S05E01: (BUSA3340, Wk1): Before You Finish Your Coffee — The World in Your Morning (Globalization Intro)

So let me get into this first part.

I want you to kind of sit with me for a second.

Like, let's talk about when the world got stuck.

So I'm going to tell you a story that I'll do my best to explain it, that I think explains this whole subject better than like any definition ever could from your textbook.

In March of 2021, a container ship called the Ever Given, it's E-V-E-R and then G-I-V-E-N, it's making its way through the Suez Canal, and this is in Egypt, okay? And if you've never seen this ship, picture this, okay? Get your kind of visual brain going.

It's about 400 meters long.

Like, stand it on its end, and it would be as tall as the Empire State Building.

And it would be about...

Boy, when you think about this visual for a second, about how much water it displaces, it's just massive.

It can carry around 20,000 shipping containers on it at one time.

And on a windy morning, the Ever Given turned kind of sideways, and unfortunately, it wedged itself into the banks of the canal.

and the bow stuck in on one side and the stern got stuck on the other.

And it basically completely blocked one of the most important shipping lanes on the entire planet.

Now look, for six days, nothing got through.

Hundreds of ships piled up on both ends trying to go through this pass.

Or there were oil tankers and cargo ships and vessels that had livestock, like actual live animals on them waiting to get to the other side, right? And the Suez Canal normally handles somewhere around, I would say a ballpark, about a tenth, one tenth of all of the global trade on this planet.

And the estimates at the time suggested that billions of dollars of goods were being held up every single day that this thing was stuck.

And the whole world just watched this thing.

This ship just basically parked, right? Poorly parallel parked in the space.

And people made memes about it.

And there was a famous photo of one small like excavator digging the bank next to this like gigantic ship.

And it honestly looked like trying to move a whale with like a teaspoon.

It was ridiculous.

Here's the part that I want you as listening to this right now, I want you to notice like a single ship, one ship stuck in a single canal, one canal on the other side of the world in a country most of you probably have never visited.

And within weeks, people in Southern California were seeing delays on furniture, on electronics, on car parts.