

Yeah, yeah. So he actually killed the data than the bank.

I think at that point, it was called the 2nd National Bank.

But that was over in done so. And we feel those repercussions now.

Like, that's part of my story is when people went into manufacturing United States, where did they get the money to do it?

Yes, it's very difficult to get financing.

Yes.

For any So financing was yes. Right. Yeah. Right. Yep.

I mean, you know, we're we're a major capitalist country like it is our religion.

And yet, being a capitalist is actually kind of hard with at the small scale. Absolutely.

Yeah, small AG small manufacturing, all of it. Yes.

Mhmm. It's not friendly. It's certainly not supportive and friendly to to smaller business, which is how we find ourselves where we are today.

So so we have so much to talk to.

But, so talk about, but the other thing that there were 2 other things that Alexander Hamilton recommended.

And, one was we need to control our shipping.

So the country that controls its shipping then can impart control the the price of the transportation of goods in and out of the country? Sure. Especially out.

And this is something that China is gonna come up in our conversation because China many

years ago, you know, when we were manufacturing many years ago, you know, when we were a manufacturing powerhouse.

So China understands history and understands the long game.

And so they're just using so many of the techniques that we developed is, but we'll come back to it.

So the final the third thing, the 3rd kind of pillar of building manufacturing in a country that had no manufacturing essentially,

was stop cheap imports from coming into the country. And how do you do that?

And in in, in Alexander Hamilton's day, it was tariffs.

So the idea was there is an imbalance in the value of goods.

So, the reason the reason that things were so cheap, coming from the British was first of all because they had this, you know, imperial monopoly.

The, you know, the British chief Cynthia company, you know, that they just they have these incredible monopolies.

They they were such a sea power at the time.

And they were, I mean, they were exploiting resources and labor in other places I at a level that is fathomable, because we're here, we're doing it now.

Yes. And there's so many scholars who have looked at the the British British East India Company and how they just basically destroyed India in a 100 years.

India was the 4th largest manufacturing economy before the British showed up.

And then ultimately, Britain turned into the English turned India into another colony, Allah, the comp of the American colonists,

which is like, fire crap, pay taxes, you know, and when people were so exploited, that they no longer had, money to pay taxes,

like, the whole country devolved into just a war zone. It was brutal. I mean, absolutely brutal.

But we're not talking about India necessarily. I mean, yes.

So anytime you have, in my opinion, cheap imports, there's a tremendous amount of environmental and labor exploitation happening somewhere in that world.

And so one of the ways to correct for that, and to foster growth in in your own industrial landscape is to rebalance those

prices by, basically taxing imported goods so that they start to match the pricing of the things that you wanna produce. And we still do that today.

But it's like, very selective, very political, what we tax through tariffs, how we tax, you know, it can seem punitive. And we'll talk about that too.

But like, there's actually now a whole global organization dedicated to restricting a country's ability to tax and tariff imported goods. And that's the World Trade Organization. Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Fascinating. I

mean, which is just I mean, it's just it's fascinating.

And you say at one point, and I really liked this, that that those tariffs acted to wean us off of these cheap cheap goods.

Exactly. That was what they were designed to do.

I mean, and then we had very high tariffs for a very long time.

And then around the end of World War 2, they dropped precipitously, in great part because we wanted to rebuild European economy,

the European economy, you know, Europe was devastated.

Japan was devastated, like, the world was a wasteland, and America was a powerhouse.

And I, I understand the logic, right?

America wanted to rebuild nations and wanted to ensure that they embrace capitalism.

Because there was this other threat, right?

There is there is the Soviet Union. So

you know, we're, whether countries go, we're going to embrace socialism slash communism, or capitalism was like a coin toss in many instances.

And so American policymakers very quickly were like, well, we want them to be capitalists.

So we're gonna do everything we can to foster free global trade as much as possible, like lower barriers, get people making things, trade, trade, trade, trade, trade.

And, I mean, I I understand the logic.

Like, when you think about how those global leaders were thinking, they really thought they really imagined that if all countries

were connected through global trade, there would be no more war.

I, I hadn't seen this piece. Like, I don't think anybody has has put that in this way, and I think it's really interesting

because at one point, you say, you know, that there there is an expectation that with global trade, countries will go to democracies. But Mhmm.

That's not necessarily what we've seen now that we're 8,080 years later, whatever is 60, 70, 80 years later, that that we've

seen a lot of it go to authoritarianism. That,

yes, that's right. So so that phenomenon is very real.

It has been highly documented, and it's extremely dis disturbing.

So, you know, the I mean, we could take China, for example, but the idea of opening up China was, oh, you know, it was Maoist, it was communist.

But if we if we hook them on capitalism, then

has happened. And it's a highly surveilled nation. Now everybody is watched very carefully.

It's very kind of 1984 at this point.

And, the the premier is is essentially authoritarian.

But part of the reason that this is happening on a global scale to countries that we thought that we were opening up to capitalism,

developing countries, is because capital there's one thing that capital really, really likes.

And global capital, I'm talking about, like, big business. Yeah. And that's predictability.

And in developing countries, politics can be messy.

And so to attract foreign investment, and, and to keep foreign investment.

There's actually like a really compelling argument to be made for seizing a lot of power concentrating in one place, because

and then, of course, suppressing labor uprisings, lowering any kind of environmental regulation.

And a lot of this again is monitored by the World Trade Organization that's designed specifically to suppress all this stuff,

but all to make the world safe for capitalism. So, you know, original.

I mean, it's funny, like, we we said, oh, you start with capitalism and democracy follows.

But what we found is you start with capitalism and capitalism follows and follows and follows and follows.

And, democracy is not necessarily, at the natural, outgrowth, or result of capitalism,

capitalist societies. And I think, you know, one thing that you talk about that's happening during this time is the University

of Chicago and some of the economic thought processes that are happening in towards a in terms of Milton Friedman and becoming

accountable to shareholders and this this real hook on the bottom line.

I mean, even just the transition of pensions to 401ks.

So there's all these kind of little pieces that are falling into place.

And you have this quote, let me see if I can see it, where you're talking about the sort of idea of the free market, and you say essentially, can't fight it.

It has the word freedom in it.

And if you're not for freedom, then you're against it.

Exactly. Yeah. So that so this is the phenomenon that started to develop in some Milton Friedman wrote his seminal text in

the sixties, but it really started to take hold in the seventies when, for the first time in the 20th century, following the Depression, America was suffering. Yeah.

And and there were a number of factors.

You know, one of obviously was the big oil oil embargo that I remember. You probably don't.

You're younger than me, but, like, I remember how profoundly that affected people.

Let me let me share you share with you a quick story.

So I was raised in a suburban Philadelphia.

And, so in the seventies, during the whole oil crisis, you know, there were these really large mansions around not my parents, but we weren't rich.

But, but in my area, there were the like these really, really big houses. And so there was this.

There was this condition, people were house poor.

So they had really large houses, but they couldn't afford to heat them.

And I actually had a little friend when I was in 5th grade.

That her family of 5 lived in this really big house.

And they only lived in a couple of rooms of it with like space heaters.

I had another friend who was kind of the same really big house.

And they actually heated the whole thing, but then they couldn't afford to furnish it.

So people I don't know whether people really Americans really, like younger Americans really understand how shocking and profound

it was that we didn't have enough energy to drive, and we didn't have enough energy to heat our houses.

And it was just an absolute shocker.

And then at the same time, you know, because because of that, and because of the cost of energy, like a lot of industry closed

up shop, It was a defining moment in American history that maybe I should read my next book about that.

I because then what comes out of that.

Yeah. Oh, and I wanna add to this, and and I'm not sure where this might tie in, but you're also seeing the consolidation

of of a lot of different industry.

This is when Earl Butz, when the secretary of ag says it's time to get big or get out, and you see the consolidation and ultimately the financialization of farmland.

You know, what ends up being in pension funds, in 401ks, like, through TIAA is farmland holdings because so many farmers took

on massive amounts of debt and loan, which they they can could no longer get these days, and ended up losing it to the consolidation of that industry.

And it's when we see the emptying of rural split spaces, a sort of American enclosure of the commons in a in a very different iteration. But

I'm so glad you mentioned Earl Butts because people forget him. But he is like,

we can't

one of America's important. Yeah, one of America's biggest antiheroes like, I mean, you know, a lot more about him than I do.

But I remember stumbling on his name.

I don't know what I was reading and just, you know, under the he was under Nixon. Right?

And, just, like, the amount of cynicism that man had to have to create his policies, his cheap food, big industrial farm policies,

like, wow, what happened to that guy when he was a kid? Yeah,

yeah. I mean, he really, he really engineered a lot that I feel we are still still experiencing.

And I think too, we also go off the gold standard around this time, you know, and so whatever it is about this moment, a lot is happening here

in a lot of 1970 1980. So 1980.

So 1980, obviously, is a reaction to 1970.

So lots of chaos in the 19 seventies, lots of transition, lots of consolidation.

And, and then and so so you take that that era of uncertainty of, I think, real disappointment in the promise of America. And you put Reagan in office.

So so so Reagan is this like beacon of hope. Right?

He's but but, basically, the messages that Reagan years, and I'm sure I'm not telling your listeners anything new, is that greed is good. Money is good. It's okay to want money.

And so what we're gonna do is we're just gonna go get it by hook or by crook.

And that was the go go eighties, in the era of mergers and acquisitions, of deregulation of all kinds of things.

You know, we can talk about how radio and television was deregulated so that people could really say whatever they wanted.

