Ethan Thornton

speaker

1,249 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Ethan Thornton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe · 497: Ethan Thornton—I Like a Lotta Problems · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

If they really compressed that, it'd be like six to nine months.

What you need to do is build a manufacturing machine that can switch from product to product in a few weeks.

So I can tell you what happened.

I can't tell you if what happened was good or bad.

So what happened is post-World War II, we pushed into things that are generally considered higher paying and like as an economy, not as individuals, and then created massive globalization and outsourced most of that manufacturing to other countries.

Now, it's probably above my pay grade today if that was the right call.

Like we got the dollar as a reserve currency, that probably could have happened anyway, but that was key.

And then we didn't do a lot of things in the US that require someone to sit at a desk for like 15 hours a day and do these things.

And GDP actually increased because of it.

We favored increase in GDP.

Well, because of that, our internal manufacturing base

rotted like crazy very, very quickly.

And so that's the position we're in today.

Now, there are advantages of that and there are disadvantages of that.

And I don't really know.

I do believe in free global trade, and I don't agree with massive protectionism.

I think the balance is somewhere in the middle.

You need to be able to make things as a country, but you also shouldn't be terrified to outsource things to countries that are allies to you.

So I think a lot of things I'm quite confident on.

So one is we could have handled that transition better for the people that made those things when we made that choice as a country.

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