Tom Mayer

Because you have to physically put the book on pallets and the pallets physically have to go into containers and the container physically has to go onto a boat.

And then sometimes you wait months for there to be room on a boat leaving the port of whatever.

And then that boat has to sail across the ocean and then dock at the port of New Jersey and then be unloaded by longshoremen and clear customs and then be trucked to our warehouse in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

And there are a lot of steps along that process where things can go wrong.

I looked at it through, you know, my hands were over my eyes.

I felt deep sympathy for the publisher and specifically for the production manager of that book.

I mean, that must have been very stressful for them.

A leading question.

Yeah.

I mean, obviously, the looming tariffs and trade war issues introduced unknowns and risk that we had to account for as we thought about where we wanted to print.

My reaction to that was, okay, you don't like that?

Let's find something else.

But that, when Alex was said that, that changed everything.

And so she had to go back and get all different pricing, and we had to look at what that would do to the cover costs.

for each of the illustrations or like extend them and which one would be better or cheaper which was a lot of extra work but on another level it was like this is necessary you know the author has a new idea a new vision for what they want to do how do we best do that even if it's late in the process and there are like dozens of knock-on effects alexi i'm smiling here okay whatever i happen to be thinking i'm smiling these are tears of joy

Yeah, and on my desk is the first box of the Planet Money book.

They have arrived.

They are right here.

Do you guys want to open them?

You know, there's something about this part of the process that never gets old for me.