The Faro the the loss of the fairness doctrine.

And so, yeah, the idea was just, like, go get the money folks, however you need to.

And the that then lays the seas for a bipartisan support of free trade, which before then results. Yeah.

Before we get there, what's happening with workers during this time?

What's happening with unions during this time?

Because I want to make sure that we just see a little thread of that before we get to NAFTA.

So in the 19 I think it was in 1972 is peak union membership.

I think it was about 33% of working Americans.

So that means 1 in 3 people in in America held a union, right?

I know, like, look at your face.

That kind of boggles my mind. I don't think I'm trying to think if I know any single person that's in a union now, like in

my in my life, knowing a lot of and I don't know that I do.

Wow. That's that's that's a pretty bold statement right there. It's changing. I'm Yeah.

I'm very heartened by what people in their 20s 30s are doing like they've rediscovered unions.

But, you know, in the 80s when when I was a teenager, so that just lets you know how old I am. Unions can were considered bad. They were considered corrupt.

They were, like, inseparable from the mob.

I mean, it was it was a really sorry state.

And, you know, some unions were corrupt, but a lot of them were just trying to do what unions do, which and I make this clear

in my book, but, like, the history of unions is fascinating. We don't have to go there.

But one thing that I do wanna emphasize is that, unions, organized labor was so much more than just negotiating for wages,

you know, $15 an hour, $16 an hour, like, that's great.

Obviously, people should earn what we call a living wage, whatever that means.

But, from very early on, unions were very concerned about working conditions, about the length of the day, about advocating

for something called a weekend, which didn't exist, you know, before 20th century.

Like, people just worked and worked and worked.

They were very much against child labor.

So they were supporters of child labor laws, which by the way, we still have yet to pass as a nation. Wow.

They were also about, you know, protecting women's, working rights.

They were concerned about, you know, the toxins that people use and, you know, the again, the working conditions.

That's how we get OSHA, for example, you know, which protects workers, regulates working, environments. But also unions were cultural.

They they grew out of, you know, in the in the 18th sorry, in the 19th century, in the early 20th century, like there were massive groups of immigrants coming in.

They were not they were not enculturated in America. They were unbanked. Right? Is everything everything was cash. They didn't trust banks. They don't understand banks. They didn't speak English. They didn't understand politics.

And so like, there was a lot of learning that happened that had to happen to get these literally millions of immigrants coming

in every year, to turn them into Americans.

And the unions did did a lot of that work.

It was, it was the it was a fascinating time.

They also actually pooled their capital to build affordable housing in New York.

And other places like, yeah, when you start to dig into the roots of organized labor in America, it was a pretty noble movement.

And, we I I feel like it should be taught in school.

I I mean, like starting in grade school, you know, so that Americans understand that there is an alternative to a lot of the, like, domestic exploitation. Right?

There are alternatives, and we were familiar with them. We know how that can work.

But we forgotten a lot of us have forgotten.

I mean, I think and I'll say this again, because it really it really hit me when you said it, but the history of getting Americans to manufacturers the history of America.

And so this is the history of manufacturing, but also about immigration, about how America became what it is, about how we

make goods about how we interact at a community level.

And I think now, you know, now talking about teaching that in school is also talking about different life paths that I don't feel like we discuss with kids. Right? I I work a trade.

I'm a I'm a butcher by training.

You know, and we don't talk about welding and manufacturing and and trades as an option.

And in what I think is a, how and I don't even really know how to broach this college atmosphere that is worth talking about,

you know, there was an article in the New York Times about and I forget where it was colleges hitting $100,000 a year, like

1st college to cross that to cross that line.

And this is something that we don't, that we don't talk about.

And so I think that this is worth teaching for, for so many different reasons.

But also, because I think that this is, like you said, there's a noble spirit of care embedded in the history of these unions?

Yeah, it's very much about connecting people to each other so they can support each other.

And in my book, you know, the story of Ben and Whitney Waxman, these, this couple that started the company that we will talk

about, you know, so much of the reason that they did this was because they stood labor as a way to build community and connect

people and offer an antidote to so much of what we're seeing and what we're reacting to in the world right now. So yes.

So I mean, when so so you can you can actually trace a very strong line between the loss of labor membership and the rise

of extreme political movements in this country.

And I think, I mean, obviously, there's so many reasons for it.

But one of them is simply that there's there's suddenly becomes this like, information vacuum.

And when people don't have access to good information and reliable information about the world, they tend to fill it with garbage. It's just what we do.

And, you know, the unions actually were providing a tremendous amount of information to people.

They were they were a forum for people to discuss what was going on in a reasonable way because, you know, we're all in this together. Right?

You when you're a member of a union, you refer to your union member your fellow union members as, like, brother or sister Yeah. Which is so touching.

It's not and it's not just semantic.

Like now, I love in the 21st century, younger people are like so attuned to the power of words.

So when I communicate with people in the labor movement, you know, they always sign off in solidarity, brother or sister.

And I'm just like, Oh, yeah, you are my brother.

You are my best sister, like, you're a fellow American.

I care very much about you and and your faith, and your ability to control your faith. So yeah.

So when you have this loss of information coming from these organized places that are also tied to work and to place. Yeah. Get this.

And, you know, you couple that with the with the, repeal of the fairness doctrine, which, was a law that required news organizations

to report objectively as best they could. Right.

So when when that is repealed, okay. Yeah.

So when that's in a world, yes, this is a big deal.

Actually, this is this is like, this is the moment when our world suddenly collapses, I think in a lot of ways.

Okay, so you have the loss of union membership.

So you have a loss of good information at the same time, I think it was 1988. Don't quote me on that. The Faro doctrine is repealed.

And suddenly you have people like Rush Limbaugh, and other very extreme radio personalities, saying a lot of things that just aren't true. So it it's conspiracy theories.

It's I'm, you know, I'm not saying this is true, but I'm just I'm just asking the questions sort of approach.

And, he very quickly gets very popular.

And then there are a bunch of copycats who spin off.

And, you know, just like our algorithms today, even back then, talk radio, there was a reward, there was a reward in popularity

and a financial reward for being extreme and being loud.

And, you know, saying, like, things that really, you know, like, basically, lighting a diary. Everywhere.

Yeah. Yes. Thank you. Things that are gonna get the conversation rolling one way or another. Mhmm. Mhmm.

And and engaging people in in you know, we have also found, like, research has shown that the best way to, like, hook and engage people is through anger.

Anger. Yeah. So I think this is really interesting, because I think I had never thought about unions as a community gathering place.

I've thought a lot about the ways in which we've lost what I sometimes call the village throughout human history.

I mean, going all the way back pre agricultural, I think we've lost a lot in in what the village, our communities are.

And and so I think I hadn't considered the loss of unions in that.

And so in so in so many ways, we've we've lost our communities.

You have more anger over the airwaves, more more things that are inflammatory, that are kind of stirring things up, a shift

towards really looking at the bottom line and and the sort of era of greed, as you put it, you know, and and a real shift

in in what a free market is, and sort of the direction of capitalism as we head into NAFTA.

And because we're we're brushing up against 1992. Right?

Exactly. Yeah. So the pump is primed. People are ready for this.

They're they're angry, they're frustrated, they're starting, they're already starting to lose their jobs. We talked about the seventies.

And then in the eighties, you know, the big shift toward, forget your so original so we talked about shareholders. There's originally this concept of stakeholders.

So a company had a responsibility to stakeholders.

So stakeholders were a whole bunch of people. Right? Wow. You just you just

clarified something that I've asked myself in my head about a 1000000 times and have never gone to clarify. So keep going. Okay, shareholders and stakeholders.

Heather Vickery 2: Yes. Right. So I'm not saying capitalism was ever perfect. Trust me. Never.

But the unions did offer a balance. That's the whole point. Right?

Like, you need a balance for everything.

And, you know, labor needs a balance and labor is it what balances labor obviously is capitalism.

So, it's an imperfect system, but it's the best we got, I think.

Anyway, so sorry, where were we going? Oh, the stakeholders.

Shareholders versus stakeholders. Yeah. So

there was this era of good companies who considered their stakeholders, not just shareholders, in other words, people who

profited off of whatever they were making or doing, but also your employees.

Your employees were your stakeholders, because, they held knowledge, Right? You had invested in training them.

And so then, you know, there was latent dollars there that then you could tap into if you wanted to produce something new

or if you wanted whatever it was.

There was also the place where the company was based. Right?

So if a company is based in Denver, Colorado or something, then stake the stakeholders included, like, the community that revolved around that company.

And that includes teachers and accountants and lawyers and trash collectors and, you know, the mayor and everybody else, the the city streets.

So there was this obligation to think about where you were and, you know, cultivate the health of that community as well in schools.

And, and then there was like, the larger nation, like, so, you know, I mean, I think partly environmental, although, you know,

in the sixties, companies weren't exactly environmentally conscious.

But then you have the EPA coming out of Nixon.

Hello, a Republican president introduces the EPA to start to offer yet another check on some of the really ugly things that

are happening in industry in the United States, which we're still obviously paying for

Paying for and I think I Yeah, environmental because I was thinking as you were talking about stakeholders, and for me, I

always come back to the environment as being a really important stakeholder.

And the environment encompasses a very large web of life with a lot of quite literal downstream effects.

But I think one of the things I love about the term stakeholders and the idea that a company might be involved is that everything is interconnected.

And in something that you said, manufacturing is place based.

