Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen on tariff shock: 'It's really ugly for our customers already'

10-year Treasury note ticked up as well, on pace to snap a three-day streak of declines. Gold prices rallied, sending the precious metals towards another all-time high. Uh Trump has declared April, April 2nd, liberation day for US trade policy. He is due to announce the contours of a sweeping tariff plan at 400 p. m.

Eastern in a Rose Garden address. Uh the Wall Street Journal will stream the president's uh tariff comments live.

The tariff fight has ignor ignited worries about a slowdown in economic growth, driving a steep selloff in shares of small companies after weeks of unease about how Trump's tariff plan will shake out and which industries they will reshape. Investors and business leaders around the globe are hoping for more clarity.

And that's the big deal here is just clarity. People want to know what to expect. You can't move a whole factory in a day. It takes years to reshore manufacturing capacity and the bigger the company, the harder it is to move.

This was this was Sean Frank's, you know, big point, which was, you know, uh even if I want to react to tariffs, it's going to be, you know, damaging to my business and every other e-commerce business in the short term.

And so Trump clearly wants to make big change, but uh there's still, you know, uh a lot of companies caught in the crossfires in the short term. Cool. Well, we got Ryan in the studio. Welcome, Ryan. Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. Are you not traveling? Was yesterday. I'm back. You're back. Congratulations.

Enjoy. Uh, Home Sweet Home. Uh, first, I mean, we got to ask you, uh, are there are there any spies? How are you dealing with uh counter intelligence, counter espionage these days? Uh, there's always spies. Yeah. Um, we're good.

We uh we try to make sure that our codebase is super buggy, so if you steal it, it just work. That's my advance tactics.

Do you think this is a symptom of like just just zooming out from you know the the deal rippling thing and anything that's happening at flexport like do you think this is a symptom of like tech becoming a little bit less green field a little bit less positive sum there's like two or three majorbacked companies in the exact same category now and it's less of like the anointed power law winner who's going up against some company that's so sclerotic that there's just it's just it just oh you're just stealing billions of market cap app all day long and it never really matters.

So, you're not not it's not so so much of a knockout dragout fight. Like, how do you think about this in the context of like the history of Silicon Valley and like your career? Oh, I don't know.

I mean, you know, our our issue was like I I think very different than deals like that was like two arch rivals going at each other and like someone you know that that was that's crazy. I just read the deposition. It's crazy, right? Really crazy. Our issue is very different.

There was a couple of employees who just like made some bad decisions, download a lot of stuff on their way out and the company they started is pretty insignificant. My my general view is never never punched down, but when you see someone committing ultimately a crime. Yeah.

Uh yeah, there's a sense of moral righteousness that needs to happen, some justice in the world. So yeah, but it's quite different. I mean, we're not this company is not a threat to Flexport the way maybe deal is to Ripling or vice versa. I don't know. But Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's very different.

Uh so yeah, I mean on tariffs like what are you expecting? What are you looking for? What do how do you think it's going to go down in an hour? Um it's Yeah, I don't know what to expect. I feel a little bit like, you know, um maybe you're in Florida waiting for a hurricane and about to hit Florida man. I don't know.

We should get our American flag out and stand in the wind and enjoy the show or be horrified and go, you know, get in your car and try to drive a thousand miles away. Um there's no escaping in your business. Yeah, there's no escaping. It's going to hit hard. Um it's really ugly for our customers already.

I mean, they've already on the the China tariffs. It's hard to imagine how they go much higher really. Um because of the they they added 20% to what was already 25%. And then the Venezuela stuff hit today, I think. Um which is another 25% on top of that because China imports Venezuelan oil. Oh wow. What am I at?

45 plus 25 70% tariff. And then if you do steel or aluminum, which if you have that component, you're you're pushing into 80% duties, go a little bit higher. I mean, at some point you're just like, oh, okay. So, I don't know how much worse China can get. It can get worse.

They can they can do whatever they want, I suppose. Um, the tariffs on other countries is the big wild card here. what other countries get. You know, you've already seen Israel and Vietnam both went to duty-free on American imports. Uh so we'll see.

My my impression from having talked to a cabinet secretary last week that what he told me was that this would be April 2nd today is the start and not the end process. And he means that I think in a positive way for companies that they're going to come out with a big bang today.

it's going to be ugly and then he would expect that countries will come to the negotiating table and make deals to bring the tariffs back down.

But they want to show send a very clear message that they're dead serious about, you know, that they they mean business and then he expects countries will will will come to the table.

Um, but some may some may read it the wrong way and kind of retaliate with their own tariffs and then the administration may escalate further. We've seen that uh as a pattern.

So my advice to all the presidents of the world is to go read the art of the deal and uh not that hard to figure out how these guys work in my No, that it's like similar to FF. It's like how does FF make investments? You know, read zero to one. Yeah, that's basically it. It's all out there.

