Key Facts

“I went to Costco yesterday, in part just to look at things, and when I see this panic buying and shelves empty from largely suburban and urban shoppers, I ask myself, where do they think this stuff comes from?

“It was stocked all night long by people of the lower middle class that worked all night. And they were supplied by truckers who came from packing houses and food processing plants and farms—directly from farms—and they were being worked by people on tractors, by engineers, farming engineers, hydrologists, farm laborers, farm managers, who have not taken one moment off.

“So what I do, and what an advertiser does, or a high-priced corporate lawyer, or a diversity czar at Stanford, a lot of these jobs are not essential to keep us alive one more day. A fracker is. A farmer is. A trucker is. And yet somehow, we’ve lumped these people in as the losers of globalization that weren’t hip enough to know how to code or how to get into a business that could not be duplicated overseas.

“I think it’s going to be really amazing to see how—how this economy survives without the input of a lot of people who are very highly compensated that are essentially doing nothing, and they’re not missed. And the people who are very lowly compensated are doing everything, and they’re essential. I hope people will start to see that—that shift in their estimation of what’s important and what’s not.”

Click here to learn more.