And I think about this a lot for human, we are made out of place, I the food that we eat becomes a part of our bodies, like

we are made out of a place, the clothes that we wear sits on the largest organ of our body.

And so what is in and on our clothes, also in ways becomes us, but it also any manufacturing becomes our environment.

So so this is place based, I think, in many different layers.

And and I love the the nuance of stakeholders versus shareholders because I think, if if I'm right, and I might not be, there's

about to be a little bit of a shift happening in our conversation for how these companies are viewing are viewing that.

Exactly. Yes. So perfect segue to start to talk about what happened. So okay. So the eighties, greed is good.

Make a profit any way you can.

I wanna introduce another character, Jack Welch.

He was the CEO of, was it, General Electric?

Yep. Yep.

And, I mean, he wasn't the 1st guy to do this, but he was the probably the biggest mouth in the room to do this, biggest voice in the room.

He actually instigate, insta introduced this concept of, firing a certain percentage of your employees every single year,

whether or not the company was profitable, whether or not they were performing.

And the idea was simply to create instability in your workforce or uncertainty in your workforce so that then people would

be ever more beholden to the guy. Yeah. It's, like, so brutal.

And he was very upfront about it.

I mean, he he was very clear about why he was doing it.

I mean, part of it was like, oh, you know, every year we need to shed dead weight.

But the but but his real impulse was to just keep employees let employees know that everybody is dispensable.

And when you start to do that, right, when you when you introduce that particular business approach?

Now you have like, a very, insecure workforce.

And, and they're competing against each other. Yes. Right. So

yeah, we've been away from cooperation. And in in almost every regard and into competition in almost every regard.

Yes, because you never know whether you're going to make that cut or not.

And there's almost nothing you can you're powerless to control it in many ways, unless you're the CEO.

And and so yeah, like incredible uncertainty in the workforce, which then perfect opportunity then to start doing all kinds

of introduce all kinds of things like, you know, offshoring the gig economy, destroying unions, like, it just cascades very

quickly into the nineties, which, which in the nineties were like a testing ground for all these ideas. Right, as people were kind of,

you know, you know, the people who embrace this stuff, the free trade, also technology and how technology could work toward these ends.

Weaning people off pensions, putting them on the 401 ks, so their fates are tied directly to the stock market. So many things happen.

The 90s is is a is a moment is a decade when all this stuff gels.

And then you get just massive job loss and massive fact manufacturing loss starting in the 90s.

And then, wow, you know, the 2000s.

And the crazy thing is that, you know, I'm alive during all this.

This is this is So when I wrote this book, you know, I asked, I was just basically asking the question, what happened to us?

I was raised in Philadelphia, as I mentioned, and Philadelphia was a massive manufacturing powerhouse.

We made everything from, you know, locomotives to pianos to hats to I mean, just massive textile industry in Philadelphia.

I have books that show that, you know, photography books that show all these things that they're making. Again, nothing's perfect. Nothing's ideal. But it wasn't a manufacturing powerhouse.

And then, literally, it all goes away in a very short period of time.

And so when I was going to college in New York City, I would take the train back and forth from Philly to New York City.

And so I would go through North Philly where a lot of this industrialization had happened and disappeared.

And it was, it was, it was like, horrifying.

It was it looked like I don't want to go to so far as to say Dresden after the after World War Two.

But I mean, the place was like blown out because, you know, industry left, and then there was nothing for people to do.

And there's no way for people to earn an income. And they're just stuck there.

You have a quote in the book that I wrote down because you're talking about that train ride and how impactful it is.

And just looking at this emptying of these spaces, and you say, I asked myself how anyone could do this to their own city, their own countrymen. And it was really impactful.

Yeah. See, that's what I was thinking back in, again, dating myself, but, you know, 1990, taking that train, and looking out

the window, and it's starting to change now.

So there's that 30, 40, 50 years after a lot of the industry left?

You know, they're starting to there's some great, you know, beautiful brick factory buildings that they're repurposing for

housing and industry, but it's taken that long for that to happen.

But so that that's kind of that was like, that was what was haunting me.

Yeah. And this is in you, you know, you talk about your your dad only buying American cars and how early you'd pull out the tags.

I checked all my tags before I hopped in this interview, I was very intentional about it.

Looking at tags and seeing made in America.

And prior to this, almost everything was it wasn't something that you'd think about in the way that we might think about it now.

Yeah, it was really like normal for things to be made in USA when I was a little girl. And you're right.

I did, like, pull tags in, you know, like, just I wanted to know where stuff was made.

I don't know why I'm a weirdo.

I mean, part of it is just that, like, I'm an obsessive reader.

And so I will read literally anything, including cereal boxes.

I wanna know, so where's my cereal made?

You know, who what company distributes my cereal? Who grows it? I don't know.

I loved that you said this that you called yourself an obsessive reader. And I loved this. We did this.

And I did this with food, my entire childhood, like, I wanted to know where food came from.

And so it was a different thing, but same same desire to understand. I don't know what it is.

I've tried to couch it now as an adult, an origin point and to feel connected to that origin point to understand what I was

interacting with on an intimate level, my clothes, my food, this is this is intimacy, in in a certain way. This is on my body. This is in my body.

This is how I'm interacting with an environment in what I think is a very blurry line between self and other. And, yeah, so I really

love that. I really love that. I never I hadn't thought of it in those terms before that the idea of intimacy, but yes, I

mean, I guess, you know, there are certain people who just like see the connectivity. Right?

I don't know, maybe it's some kind of like 6th sense.

But I do like I and when I when I talk about, you know, made in USA and why it's important.

I think one of the simplest ways to put it is just like, I want to support the people who support me.

And that might be a really selfish statement.

But let's let let me just unpack it for a second.

Like, the people who support me are my fellow Americans who are taxpayers, right, and who are voters.

And, and so, you know, when people goose the economy with the money in their pocket, and, pay taxes and hire others to do work in the community.

They are supporting me in in an indirect way, but I see the effects everywhere.

It's the multiplier effect that you use.

So you speak to so well that that every dollar spent in the economy, it in the local economy, circulates 3, 4 times around and, and grows that grows.

And so there's, there's kind of this more esoteric support, but there's also the support of connection of community of being

placed based together, I think there's there's layers of, of support there and then up to the nation, but and I do want to get into that, too.

I have that I have a whole, I have a whole piece about ecosystems, but I don't want to miss I don't want to miss NAFTA either.

And I'll get production. Got it. Alright, so should we talk about NAFTA?

I have maybe. Yeah. What do you think? Where are you?

Because I'm curious where you are to

super heady stuff. But it because a lot of people actually when when I talk to folks, you know, they wanna talk about the

story, the story of Ben and Whitney Waxman and American Roods first.

And I find that a little disappointing in a way.

I I don't wanna diss anybody like I get it.

I wrote I wrote about them because I thought, look, you know, I'm not a wonk, right? I'm not an economist. I'm not a historian. Yeah, I'm a journalist.

I don't know about that.

And

I don't know that you're not a historian.

Okay. All right. Well, if I am, I'm a casual historian.

I don't I don't have any bona fides.

But, but, but I'm a journalist. And so I and so it was very important to me that I reach a general audience like, yeah, and that's, that's the technical term.

But what I mean is, like, I want people to enjoy this book, I want people to like, really read it and get into it and get into these very personal stories.

Because, you know, you got this larger thing that we're talking about, which is so important.

But it's also really big, and it spans centuries. So it's a little El.

And there's, oftentimes I mean, certainly with me, you know, there are a lot of, like, pockets of lack of knowledge. Right?

So, in order to understand where we are, like, I kind of needed also to do a little bit of explaining, but, but all in the

service of this really cool story about one company that's trying to do it right. So I, you know, go ahead.

Oh, I was gonna say I think I listened to 4 or 5 interviews that you did.

And I was really interested that that Ben and Whitney Waxman and American roots, which is this incredible story was always the focal point.

And I I was very interested in that because I viewed and and they have an incredible story.

And I saw myself in their story in a really beautiful way.

So I think not only are they a vehicle to tell some of this history, some of these much bigger factors that are in play around

this question that I am constantly trying to tease out on the podcast, which is, how did we get here, really?

And I know what a big question that is, but I I wanna better understand how all of that weaves together.

And so they're this beautiful vehicle for story, their story itself is incredible.

And it's also a beautiful mirror for those of us that have run small businesses.

And you know, I know a lot of listeners are actually more agriculturalists.

But I saw so much of agriculture in their story, too.

And so it's this beautiful story, but I was hypnotized because I think both in in this and into the raging sea, there's this,

this bigger story that you're telling through these incredibly compelling stories of very human human lives.

Well, thank you for that. And and I really appreciate that.

That is obviously what interests me the most. Like, I love to tell stories.

I love the storytelling, but always in the service of something larger, right?

Like, I mean, otherwise, it's just a story.

It can be a fairy tale, although fairy tales have morals, but it's an excuse for me also, when I do find a good story to spin

it out for my own sake, like, you know, I feel like we're put on this earth for a short period of time.

And for me, my goal is like to learn everything I frickin can.

So, right, like, let me just soak it up. It's pretty wild.

Yeah, this is my this podcast is really just my excuse to read more and to have more impetus to learn more.

I love that. And I just feel like that's what it means to be human because we have, you know, what, like 6000 years of written knowledge. And, and that's a lot of

80, 100000 years of storytelling. I mean, the history of storytelling itself, which is something I've looked into, like, not

just the written word, but the oral tradition, like we've been telling stories for, for a long time.

