The Containers Podcast mini-series (with eight self-contained 30-minute episodes) by Alexis Madrigal at Atlantic is amazing!
As an Operations academic in a business school, I am a fan of both nitty-gritty details and narrative story-telling canvas. When I came across the Containers podcast my stoicism vanished, and I was giddy with excitement.
Containers are one of those mundane things that fundamentally changed global trade and turned supply chains into complex organisms. You would be completely mistaken to think that a podcast on containers would be boring.
Alexis Madrigal brilliantly weaves logistics facts with human interest stories that form the cogs in gigantic machinery of global trade. He talks about the history of Oakland, the “deaths” of longshoremen, poetry, Filipino lives, logistics, the Jones Act, hurricanes, shipping disasters, single-origin coffee brews, robots in warehouses, Vietnam war and much more in this podcast.
The entire podcast is transcribed on Medium, with a treasure trove of 60s era pictures from the Bay Area.
But it is more exciting to listen to the episodes of the podcast on Megaphone, iTunes Podcast or Soundcloud. Happy Listening!
Notes:
1. If you stare across the Bay Bridge from Wharton West building, you will see the three grey structures on the Oakland port (which urban myth has that – it is really a myth, but I love the myth – it inspired the design of AT-AT walkers in Star Wars movies).
2. Marlon Brando’s memorable “I coulda been contender” role in the movie, On the Waterfront vividly captures the angst of brittle future in longshoreman jobs.
3. It is amazing that the excitement of seafaring in Treasure Island and Around the World in 80 Days has now been reduced to the tedium of staring at the horizons, as seen in Part 2.
(Photo credit: Containers Podcast).