Global trade and global supply chains

That's fascinating.

Now, I gather, Ed, you compare in the book global supply chains to the sort of underground fungal networks that invisibly feed and connect plants.

I wonder if you can just say a little bit about this analogy.

It's a rather neat one.

Yeah, and it's an analogy that I kind of borrowed from an economist friend who was looking at supply chains.

And one of his points was to say, there is this fungal network.

So if you look at kind of the trees in a forest, the plants in your garden, the grass, everything else.

What we see is the surface manifestation of a lot of stuff that's happening beneath the surface.

And for a long time, people have understood about the roots of plants and how they interact with the soil and the subterranean environment.

But something that we've only really begun to understand slightly in a more sophisticated way in recent decades has been the mycelium network.

So you've got all of these different fungal roots, essentially, many of them tiny, invisible fungal roots that are basically throughout the soil underneath the ground.

And your listeners may have read before about this idea of the wood wide web.

So within forests, the fungus, those mycelial networks that feed into the roots and they're physically connected to the roots of different trees, that mycelial network is able to allow trees to literally communicate with each other.

If there is, for instance, something happening on one end of the forest, then some of the signs of that happening, whether it's kind of trees being cut down or some sort of impact, some of those signs that are happening are able to be spread through this extraordinarily complex mycelial network.

And it is both invisible and it is incredibly vast.

And the analogy here is to say that that in many ways, the way that the global economy works is quite similar.

So we see the visible manifestations of economic activity, the products that we buy every day.

But beneath those products, whether it's a car, whether it's a loaf of bread, whether it's anything else, Beneath those products are a web of different interconnecting economic relationships.

People talk about supply chains, but it's not really a supply chain.

When you're thinking about a car, you're thinking about all of the different cogs, the different parts, the different springs, the different pieces of metal, the electronics.

These are parts that have come from all over the world, from so many different providers, who in turn have their own different... tiers of providers beneath them.

The degree of complexity in this is so great that for a long time, economists just decided they didn't want to even kind of spend too much time thinking about it.

They would just assume that the market would take care of itself.

But my point in this book is that it's helpful to try and understand this a little bit more in the same way that Biologists are trying to understand more about the fungal networks that are this basis, the kind of dark matter of how a lot of nature, a lot of the plant world actually functions.

The complexity is amazing, but it is kind of overwhelming.