Shipping and Freight
137 episodes
#5926: Inside Alibaba's Machine: AliExpress, Guanxi, and the China Daniel Has Never Visited
What's actually on the other end of an AliExpress order? A look at Alibaba's B2B machine, Israel's import economy, and guanxi.
#5710: Tristan da Cunha: Life on the World's Most Remote Island
222 people, one village, and a dialect that conjugates like a single person — what life is actually like on the world's most remote inhabited island.
#5519: Mobile Warehouse: Racking That Travels With the Tech
What happens when your inventory tier gets wheels — and how Milwaukee and Bott keep drawers shut at 50 km/h.
#5197: Flags of Convenience: Ships, Planes, and Olive Oil
A Maltese-registered Arkia plane and Tunisian olive oil at Osher Ad turn out to share one mechanism: the legal costume of nationality.
#5193: Rethinking How We Travel Long Distances Without Flying
Sleeper trains, cargo ships, and vehicle relocation — the surprising alternatives to flying that already exist.
#5190: How Iranian Rugs Reach Israeli Shelves
Tunisian olive oil with French labels, Iranian rugs in Jerusalem shops — how goods actually move around sanctions and enemy-state bans.
#5137: Why Your Package Stalls at "Linehaul Office
Why do packages fly across the ocean then sit for days? It's the last-mile logistics bottleneck — and it's all about consolidation.
#5130: Why Small Business Deliveries Come One by One
Daniel wants one weekly delivery instead of dozens of trips. Here's why that service doesn't exist — and what does.
#5095: Airline Food Factories: Inside the 24-Hour Cold Chain
Giant plants, 800-liter kettles, and recipe engineers — how 50,000 meals a day get from factory floor to 35,000 feet.
#5063: The Search Arbitrage Trap: Amazon's Pop-Up Brands
Why do fake "quality" brands flood Amazon search results — and why won't the platform build a filter to stop them?
#4881: How Your Bag Actually Travels 22 Miles Through the Airport
99.24% of bags arrive safely. But 33 million still go astray each year. Here's how the system actually works.
#4837: The Pink Mark on the Lantern
How a pink smudge on a Fenix lantern reveals the hidden structure of Amazon's marketplace.
#4810: How a Stop Sign Gets Bought: B2B Procurement Decoded
Follow a stop sign from Hartford's need to a DOT depot — and learn why B2B pricing has no catalogue price tags.
#4772: Amazon's Three Shadows: Packaging, Returns, and Warehouse Labor
How Amazon's selection, delivery, and returns create hidden costs in cardboard, waste, and worker safety.
#4693: Can You Live Entirely on Amazon?
We audit the plan to buy every aspect of life from one retailer, and find the gaps that don't fit in a box.
#4680: Inside Amazon's Delivery Machine: From Robot Picking to Your Doorstep
How Amazon's fulfillment centers, 750K robots, and Prime's economics make next-day doorstep delivery feel like gravity.
#4679: Inside the Machines: Amazon vs. AliExpress Marketplaces
We break down the structural differences between Amazon's FBA logistics machine and AliExpress's cross-border escrow model.
#4659: When Companies Ruled Empires: The EIC Story
How a spice trading firm ended up governing 250 million people — and what that means for Big Tech today.
#4612: Rubber Ducks by the Gross: The Industrial Supply Wonderland
What happens when a regular person shops at McMaster-Carr? Gross quantities of rubber ducks, petri dishes, and the pipe threader you never knew you...
#4611: Amazon's Absurd Long Tail: Hinges, Snails & AI Listings
From a hinge that made someone weep to pallets of left-handed scissors — the rational economics behind Amazon's strangest listings.
#4598: The Real Cost of a 7-Cent Screw
Why local hardware stores can't compete with AliExpress — and what that means for communities.
#4571: How Shenzhen Became the World's Export Machine
A deep dive into how one city became the default engine of global trade, from factory floor to cargo plane.
#4554: Inside the Eurobox: The Hidden Standard That Runs Warehouses
The shipping container is famous. The Eurobox inside it? Not so much. We trace the cascade of standards that makes modern logistics work.
#4537: Unboxing the Warehouse: From Joseph's Silos to Slotting Algorithms
From Roman FIFO granaries to gravity flow racks — the unglamorous engineering that keeps civilization fed.