They're still doing the playbook. Are you do you think is this already happening or is it going to happen? Companies sort of dying before they can onshore manufacturing.

Is that is that something that you're super worried about or are people just battening down the hatches like you said Florida style and just figuring out a way to you know obviously everybody wants to survive? Uh but are we seeing sort of like an an extinction level event uh within e-commerce yet specifically?

Certainly not yet. Um I I it's very hard to say. I mean the the reality is tariffs alone won't do won't bring most of these industries back to the US. the the US dollar is just too strong. I was talking with a company yesterday that imports garlic. Mhm.

I was like, wait, I thought California like has the best farmland in the world for growing garlic. Like, why do we need to import it from China, but it's just even with the tariffs, it's cheaper to import the stuff from China. And it's the you know, our soil is better than theirs.

Like California is the Gilroy is like the garlic festival. I mean, this the best place in the world to grow garlic. So, but the US dollar just being so strong as the reserve currency makes it like no matter what you do almost with tariffs, it's still cheaper to buy from another country.

So, I think that tariffs alone won't do it. And and nobody's there's no political will to make the dollar cheaper. But if you want manufacturing to come in the US, the US just can't it just can't be that we're that much richer than everybody else on a dollar basis because it's kind of big. Yeah.

But haven't haven't some people argued that with extreme enough tariffs it would you know get people to tr you know try to just move off the dollar maybe it's impossible there's got to be a number yeah it might move off the dollar which might actually cause their problem not the way they intended to be I'm not like I've always been a macroeconomic skeptic it was I'm either too smart or too dumb to for macroeconomics I'm not sure which uh I couldn't figure it out they would have all these advanced it all seemed more complicated than they were it out to be.

Uh, so you never studied is ISLM? All the different charts and graphs interact inter like the only class I ever got a bad grade in in college was macroeconomics. Yeah.

Uh, is there is there hope that um I mean it seems like obviously there's like the micro like what is the actual tariff rate in the country that I'm operating in?

But then the real hope from the market at least in companies seems to be give me a framework and a real understanding of what the future's going to look like and does is is there a chance I mean it sounds like we're maybe even just starting that process of really understanding how the business community can respond to like a a larger trade policy strategy and like is that what people are pushing?

for is that is it really is it really more about um just clarity over the long term? For sure. Business needs certainty and clarity and it's really hard. These supply chains are multi-year maybe ideally decade plus investments that you're you're making and how you're going to set up your supply chain.

And if you if it's changing every single week like you're just paralyzed. You can't make any decision at all. I think Canada stuff's pretty harmful in that way because if there's going to be tariffs on Canada, then there's going to be tariffs on Malaysia, Vietnam, India, and everybody else.

Like, so it makes it really hard to to make any decision. Let's say a company finally says, "Okay, it's very clear we're going to have to move our manufacturing out of China. This administration and the Biden administration, by the way, was also um ratcheted up the first Trump administration's tariffs on China.

They didn't lower them at all. " So, both parties are aligned on that. So, if that's clear and you're ready to make that move, then you go, "Okay, where do we move it to? " Unless you're ready to move to the US, there's no ability to make a decision at all right now.

Um, do you think it would be better to take a more gradual approach to implementing these uh tariffs, I'm just thinking like instead of saying, "Hey, there's a 24% tariff coming in on this country," it's like, "No, we're going to raise the tariff 1% per month for the next two years.

" And so, you know exactly where it's going. It's not going to just just destroy your profit margin today, but if you don't figure it out in two years, like you probably will be done. And so you're signaling to the market exactly where it's going to go. But it seems like I've never seen a policy like that rolled out.

Yeah, I've heard they were talking about that. I mean, I think that was one of the things that Trump or Lighheiser, one of the admin people close to the administration said they were going to do during the campaign. No, I think it was Bessant who said that, Treasury Secretary. Um, that would make sense to me.

or even just giving people, you know, six months notice of this is coming, a year notice. Like some of the policies they've enacted have said, "Okay, this kicks in tomorrow or next week. " And you're just like, "Oh my god.

" Like I have a friend who's importing uh stuffed animals and he bought $100,000 worth of stuffed animals and while the container was on the water, the duty rate went up and he got hit with his $20,000 bill. He didn't plan. I know.

like ah brutal you know and so brutal you need some notice period that they haven't done that this time around I think yeah gradual ratching it up but ultimately just providing clarity like where are we going to be um it's it's also the ultimate challenge of the US system is you know here at least the two parties are mostly aligned at least when it comes to China we'll see about other we'll see what policies they actually roll out but the two parties are mostly aligned on trade they both hate trade right now Um, and so at least you have some longer term view of what it's going to look like if but in the US system where it can totally flip overnight, it makes it very makes us very hard to deal with as a country.