Humans love stories. And I know it was a trend for a while, and people still do this.

They're like, I'm a storyteller first, you know, whatever whatever it is, whatever your specialty is, you're supposed to be a storyteller.

But I mean, it does serve a purpose.

So, you know, buzzwords aside, like, yeah, we get into story.

You know, we pay attention when I start to talk about myself personally, when you start to talk or, you know, when we're talking

about specific things that happened, like, that's when the ears just perk up, we can't help it. We love reading about people. We love reading about events. Yeah, That's how we learn.

And so actually when after Into the Raging Sea came out, which again was about a container ship.

We haven't said it as a container ship that American container ship that actually sunk in 2015 in the Atlantic on its way

from Jacksonville, to Puerto Rico, and all 33 Mariners aboard were killed in that accident.

The ship ended up deeper than the Titanic. It's a 15,000 feet. But it's really amazing.

The original NTSB I think that's right is an NTSB report has a little diagram of the depth at and I was I was absolutely blown away by that.

Excuse me. Yeah, it's very deep. And what's quite amazing is that they were able to recover down on the ocean floor, the ship's black box.

And why that's so important is because the black box, very unusually, it was it was a rare occurrence, actually, captured

26 hours of conversations on the bridge of the ship leading up to the very final moments of the Alphara as it sailed into this hurricane. And that just was so invaluable.

It's probably the most documented fatal shipwreck in history.

Yeah.

To hear the people on the bridge of the ship over 26 hours, they know they're going into a hurricane and kind of the conversations

and, and the thought that leads them there and prevents them from changing courses.

Just like, I mean, just the most riveting read, I think, ever.

Yeah. And it's all true. I mean, I kept coming back to that as I was reading it, all of this. This was the dialogue.

This this is direct dialogue from that space.

And and it was interesting towards the end, you talk about how much of a surprise it was that 26 hours were captured, that

that wasn't that it was kind of a, in some ways, almost an accident that it was this older chip and all of these these little

synchronicities coming to that that space where it captured that much dialogue.

Yeah. Just so impressive. And also that, what was it like 10 months later when they recovered the black box under those extreme

conditions 15,000 feet, I mean, the pressure under there's so extreme as saltwater that they were able to recover the audio is also just incredibly impressive.

But so many lessons to be gleaned from that because these are people who are just like you and me. They were doing their jobs. And, they were not actors. They they didn't.

They'd know they knew they were being recorded.

But I mean, they never thought that anybody would listen to it.

They did not know that this was their final voyage.

And so just is it like so human these interactions, even, you know, at the very end, they are doomed, and they're going down.

And one of the the mates, is very overweight, and he is diabetic.

And like, some of his final thoughts are about putting, you know, artificial sweetener in his coffee instead of sugar. Yeah.

That's what I mean about just, yeah, it's so relatable, so human.

Nobody, you know, it's just an it's it's it's just such a treasure that we have it, but also,

I I don't know so many feelings when I was writing that book. It was it was incredibly intense.

So coming out of that, I swore I was gonna write about rainbows and unicorns.

I was like, I'm not I'm not going down this road again. I can't write about tragedy again.

It was it was it just, you know, messed with me. I

it's still sitting. I mean, it's it it's it's it will it will be with me for a long time.

So I can't even imagine what it would have been to be in that.

And that actually because you constantly call Ben and Whitney Waxman your unicorn, in terms of the company that they that they created.

And so that gives a that gives another little facet of that.

But it's also it's also your unicorn. It's also your rainbow. After after writing this this tragedy.

Oh, that's true. I never thought about it that way. Yeah.

So I was looking for a happy story.

And I wanna you know, I wanted to write a good story, a feel good story, a hopeful story because, you know, we're just inundated

with tragedy in part because people just gobble them up whether or not they say they wanna read happy stories.

And so pandemic, like, let's just you wanna just jump there?

I mean, this is how I met these guys.

Yeah, I do want to like, just very briefly, I just want to say that NAFTA happens, right.

And a lot of offshoring is lost in that.

We don't have to go into it in detail.

You know, I have something here that that really struck me, which is 5,000,000 manufacturing jobs vanished between 1992,013.

And so I just I just wanna speak to how much we offshore.

And I if we got into it, one thing that I'd like to talk about is that there's externalities of NAFTA, both here in the US and abroad.

You know, one of the things that I picked up supplementally for this is Alicia Galvez' eating NAFTA.

I wanted to connect it to food because and farming because that's what I it's framework that feels really comfy to me.

And she talks some about the the horrifying externalities of what this does to the Mexican people, in terms of really decreasing

their health, their rural economies, their farming culture, their food ways and life ways.

And so NAFTA has all of these global implications.

Well, it might be the North American Free Trade Agreement.

This changes the race to the bottom in in in other countries, and increasingly cheap goods.

And I don't know what you might want to add to that would make it a kind of tight container, but these these increasingly cheap goods.

Right. So when companies start offshoring, their argument is that, look, if we can use cheaper labor abroad, like Mexican

labor, where they have very few labor protections, but also, cost of living is much lower.

And as you mentioned, there was a much more agricultural economy.

Then we'll be able to offer Americans cheaper pricing, cheaper goods. Like that was the big sell.

And, of course, what companies were really thinking was, yeah, we can sell things for a little bit less because they cost

less to manufacture, but mostly we can, like, dramatically increase our profits.

And that's I mean, your company wouldn't jump at that.

And so, actually, you mentioned the 5,000,000 people who lost their jobs. Like, we don't even know.

That's an estimate because this was not tracked officially.

But it's not only the job loss. Right?

And it's not only the impact on on people in other countries, and we talked about the rise of authoritarianism, in other countries to to court capital. Right?

To court what I call free range capital. It's it's not just that.

One of the biggest issues facing America now, now that we make so low,

is our our loss of capability. So I just want this to sink in for a minute.

Just this year, the US military has warned policymakers that our supply chain is so dependent on imports and foreign suppliers,

that, that the military is concerned that if we do have to do anything, and we have very predictable and not enemies, but

like adversaries, we might not be able to pull off what we want to, we might not be we might not be politically independent,

whereas politically as militarily independent as necessary to be able to, negotiate on a global level, the kinds of things

that Americans hold dear, whatever that is now.

I mean, obviously, I'm I'm progressive, and I believe in supporting people.

And so, like, that is one of my biggest things along with the protection of the environment.

But, you know, whatever it is to be American and whatever we hold dear and whatever, whatever we've done globally in a good

sense to, in in the realm of, for example, public El, What we're losing that ability when we are dependent on imports, and

other countries to supply us with literally everything we need to sustain modern life in America. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty profound.

It is very profound. It is very profound.

And I think that's a maybe that's a good place to pick up where you meet Ben and Whitney.

And one thing I wanna make sure that we leave time for, I have the most these notes are ridiculous, is to talk some at the

end about innovation and about how we might think of manufacturing in the future and in in city centers, and I have some some bobs that I like Faro important.

I love I love an extra it was a call in an outro that that talks about that because it's such an it's a vision, right?

It's a vision for for an economy and an America that looks a little different from where we are now.

But yeah, would very much resonate, I think, with most American. Yeah. Excuse me. So okay, so pandemic.

So March 2020, like people who are paying attention have seen this thing starting to cook up actually, as far back, I think is in October November of 2019.

And then it arrives on our shores.

And what happens, of course, we are we're all there, but, you know, the country is about to shut down.

So Ben and Whitney, very briefly, started their company in 2015.

Ben had worked for 10 years very high up at the AFL CIO, which is an umbrella organization that represents, labor.

So a bunch of unions are are members of the AFL CIO, and then these AFL CIO convenes.

So it brings everybody together to talk about the politics and other things, you know, what people should be supporting to

support labor, to support all these smaller locals, right, representing workers.

So it's it's 2 12,000,000 people I think about right now who are represented by the AFL CIO, and Ben Waxman was representing

them at a time or standing with them organizing them advocating for them at a time when all these jobs, all these manufacturing

jobs were going abroad, not because they weren't profitable, but because they weren't profitable enough. And it's

an important distinction.

Right? Yeah. And it's heartbreaking. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think most people with a beating heart inside their chest would

have left after a couple of years to to be there, you know, in Ohio when a factory or the Whirlpool factory, for example, shuts down.

And you have to you as a worker, not only are charged with packing up the machinery to be sent to Mexico. Fuck. Right? You're also right.

But you're also asked by the company to train the people who are going to be taking your job.

And then your pension, which you've maybe worked for 30 years for evaporates.

And also, we were talking about place, we've been talking a lot about place.

And this factory is like the anchor of your community. Yeah.

And that's about to be an empty husk.

You in the you've talked a little bit, we have no industrial policy for these, these people for whom their entire livelihoods is suddenly gutted.

And I know I talked with, Melanie Challenger, who's written a couple of of great books about, we were specifically actually

talking about in England, the 10 miners, Ten miners in the industry is is is gutted in a very short period of time.

And the unimaginable grief that goes with that, that that

yeah, that this is that that this is grief, that this is the loss of community of place of hard work of so many different things.

Yeah, I mean, it is a generational trauma.

And as we know from, for example, the I'm I'm here in Boston, you know, the the Catholic church trauma from, you know, the priests, the pedophilic priests.

I mean, any generational trauma, you need a lot of support, a lot of professional support to be able to overcome that.

And so in tandem with all this shutting down, and job loss, you also have like, tremendous and righteous anger.

