 Engineering means finding ways to do things better, to provide new or cheaper values to people, to innovate. And combined with entrepreneurship, it is what drives our economy. It's what creates our standard of living and our quality of life. Now I want to tell you, and of course I talked about this yesterday, you know, that if you combine that and you make it global, and then you allow it for trade, that's how real values increase. That's how real standard of living increase. That's how real progress happens. And I want to tell you the story that I started telling you yesterday about the shipping container. Because I mean, the story is so inspiring. And I know that many of you don't know about this, but I think the shipping container is one of the most revolutionary products that we have seen in the last hundred years. It has dramatically changed world trade. It has dramatically improved your quality of life. And it is a massive example of ingenuity and entrepreneurship leading to global economic growth with one relatively simple idea and executing on that idea. Debra, thank you. I'm going to tell you the story of the container. And then we've got a ton of super chat questions. So just give me a little bit before I get to the questions to tell you a story. I think you'll enjoy it, or some of you will anyway, because I did. I thought this was an amazing story. And then we've got endless number of super chat questions. I'll do some of them today and some of you tomorrow. I promise tomorrow we'll talk about more current events. Yeah. So April 26, 1956 was the first time the modern container was used. And the modern container is an invention of a truck driver. A guy owned a trucking business. A guy by the name of Malcolm McLean. Malcolm McLean. You should all say thank you to Malcolm McLean. Malcolm grew up in North Carolina in a tiny cotton center in Maxland. He was born in 1913. But he was a compulsive entrepreneur. As a child, he sold eggs on the side of the road. He graduated from high school in the midst of the Great Depression in 1931. He stocked shelves in grocery stores and managed a gas station. And then he bought a used truck. And he opened what was called McLean Trucking in 1934. Trucking business. And he was obsessed with making his trucks the most efficient, productive, possible trucks that you could have. He was obsessed with the logistics of delivery to make them the most efficient. But also things like reducing drag on his trucks so that they used, they were the most fuel efficient that they could be, so he could reduce his cost as much as he could. Now, this is a period in the 30s and 40s and 50s where trucking is heavily regulated. This is coming out of the new deal where trucking is heavily regulated. And rates, trucking rates, shipping rates were controlled by the government. So he had to be able to show the government, the regulators, the cost of his truck, the cost of shipping so that he could charge what he charged. The only way, so that the rates were set by government, so the only way he could make money was by constantly lowering costs, which he was brilliant at doing. So this is a period where there was no interstate highway system, where trucks were traveling on all these little roads all over America, where everything was late, delayed, traffic jams were everywhere, trucks dominated the roads. There was no quick way to transfer stuff. So a lot of stuff was done through shipping. You would load stuff up in New York and you would travel to North Carolina, which would travel to maybe Houston or Galveston, and you would unload things, but everything was incredibly inefficient because everything was in boxes that were on truck trailers, then be unloaded into boxes, put into pallets, loaded onto ships, downloaded into places where everything was incredibly inefficient, slow, unproductive. And Malcolm was seeing this and living it, and he said there has to be some better way to do this. At the time, an ocean-going ship in the 1950s carried about 200,000 square separate crates, bags, barrels, and bales. Imagine fitting into the hull of a ship. Crates, bags, barrels, and bales. 200,000 different ones that had to be loaded, unloaded. They would arrive at a docked in hundreds of separate shipments. Each item had to be removed from a truck or a rail car, removed into a warehouse, then picked up at the warehouse, put it under the vessel, unloaded from the vessel, picked up at the warehouse where it was stored in the next port. I mean, this is endless. And McLean potted this idea, thought about it, and he thought maybe one way to do it is for the truck to literally drive onto the ship and detach its trailer and leave it on the ship and then get unloaded somewhere else where it got hooked onto a truck and then driven off the ship. But then because you had these trailers, because we had these trailers, you couldn't stack these containers on top of each other. So McLean literally invented this idea that the container itself is separate from the trailer of the truck, that the container sits on the trailer of the truck, that container could be removed from the trailer of the truck, put onto a ship, and that the ships could then stack these containers, one on top of the other, download in the next port, put onto a truck, and the truck could take it. The standardization of shipping. Now the problem was that nobody wanted to take this idea too seriously. He patented it and he tried to sell it to shipping companies. But the shipping companies were, as usual, very conservative. They had their way of doing business and they weren't interested. So what McLean did was that he sold his trucking business. He took all his money and he bought ships and he built his own shipping business. And he started using these containers to move things up and down the east coast of America, ultimately Puerto Rico, Panama Canal, started shipping stuff across the Pacific during the Vietnam War in the 1960s, which nobody thought you could do. That the ship could handle the Pacific Ocean. And he had a problem because he was shipping military equipment for the army to Vietnam. But it was a waste to bring the ships back empty, but then he discovered Japan. And Japan was just becoming this industrial powerhouse. So the ships would drop military equipment in Vietnam, go to Japan and load up on TVs, VCRs, small cars, all in containers. They would then be shipped to the United States, you pick up military equipment and you keep doing that. Of course, other shipping companies saw this, ultimately embraced the idea, but every shipping company had different containers. They used different measurements, different styles, different operations. And that became unbelievably inefficient. So they got a committee together and they tried to negotiate a common standard for the entire shipping industry. And they couldn't until McLean intervened again, sat down with him and basically provided the patent for his particular container. He basically provided for free to anybody who wanted to use it. And his shipping container, the shipping container that he basically invented became the standardized shipping container that still rules the sea today. And today, of course, everything is shipped by container. And there is so much shipped by container. There's so many ships out on the sea. Containers are so simple and easy. By the way, he also invented the crane that lifts the container, puts it onto the ship, right? So every port in every port in the world now has exactly the same crane. The crane that lifts the container, puts it onto ship and downloads, takes the container from the ship and puts it onto, I mean, it's stunning. What this little thing, what this little thing has done. Now, he sold his company, ultimately he started a different shipping company. He got hit with the oil crisis of 1970s. He actually went bankrupt. After the bankruptcy, he started another shipping company that was very successful and he died very wealthy and very successful, but he's been forgotten. And what the container business provided, what the shipping business through containers provided was low cost globalization on a scale that people could not have imagined. And what has driven the US economy over the last 40 years is not just ingenuity and entrepreneurship in the United States. What has driven the US economy and the global economy is the ability now to leverage ingenuity and entrepreneurship on a global scale, to leverage entrepreneurship and ingenuity all over the world, eight billion people. Now, not all of them live in cultures and in political systems that allow for ingenuity and entrepreneurship, but many of them do. And to the extent that they can do, they contribute to me and contribute to you. Globalization has made it possible for economy to grow even as we have stifled innovation in this country, even as we have increased regulation, even as through central planning, we have slowed economic growth in this country because other countries since the 1980s freed up their economies, opened up up with huge regulations, creating cultures that are pro-engineuity and entrepreneurship. And we have been the beneficiaries of that. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism, and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist and the world. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it, but at least the people who are liking it, you know, I wanna see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I wanna see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing whether you're looking at this. And you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So, you know, and if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. 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