HIBT Lab! Armbrust American: Lloyd Armbrust

Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. This is the place where we break format and experiment with ideas and stories that you might not hear on our Monday episode. So remember the early days of the pandemic when we were all freaking out when you would literally see someone walking towards you on the sidewalk and you'd cross the street because you thought you'd get COVID just by passing them. The days when we were disinfecting packages and mail and even vegetables from the grocery store.

Okay, maybe that was just me, but it was a scary time and Even scarier was the shortage of things like hand sanitizer and Lysol, and most importantly, surgical masks and N95 respirators. And the reason for the shortage was because most of these products are made overseas, particularly in China. And the demand for personal protective gear skyrocketed so high.

That Chinese manufacturers, at least at first. Couldn't keep up. So Lloyd Armbrest, an entrepreneur who ran a company that sold ad sales software to newspapers, decided to make a pivot and try to tackle the problem. And within a few short weeks.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

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