Again, I mean, it's very much like me on the train between Philly and New York, like, how could you do this to your own people? Yeah.

Now what's interesting is that there were programs and there are Faro programs in place, like, people anticipated that there would be this job loss.

And there was a strong desire to retrain people for the new economy, which was like the service economy and the knowledge economy.

And, there are a couple of barriers to that.

I mean, one is obviously that a lot of folks in manufacturing did not have beyond a high school education.

So it was really tough for them to then suddenly be to confront, like, this knowledge economy that's probably not open to them. Colleges are college is so expensive.

Yeah, like you mentioned $100,000 a year now for Vanderbilt. And that's not the only one

what everyone wants to do. I know, I think that this is that's really important to the, you know, and you spoke to this a

little bit in your your interview with, Julian, which I'll I'll link in the show notes.

But about men too, like, this was about mental health for for men.

I thought about Richard Reeves of boys and men.

I don't know if you've read that book, but it or Yeah, listen to Richard talk, but it just an interesting highlight of, of some of this.

Right. So that's what I was gonna say was that it seems Faro whatever reason, women were better at transitioning over to the service economy.

And I don't wanna get into why. Yeah.

But they were more willing to statistics show data show that they're more willing to retrain.

But oftentimes, they earn significantly less because the service economy was not unionized generally.

So, and by the way, companies don't have to be unionized for them to feel the effects of organized labor. Right?

Like, if a sector is generally unionized, then everybody has to keep pace whether or not their workers are actually unionized.

So we're now talking about a service economy that was not, you know, very well organized, and heavily female.

And so people just paid less, but they took the pay cut, because what else are they gonna do? Right.

And on the other hand, and I'm generalizing, there's a gross generalization, but we know the impact, we know the cultural impact.

It was much tougher for men to recover because they had been they they thought a part of part of identity is like what you do.

So, you know, being in manufacturing, being a member of labor unions, I met a guy recently, who said my dad, he said 30 years

after he lost his job, he still had his labor card in his wallet, like that was part of his identity, being part of this group.

And sidebar, I mean, we should say that, like, the labor movement in America is not perfect. It's it's never been perfect.

And also, there's there have always been serious racial issues, and obviously gender issues.

Yes.

So that's, it's worth saying we're not going to talk about them at this moment. But like,

it seems what we see in the phenomenon is that when men lose their manufacturing jobs and lose their affiliation with their

community through, organized labor and other things, it's like, it is such a tragedy.

And again, so it leaves a void and, you know, louder voices, more radical voices step in to fill that void and the anger,

you can feel that anger with with the political climate that sprung up out of out of all of this trauma, which we're now seeing today. Right? It hasn't stopped. And it won't stop. That's it.

It's gonna continue until we figure out a way to restore dignity to work, all kinds of work.

Thank you for saying that. I just want to let that land. Yeah, thank you.

That was restoring dignity to all kinds of work. It won't end until that. I just want to reiterate that. Okay, keep going.

Yeah, because it's about pride. Like, are you doing what you'd love to do?

Do you feel good being with the people who you work with is There's also a by the way, the attendant, joy or satisfaction

of producing things working with your hands, the New York Times just ran a story.

You know about this firsthand, I'm sure.

I El, I know about it firsthand.

But I also you have a great quote towards the end of the book that I have about just how restorative it is to work with our hands.

And I think just how embedded in our DNA.

I was saving to the end, but I could I could read it now.

Sure. Go ahead. Yeah.

So you said and I love this, right?

I Faro and I've worked with my hands for after and I came out of that after I was gonna go through PhD and felt really I wanted

to go work with my hands, I wanted something tangible and did that and complicated decision.

But in that way, bringing back manufacturing could even boost happiness.

Some researchers posit that the rise in stress and depression among Americans is related to their lack of engagement with the physical environment.

Since 1980, desk jobs have increased 94%.

Neuroscientist El Lambert argues that that kind of work is unnatural, as well as physically and mentally unhealthy.

Her research has shown that our brains are wired with an effort driven reward circuit, which gives us a sense of deep satisfaction

when we make things with our hands.

She stresses that triggering this reward circuit requires doing activities that produce a result you can see, feel, and touch.

Handwork, she writes, and the thoughts, plans, and ultimate results of handwork change the physiology and chemical makeup of the brain, energizing cognition.

That's why some of us enjoy taking a break from our computer driven world to knit, vacuum, do the dishes, or rake leaves.

Those kinds of physical, repetitive, completeable activities tickle an essential part of the human brain, the one that we

needed to survive all those millennia in the natural environment.

In other words, nourishing the maker, freeze the thinker. And I love this.

And I also wanna call out that the etymology of manufacturing, the initial, like in 15 sixties, when it comes up is something made by

etymology etymological root.

I love that. Thank you for reminding me of that. Yeah.

So I mean, is there a moment I'm sure you feel this too.

Well, you you do a lot of work with your hands. It's just so amazing.

And you're working with animals, which also is just another level of

But I also love doing the dishes.

I have a running joke that it's the one thing in my day that I feel like has a sense of completion.

I can start with a pile here, right? And I've worked in dish pits.

I've worked in the service industry for a long time, so I've done dishes also in a sort of

professional dishwasher.

And I think it's a good meditative practice. And it also, it gets completed.

And I think increasingly 94% of desk jobs like it is just a I I'm rereading bullshit jobs by David Graber.

And so by by your whole exploration, I kind of wanted to touch in on this again.

And I think it does, it gives us a sense of like, okay, this is done. I've touched it, and it's done.

And instead, now we just have a an endless scroll of an inbox. That's no,

yes. There's also the whole thing about problem solving, which just tickles parts of our brain, like, when when you're working

with your hands, and you're trying to problem El, a physical thing, the whole brain lights up.

It activates every single part of it.

It's just bathing and nourishing our brain and, like, neural activity.

And when you're scrolling it's it's like you're half brain dead.

I mean, well, they've done scans on people, and and it's just this little kind of walnut size activity center that's lit up.

So, I mean, because of the whole hand and brain connection, it cannot I don't think it can be overstated.

I mean, I don't wanna glorify, all manufacturing.

Obviously, manufacturing is difficult and can be very brutal on the body, very repetitive, mind numbing. Yeah. No question.

I have I have I have an elbow that that will never be the same from how much meat cutting I've done. I've done its tennis El.

But it'll it'll never be the same and arthritis in my hands that will never be the same.

And so I do that is very important.

Like, these are hard things on the body for farmers know this too. It's hard on the body.

It is hard on the body. Yeah, I once I once got a job weeding a potato patch, and I only lasted a day and I got a C.

I know she was greeting me, but the former gave me a C.

I mean, part of the biggest the biggest problem for me was that I could not distinguish the potato plant from the weed.

Like, if I had had a photo that I could refer to, it would have been easier.

So at one point, I just started to question what I was pulling, and then, of course, that slowed me down quite a bit because

I actually didn't want to pull up her potato plants. And, yeah, just follow from there.

So I was not an effective farmer. That was my farming day.

I have a running joke that I raise animals because I don't have to weed them.

Because that's just not my strong suit.

But I do think that that that connection to our hands, you know, without glorifying manufacturing, that connection to our

hands to making something is also new speak to this really well in the book too is also part of innovation. Yes, absolutely.

And it is part of problem solving and firing up all those areas in our brain, right, fire, and firing up all those areas in

our brain, right fire lighting up our whole brain and this this entire integration. We need it in some

way. Yes. The invention throughout history, the invention comes from the people who make.

And that's because they're making it, and they see better ways to do things, more efficient ways to do things.

They also are there when happy accidents happen. Right?

So a lot of innovation just comes from mistakes that somebody's keen enough to observe and say, wait a minute.

You know, this could be a good thing. Let's let's try this.

A lot of innovation comes from, for example, people on the line who are like, there's a better.

I've identified a better way to do this. I'm right here.

I've been doing this this way for x number of years.

And, you know, I think if we tweak this or that, it'll be better.

So, you know, the most I think the most innovative period of history for for America was when we were manufacturing powerhouse, specifically for that reason.

But also because, so much of profit was then funneled back into r and d, which is something that's really lost.

Interesting.

Again, yeah, that that r and d culture research and development culture

Yeah.

Was so strong at one point in American companies.

And, then when there was this, you know, massive shift toward profit, not only did, obviously, labor and domestic manufacturing

suffer, but also research and development very much suffered, because the Prophet just wasn't going there anymore.

So you don't have that happening, which is really unfortunate because we we need innovation.

So, actually, you know, Americans were pioneers of the green industry.

Like, solar panels were were, I believe, invented and refined in America, but then, you know, you weren't manufacturing them anymore.

And so it's part of the problem that we're facing now. Okay. So pandemic 2020. So Ben and Whitney sorry.

That was a I I apologize to your readers. I mean, to to your listeners. That was a huge digression. Don't this is

my listeners know where this is going, and and they're used to a a very differently structured podcast. So great. We're good.

Sorry about not being linear. Apologies halfway through here.

We don't believe we don't believe in linearity here. We could. It's It's too simple. It's too simple for us.

I agree. It's this crazy three-dimensional web.

So Ben comes from the AFL CIO.

He's seen the manufacturing jobs dry up.

He's seen the impact on communities, And he El, like, a pretty bad drug habit, to to deal with the trauma that he's witnessing

every day and the feeling of El.

Because labor no longer has a seat at the table. Again, this is, 2003 to 2013.

And so he checks himself into rehab. He leaves the labor movement. He leaves his job.

And then he ends up back in Portland, Maine, his hometown, where his parents are, to rethink his life and do like a Bend 2.0.

And he's at that point, I'm gonna say he's like 30, 33, 34. And he decides very quickly. He's he's always been very righteous.

That's why he was in the labor movement to begin with.

Like, he's passionate about workers and workers' rights.

And people just and Faro, like, people just getting a fair shake and a shot at the American dream.

He's kind of a little bit like a Bruce Springsteen song.

And by the way, Bruce Springsteen is very much like his favorite artist.

And so he comes back to Portland, and he decides that manufacturing is the way, and he is going to figure out something that

some industry that through which he can prove that capitalism can be a force of good if it's done the right way. So he has this vision.

He doesn't know what he's gonna make.

And at the same time, fortuitously, he meets Whitney Reynolds, who is this super, she could have been a supermodel.

She's this beautiful woman who has had a journey of her own and, mostly working in bars.

Hot you know, like, very trendy bars in New York City, hogs and heifers, in case any of your listeners know about it.

It it now they have, an outlet in Las Vegas.

And, like, tough working conditions, but, you know, lucrative.

And she is not from Maine, but she's found herself in Maine. That's another story.

And she's working at this pretty cool bar in Portland, where Ben goes a lot with his buddies.

And he just, like, falls head over heels in love with her.

And eventually, he convinces her that his vision of this, like, American dream 2.0 That is about, you know, labor, the the

marriage of labor and capital and manufacturing.

She gets all caught up in this Ben Waxman vision like she is his acolyte. And she says, Alright, I'm in. What are we making?

And Ben has all kinds of ideas.

At one point, he even thinks that he might build boats or ships. He doesn't know.

But ultimately he ends up falling back on in a good way, on something that his mother had gotten into in the nineties.

So, Maine used to be a textile powerhouse.

And Dori, his mother, decided to start making capes and blankets out of beautiful Maine one fabric.

And she's very successful for a long time until NAFTA shuts down all of these factories, and she no longer can source locally,

which kind of takes the winds out of wind out of her sails. She's not she's no longer interested.

Because part of the joy for her was, again, this community, like, it was a way for her to engage in Maine. Right?

Like, people are making fabric, this beautiful wool woven fabric. I wanna be with those people. I wanna help them. I'm going to buy the fabric. I'm gonna cut it.

I'm gonna finish it with a whole bunch of ladies who I hire in.

I'm gonna put these things out there and therefore El this this, like, incredible manufacturing economy here, which then dries up, which is another story. But it's a perilous textile.

And so ultimately, that's what Ben decides to do.

And Ben and Whitney decided to do and their first product is

fleece, because they settle on polar fleece because it was manufactured in Massachusetts. Quick digression. Apologies again. Polar Fleece was actually okay. This is the good stuff. Police great.

There was a company in Massachusetts called Malden Mills.

It was a 3rd generation family owned massive mill, and they made textiles.

And in their heyday, they invested a huge percent of the the profits in research and development. This is what we're talking about.

This is what you'd had to do.

Because you couldn't just rest on your laurels.

You know, everybody was manufacturing in the United States. There's a lot of competition.

So you always had to be ahead of the trends.

And one day, this guy from California, originally from Maine, He has started an outdoor company.

His name was I want to make sure I get this right. I think Eve Chobinard. And he had found it pronounced

that I always get it wrong.

Okay. Yeah. I think he'd be great. Yeah.

I was just gonna look it up just for the El of it.

So it's Pat he had started Patagonia. Yeah. Yes, people. Shrinard. Shrinard. Okay.

So he had founded Patagonia because he was like this outdoor guy.

And there at the time in the in the seventies, there were actually weren't a lot of companies that were producing apparel

for the outdoor market, like the recreational outdoor market.

So you've had this vision of a fabric that was polyester, not wool.

And he wanted it to be light, and he wanted it to to be warm when it was wet, and he wanted it to have certain wicking properties and other things, but especially light.

Like when you're camping, you know, when you're camping or doing things outside, like, you the fabrics need to be light.

And, so he actually teamed up with Malden Mills to develop the first version of what we now know as fleece, polyester, fleece.

And it was actually called sin El as in synthetic chinchilla.

Sure. It was okay. Yeah. So

sin Chilla, my parents, actually, I remember they bought early Patagonia products, and the stuff peeled like crazy.

It was it was super soft when you first bought it, but it had really bad peeling issues. Anyway, that's history. That's water under the bridge. They figured it out. Now it doesn't peel.

And now, of course, we're like, do we really want plastic clothing?

But anyway, so then Whitney decide to make fleece vests for that could be custom made and then custom branded for events,

because that's what everybody was wearing at the time these fleece vests.

I don't know where that I think people wear them as much anymore.

It was like, no, I was thinking about reading it.

I was trying to remember the last time I saw it, it's someone and it has a very 90s dad flavor that Yeah. Yeah. Not sure his present anymore.

It was just 2015. So it wasn't that old, but it was the thing that people had.

Everybody had put out a fleece fest.

And so that's what they started making.

And then, wouldn't you know it, Polar Fleece gets offshored. Yeah. It was, that's that's another story.

It's actually kind of a tragedy and a hero and a tragedy story. So, yay. So terrible. Yay. Terrible story.

But Malden Mills had been bought by private equity, which is a very common story now. Right?

And they said, we wanna make more money, so we're gonna offshore this, and that's exactly what they did.

So piece of most of polo fleece is not no longer made in the United States.

And when that happened, Ben and Whitney had to find a new product, a new fabric, and a new product.

And by the way, this is all pre pandemic.

So the United States is the 2nd or 3rd largest producer of cotton in the world.

The other 2 are India and China.

And, we still have textile mills, big textile mills in the South that spin that, you know, there's this whole process for getting cotton ready.

But you know, you you card it, you spin it, then you knit it, you dye it, and it becomes a workable fabric.

And so they decided to start making garments out of, cotton. Yeah.

And so they end up with the fleece hoodie, which is such a cool garment.

Like, it's a it's a pure American product.

It was vented in America in the 19 twenties, the cotton fleece sweatshirt with the crew neck. And so the company was Russell. I think Russell is still around.

They started putting out this alternative project product to the crewneck wool sweater the athletes used to wear when they played football. They all wore wool.

When the cotton crewneck sweatshirt gets introduced, suddenly, everybody's like, oh, this is so much better. We love this. We're gonna wear cotton instead.

And then our story moves to Rochester, New York where the Feinbloom brothers are now manufacturing

cotton fleece sweatshirts. And somebody says, it's cold up here. Right? We're we're in New York. And they're supplying to New England.

And somebody says, can you slap a hood on that?

And then suddenly, we have the hoodie.

And then somebody else says, hey, you know, even cooler is if we put a zipper on this.

And by the way, the zipper was a very recent invention. We're in the thirties now.

The the zipper actually was invented, I believe, in the teens.

Like, actually, the concept was around for a while, but then you had a lot of tinkers trying to patent something that really worked.

And finally, the zipper emerges as something that can be produced and sewn into clothing.

And so the the zipper finally takes hold in the late 30s is something that you can put on garments. It's okay.

And voila, my favorite garment, the pure American zippered hoodie, fleece cotton fleece hoodie.

And then that takes on a whole life of its own, which we could also talk about if we wanted to.

But anyway, so Ben and Whitney are making hoodies.

They're making fleece hoodies and their biggest market.

Oh, I should mention, they're making fleece hoodies with Union Labor.

So there's no way that Ben is going to have a company that doesn't include union labor.

And so all of their workers are unionized, and they get paid much higher than, minimum wage. They they get vacation time.

They get sick leave with they at the moment at when they first started, they had unlimited sick leave because it's so critical

to the health of workers, to be able to take time off, not only to to get better themselves, but also to take care of their children. Mhmm.

So a healthy family is a health means that produces a healthy worker. Right?

If we care about families, then we give people sick leave. Yeah.

And all union labor.

Yeah.

Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. All union labor and sells a lot of them to unions.

A lot of these hoodies are are are marketed to unions.

And I and I don't think we said this, and I wanna make sure we do. All American made.

That means grommets, drawstrings, zippers, every every bit, every bob, all the cotton.

Bit of that hoodie is American sourced.

Again, coming from Dory's original, you know, thesis that we support our community by buying things from each other, which

of course is also a union approach as well. So the nation is a community.

It's a larger community than, you know, your town, but it's it's our community.

So we support the people, support each other, and therefore, all American sourced, union made.

And they're cranking these things out, and they're expensive.

And so the buyers are unions because the buyers understand that, like, oh, yeah, a cheap hoodie is cheap for a reason.

There's a lot of exploitation that goes into very cheap products, And the unions don't want to be culpable.

They don't they don't the locals all around the country, they don't they don't want to have that blood on their hands, if you will. And so Gotcha. They buy these hoodies. They're they start buying the hoodies.

And the hoodies are really well made, and they're designed for the American worker. They're tough. They're complicated garments to make. There are no shortcuts.

They have these big heavy metal zippers, you know, that that will you know, I'll be able to pass my American roots hoodie down to my great grandchildren. I'm quite sure.

So I mean, it's built to last and that's the idea.

And so of course, that has environmental implications as El, because massive,

you

don't need as many hoodies, right?

Yeah, yeah. And it's not made from all synthetic materials.

So I, and I have to, I just have to say this piece, because I want people to hear it.

And then and then just keep keep going.

But when we ship our clothes, often from donation boxes, overseas, you know, and often and they're they're Oliver Francis

Wallace's wasteland talks a lot about clothing waste to South America and Africa.

But I really love this that you pulled when when those clothes arrive in Ghana, that that they would say, Oh, the white man has died.

Because why else would you get rid of precious clothing.

And so making something here, the wax bins at American roots are making something that is not disposable, sometimes it is an heirloom piece.

It is it is built to last, which has a lot of implications for for environment and materials and all of these different pieces.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And what's happening in Ghana is, like, if if you if your listeners wanna just Google Ghana and landfill

and, you know, clothing, it's absolutely appalling.

I mean, you think you're doing good by throwing your clothes in this bin.

And you know, it's no longer your problem.

And it's actually creating a massive environmental problem half a world away. So that's another story.

And I think that but that is the story.

Because I think so much what we've talked about leading up to this is is how we move, you know, 90% of everything shipped

to us how we move resources, stuff to our bodies.

And then the other part that we don't think about is the waste that we move away. And sometimes that's human excreta. Sometimes that's recycling.

Sometimes that's clothing that we're done with.

Yeah. We are very destructive. Humans are no bueno for the plan.

But we can we can we can mitigate that.

Yeah. And I wanna get to that.

I have a little piece for that for us to wrap up with.

So Ben and Whitney are making these, hoodies, And there's they're they're doing it. They're growing.

And like I said, their their big market is unions.

And it's working for them, and they're growing slowly.

And they've also, by the way, made a pledge that they would never earn more than 4 times their median worker, which is really

important because in America, there are some companies, where the CEOs, people's c suite level, are making, like, thousands of times Yes. More than their medium workers.

And you know what's really screwed up about that is oftentimes that doesn't even include the offshored workers because they're contract workers.

So if you factor those people in and the small amount that they make, it could be tens of thousands of times.

Yeah, I mean, you you have a great, and I want to keep pointing people back to the book like this is a must read.

You have a great chart in there, a pie chart of what makes up the price of a Zara hoodie, and who makes what. And it is, it's not pretty.

Yeah. It's pretty appalling. So you have, you know, executive compensation, and then you have astronomical investment in marketing Yeah. Which is like the new manufacturing. Right?

Like, I think I think Americans are mostly marketers at this point.

El, one of the ways I came to thinking about this as I was reading this book is how we manufacture demand.

Like that is what we now manufacture, we manufacture demand.

Demand for mostly like Chinese or Vietnamese made goods. It's just so warped.

Demand for more consumption.

Yeah. Yep. And exploitation. Yes. Anyway. Alright. So happy happy story.

So they're making, hoodies and then March 2020.

And they very quickly realize that if they have to shut down,

they're not gonna survive. So the reason that American Roots and Ben and Whitney were a unicorn for me was because I was looking

not only for a company that was making things using using union labor, But I was also looking for a company that was self financed.

So they did they're not financed by private equity. They're not financed by venture capital.

So they're that that's they actually mortgaged their house and cashed in their retirements to get this company started.

And then they took really loans from from friends and family, and they paid them back.

So it's truly, truly, truly unicorn and also a labor of love.

But of course, part of that is so that they could use it in their mission, right, which was like not offshoring.

So of course, when you take private equity money or whatever, chances are the first thing that they say is, well, why are you making stuff here?

It would be so cheaper to do it somewhere else.

And this happens again and again and again, like, probably 1,000 of times a year, you have great brands that are built up in the United States.

Maybe they do the manufacturing in house, maybe they contract out to other parts in of the United States, but they don't they

can't effectively argue to private equity why made in USA is such a key part of the brand.

And so they offshore, they might off start offshoring, like, part of their line. But it's just so tempting.

I mean, it's, it's ridiculous, like, you can't fight it. Okay.

So they realized they very quickly realized that they're just not gonna survive, and they're gonna lose everything. They're gonna lose our house.

They're gonna lose everything if they have to shut down.

But the other thing that they're seeing now this is Saturday night. I'm gonna say it's March 14th. Don't quote me on that.

But it was like right at that moment when all Americans were like reckoning, facing the music and seeing the footage coming

news footage coming out of New York City.

So I don't know if you remember, but it was mayhem.

Because COVID hit New York City really hard in those first months. And a lot of people died.

And the in part because the emergency rooms were overwhelmed.

But the big thing coming out in those early days was that we as Americans had not stockpiled protective gear for our El workers.

That meant that they didn't have, they limited supplies of things that they depended on, like masks, like gowns.

And then you start seeing the footage of like nurses and doctors in garbage bags, Like, what? This is this is America? Yeah. You know?

Because Because we don't manufacture it here.

Because we weren't making it here. Yeah.

We hadn't stockpiled, and with all the consolidation of, not only hospitals, but buyers' clubs.

So hospitals started subcontracting out there, buying to

large organizations to get the best price. It's a whole story.

It was wild. It ends in the book, and it is it's wild through the lens of the guy who makes the retractable.

It's the retractable injector was the Oh, yeah. Yeah. Hypodermic needle. Yeah.

And trying to market it, but there's only 2 buyers for all of all hospital everything. But yeah. Right.

It's just this consolidate consolidation story.

It's yet another riveting I mean, and and I do wanna point people back.

Like, they're just all of these riveting little stories that surround this greater story of Ben and Whitney Waxman and American roots throughout the book and histories. And it's incredible.

Thank you. Yeah, Just so many nuggets.

I was just like, are you kidding me?

I mean, because that's what I do.

You know, I start reading about where I remembered we didn't have productive gear.

And I was like, well, why not?

And so then I'm down another rabbit hole understanding again how policy affects manufacturing affects all of us.

Yeah.

And, so yes. So so there we were.

And then and then we have the government, sadly, telling us, well, actually, you don't need masks.

And I think anybody who was thinking at that time knew that that was a super cynical message designed to prevent Americans

from stockpiling masks because, actually, hospitals desperately needed them.

And so we shouldn't we we we couldn't we couldn't buy them we shouldn't be buying them up.

So Whitney turns to Ben, she's that they're they're sitting on their sofa in their home.

They have 2 little kids that I think at that time, and they're, they're looking at the collapse of their company, imminent collapse. Mhmm.

But they're also looking at the horror story that's unfolding in New York City and around the country.

And Whitney turns to Ben, and she goes, we can make things. We can make masks.

And Ben says, let's get the board together. Let's let's get a call. Get a board.

A brand new board, by the way.

And, the board said, if you can make the stuff safely, go for it.

And so they pull this is one of the most moving moments I think in the book.

We haven't mentioned that most of their workers were new Americans Yeah.

Who had come from very, very difficult places like Democratic Republic of Congo Yeah. And Angola, and Iraq.

And many of them came to America, seeking political asylum, because they would have lost their lives if they'd stayed where they were.

Yeah. And I think just to just to add a little bit, because we've done some exploring on the podcast of like, power metals

in the Congo, right, like the the mining Oh, yes.

It's it's it's mining lithium and and some of these these places I mean, the Congo historically, Leopold and every the entire

history of that is, is so so so places where a lot of extraction is occurring both of labor and environmental resources.

Right. And mining is is so incredibly destructive, that in order for mining companies, companies, I think, to be successful, they really need authoritarian governments. Yeah.

Because, you know, to to roll back any kind of labor and environmental regulation so they can just do this with wild abandon.

And that's exactly what's happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is basically a failed state.

So, like, these all these things go hand in hand.

That's what what's so incredible about the book is that it all fits together very beautifully. Okay.

Yeah. Because unfortunately, all this stuff does fit together very beautifully. Yeah.

So you have these, so you have a failed state for so many reasons.

And then you have refugees, and they end up some of them end up in Maine.

They're the people who are showing up to be trained to do the work. Yeah.

You know, Ben and Whitney were happy to hire literally anybody who would walk through the door and train them.

And the people who were showing up Maine happens to be, by the way, I think the oldest state in the union. The median age is, like, 45.

So it's not easy finding people to do the work. Yeah.

And that's why immigration is so important to the survival of the state of Maine. Okay.

So Ben and Whitney are in a room at the factory on the Monday after basically the country is in panic mode because this pandemic is clearly gonna just slaughter us.

And they turn to their, at that point, 30 workers, most of them new Americans, recent arrivals with permitted to work. They've been working in the factory.

They have families of their own, young children, their children are not not the people who are working in the factory, obviously.

Not a sweat shop.

And Ben and Whitney. No, this is not a sweat shop.

And Ben and Whitney said to their workers, if we do everything that we can to make this factory safe, we will move the sewing

machines 6 feet apart, we will put up all kinds of plastic barriers, we will hire a cleaning crew to constantly clean like,

you will have to wear masks when you're here.

If we do all of these things, if we do everything we possibly can with very little understanding of what this pandemic really is all about. We don't even know.

Will you come back to make masks for hospitals and first responders.

And what's just so remarkable, and I really wish I'd been in the room for this, but I've heard the descriptions.

What's so remarkable is that every single person in that room says yes, they'll come back. They didn't have to.

They were putting themselves at great risk.

But as the workers said themselves, we're Americans. Yeah. And this is what Americans do.

Like, and remember this, this was under Trump.

So at the same time that immigrants were being billed as like the scourge of American society and job killers and everything El.

And rapists, you have this group of immigrants who've been through incredible trauma, saying, Yeah, this is what we do for each other.

We're gonna do this, we're gonna do this for our fellow Americans, we're gonna make masks, and they do.

And that year, Ben and Whitney end up staffing up quite a bit, they end up with 150 employees going from 30 to 150.

And they're cranking out 100 of 1000 of masks of their own design.

And just like what an incredible story.

And again, that's the I don't know if you remember, but like, at some point in our conversation, I was talking about the loss of capability.

How damaging that can be to a nation if you can't make. Yes.

If you don't know how to make, and it doesn't even matter what it is, but, like, you need to have manufacturing knowledge,

know how, and machinery, and and a trained workforce Faro just such these this is I mean, like, this is exactly the moment

when I think Americans realize, oh, wait a minute. Yes.

Like, we need to be able to make things to survive. Yes.

And I think here it was an action.

And I think the moment that that awareness, at least a cursory initial awareness around supply chains, and just how much we

might be outsourcing, sort of came into more of the general knowledge pool.

It was it was we were seeing it in real time, I think, in a way that it hadn't been seen, which I'd like to hope provides

us with a little bit of a pivot point.

And and I wanna I wanna pull this out because I know I know we're coming up on time here, and I I wanna be I wanna be aware of that.

And I'd love there's one little thing I'd love to touch on, but I I I want to point people to the book for what happens next

for Ben and Whitney Waxman, Because it's it's heartening. It's heartening, and it's harrowing.

And you know, what I said at the beginning of this call is that, that as somebody who's worked with small businesses and had

a small business, you know, for myself, I saw myself in Ben and Whitney in their struggles, and their commitment to a vision

and a mission, and how how beautifully unwilling to compromise they are.

Yeah, it's not easy. It's really not easy. I have tremendous admiration for them. They just won't quit. Yeah.

While I was writing the book or when I was wrapping up, I was really concerned.

I had my publisher, Ashley, asked me, she said, you know, what will we do if they go bankrupt?

Yeah. I thought about that as I was reading it.

And I don't wanna give away the ending because I would like people to read the book.

Yeah. I'm

But, you know, that was always hanging there because I followed them for 3 years.

I followed them from 2020 to I had to put out a book and, you know, I had to finish the the manuscript in 2023.

And there that that was the question. Yeah. You know? What's gonna happen to them?

And what will we do if they don't survive?

Yeah.

So we'll leave that.

We'll leave that there. We'll leave that we'll leave that hanging.

And because it's it's incredibly worth reading.

And I actually want to bring us back.

You wrote an article for the Boston Globe about returning manufacturing to some of the empty office buildings that we've we've

seen for I think Faro it's multifactorial, but this certainly post COVID.

And I wanted to tell you, I was struck by this idea of bringing small manufacturing back to city centers, which is what city centers originally were. Right?

Again, the history of manufacturing is a history of America.

But I was struck because I've been looking a lot at circular economies on the podcast and always looking at keystone species.

And so this is gonna

be a little bit of a weird analogy, but maybe you'll hang in there with me.

And I was thinking about I did this beautiful podcast with Ben Goldfarb.

And one of his books is called eager.

And it's a history of beavers and how beavers shaped shaped America in a very different way.

But when you restore beavers to an ecosystem, there are a lot of things that you might not expect to happen.

You know, we talked about this some with wolves in Yellowstone as sort of trophic cascade.

But when you bring a beaver back, you restore a lot of biodiversity to the landscape, a lot of fertility to the landscape,

a lot more resources into a landscape.

And I couldn't help but think as I was reading through this article that the restoration of small manufacturing into city

centers has these sort of wide reaching implications that it is very much a keystone species in in this ecosystem of what it means to build a community.

And it has all of these interconnected web of effects.

And so, you know, with the idea that when we make things with our hands, that that is part of innovation, that that is part

of happiness and sort of meaning for our bodies.

What might it look like for us to come back to manufacturing as Americans?

I love the analogy to the beaver.

I can't explain, but why, but I actually had a dream about a beaver the other night that I was just walking,

Alright.

Yeah. I love that.

Oh, man. I guess so. I don't know why.

And then I was like, oh, yeah. El, very much so. I mean, they're architects. They're engine. They're brilliant. And, they're also super cute. I really like the Everse. But anyway, so right.

So this is this is actually a trend that's happening all around the country, really exciting in Baltimore, in Pittsburgh,

in cities, Detroit, in cities post industrial cities all over the nation and also in Europe.

We there's this problem here in America, we we're very well aware of this, where the street level in urban centers and towns is is just devastated. Right?

And, you know, it they're they're mostly occupied by, like, multinational banks or whatever.

I mean, it's just it's so sad.

And a lot of spaces are empty.

And so there's this movement actually to help bring the Atelier retail model back to, street level.

This is a little bit different from what I was proposing in my Boston Globe story only because here in Boston, like, we have

this really crazy knowledge economy, and so people are thinking a lot about high-tech manufacturing, which is which is slightly different from what I'm talking about. I'm talking more about craft

Yeah.

Based, manufacturing. So, like, apparel, shoes. Obviously, food is actually classified here, at least in Boston, as manufacturing.

Should

be. But, you know, Right? Yes. It it is manufacturing.

So so the idea is what what these advocates are talking about is, either the atelier or the workshop in the back and the retail upfront.

And in order for there are all these things that you need to do to create a healthy ecosystem that would support that, that

I don't wanna get into it at this time.

But, I mean, like, it's out there.

But imagine having that kind of manufacturing in your region. Right? Like, you meet your makers.

Yeah.

Not you meet your maker, but you meet your makers.

Yeah.

It also means that young people start to develop material literacy, which is really important.

Material literacy means, like, what does it take to actually manufacture or grow this thing?

Oh, I love that so much. Thank you for that.

Right? Yeah. Material literacy. Yeah. Because that you know, I actually have in the beginning of my book on the end papers,

you know, when you open the the hardcover, there's a graphic that talks about all the steps it takes to make an American made

hoodie, right, from the cotton field to shipping it across the country.

And, so, you know, when you have makers, you start to develop material literacy when you have them in your community.

And then you start to understand what's involved, what it takes to actually create something, Which then makes you begin to value this thing. Yes.

Which then makes you question why an an a quote unquote equivalent thing might be so cheap when it comes from somewhere else.

Like, what are the compromises that needed to be made?

And then also what you're doing is you're introducing, I think, an the new, you know, younger generations to the possibilities that that are introduced by making.

So do you have to go to college? Great. Go to college. What do you do after college?

Do you wanna be involved in manufacturing? It's a viable industry. Right?

Like, you don't have to sit in a phone bank, you don't have to work for an insurance company. There are other options.

And then also just connecting makers directly to consumers is so important right now.

Because we've been talking about consolidation and the Amazons and the Walmarts and the Targets of the world and the the tremendous

impact that they've had, negative impact that they've had.

Like, there's a strong desire among people who are paying attention to do an end run around these folks, and it sometimes it's difficult to know how.

Imagine then if we put makers back in these spaces that desperately need to be occupied anyway. You're right.

Like, a whole bunch of things can spin out from that they're pretty exciting.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just I think it has a lot of potential for how we might reimagine our world.

And this is this is something that I think is important, like, we have to start reimagining.

And I come back to, you know, David Graber's David Graber has a great quote about reimagining the world that that we are imaginative species, we can reimagine this.

And, oh, look how adaptable we are.

And we're like, during the pandemic, we were incredibly adaptable.

And let me, you know, let me just mention, one more thing about that is that, you know, when you have these small makers,

batch producers, that sort of thing, most of the money is then going back to the people who are doing work. Yes. Yeah.

The externalities that we can't see the away the unseen that we don't see in these other places that that is not good.

Which is, which isn't nearly a grand enough statement for it.

But but for lack of better words, right now, it that we can see it, we're bringing it home, bring him back into communities.

And I think it's a beautiful vision.

Absolutely. And I love that that your orientation is AG because I have been, as I mentioned before to you, talking a lot about this.

I do call it a slow, you know, manufacturing movement

Yeah.

That, I could imagine would take its, you know, content or, you know, take take a lot from the Slow Food movement. Yes. Like, that exists. We understand it. We bought into it.

And we actually have a major buyer now.

I think Whole Foods has done a lot.

I don't know how you feel about hope I mean, good and bad.

But, I mean, like, to have buyer to have the consumers start to really think about why it's important, and then connecting

them to the small makers like, yes, let's do it.

Yes. I mean, that that I really saw that in this, that that we have done that in so many ways with food.

And I think it's time that we did it for a lot of other things, honestly.

I mean, that's that's why you're here and we're talking about this because I think that it is just so important, and I think

that you have done I've said it a lot, but an incredible job with both your books as as well as your other pieces, like the one in the Boston Globe.

And I will have all of those links and more are there. Did I miss anything?

I mean, I think we could talk all day. But did I miss anything big?

Are there places people you want people to find you all have social links in the in the show notes as well?

Yeah. So I actually I by popular demand, I created a made in USA brands page where I list tons of things. Yeah.

And it's crowdsourced, so people have ideas.

If they know companies that aren't up there, I invite people to please let me know because I I the list is just growing.

And I feel very lucky that I'm starting to step into this, like, incredible network of, domestic makers. They're all really great.

Yeah. Yeah, it's really I browsed through it. And it's, it's really exciting. We need more of that.

We need more databases like that more places to find, so that we can connect with that.

And so we'll link to that in the show notes. Rachel, thank you so much. Thank you for your work. Thank you for this new vision.

And thank you for 2 incredible and page turning riveting books. I really appreciate your work.

Wow. Okay, thank you for being such a careful reader. And for putting this together.

It's been such a pleasure talking to you.

Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it.

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