I mean I uh I think this is one of the things that has made it difficult for a deal like with Russia for example. I mean the two parties are just polar opposite in policy. So, how do you how can they make a deal with either party when it might just flip in four years to someone who's got it who won't hold up the deal?

Yeah, I've seen I've seen the uh like the flexport 747, there's one right behind you. Uh if if onshoring really happens and there's major major production shifting to the United States, what does that look like for flexport? Are you going to get into like more rail, more trucking? Is is is the market even big?

H how would you think about that? I would imagine there'd be an expansion of the US opportunity, but like what what does that look like for Flexport specifically? Yeah, winners and losers in different parts of our business for sure.

The air freight we air freight business, a lot of our we do a lot of e-commerce products from China to the US. Of course, that's about 50% of all the air freight in the world now is coming out of Chinese e-commerce. And so that that is at major risk and the price of air freight will probably collapse.

That that would be bad for our air freight business. Um, our customs business is already booming as we help we provide a lot of advisory services to help country companies figure out what this means for them. Uh, how to mitigate, minimize duties, be compliant, um, get refunds on duties.

Every year, even before all these new tariffs, seven billion dollars was going unclaimed in refunds that people are owed. That's right. That's crazy. So, we got people $140 million worth of that uh last year or no, that's our goal for this year. Um, but that's still a big market.

You know, we should be 10 times bigger or or even more than that. Um, so that part of our business is booming. Trucking, we do about 200,000 truckloads a year. Mhm. Domestically, moving trucks uh that have nothing to do with the international freight. That would probably grow.

Uh, we'd want to get more, we will be getting more into kind of trade with US and Latin America, US and other parts of the world. I I I don't really worry too much about the macro. Like we're still pretty small. We estimate our market share is about 0. 25%. Wow. Um right now.

So like okay, even if the market shrunk in half. Yeah. We Okay, now we're 0. 5%. You know, hold on to the business we have, but to all of it. So I I I'm too worried. Yeah. I have a question about a a market I'm sure you've thought about.

So, we've been having a bunch of, you know, there's a bunch of new defense tech companies emerging. Uh, you know, they have to move uh big expensive uh flammable, you know, things around all the time. Is that a vertical that like you guys have looked at at all?

Because I think it's obviously, you know, bunch of compliance issues. It's it's Yeah, a little bit. Um, I think you tend to want to be more those guys want to work with people who own the assets. Interesting. more tighter control security-wise.

Like actually, I heard about this company that does trucking for the DoD or for big defense contractors and they ship missiles and it's like a very lucrative business, but they own all the trucks and we don't we try not to own any assets. Sure.

Very hard to maintain to provide the kind of like ultimate security that one of those companies needs if you're not asset heavy. So, they'll it's a it's a it's a cool space, but probably not one that we're best suited to play in right now. Yeah. What about uh what about self-driving trucks?

I feel like we're seeing so many just like the studio Giblly moment, the chat GPT moment, like AI feels so big and yet the self-driving trucks aren't really here. What are the dynamics? And do you have a timeline for that actually affecting the market? What's kind of the impact? It'll be huge.

I mean, it's um the Whimo's here. My Tesla I mostly drives itself now. Um and Tesla's making a truck. So, but I don't know how many of those Tesla semis they've really shipped. And and there's two different problems of the electric truck and the self-driving truck that maybe shouldn't have been conflated.

Like because I think the electric truck actually has more problems than the self-driving truck, it seems like. Yeah. Um just because of like charging and range and different things that don't make that much sense for a from what I've heard.

I'm not I'm not that close to the physics of it, but the recharging network has just like not been there for it. Y um it's going to be really huge though and a massive impact on a lot of things. You know, right now transit time even like a a truck that drives 24 hours a day can cross the country.

I think the law says you can only drive eight hours a day. So crossed three three times faster where today you would need three drivers and they charge you a huge premium. Yeah.

for that team trucking it's called where you have multiple drivers running shifts and sure and like it's a shitty lifestyle like riding overnight like never getting out of the truck as you cross the country. Um that is crazy and but you could it would be very competitive.

You could I once drove across the country in 53 hours with four friends just taking turns. Were you doing Cannonball being hardcore? Four four broke college kids. Like there's something about that that sounds like amazing with your boys once. But I hear I take your point on like a lifestyle.

We've been we've been talking about it. Yeah. We want to do a race try and get across the country. I think the record is something like 22 hours which is easy. Yeah. Over 100 miles an hour the entire time. Uh very illegal, very controversial. From Maryland, where I'm from, to Oklahoma.

And actually the only reason we stopped the car broke down. We were gonna go the whole way without stopping. Yeah. Broke down. So the 53 hours actually there was a stint while the car was in the mechanic. Okay. I'm ignoring that part. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You cut that out. Yeah. Yeah.

And then we can like looked around a little while. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The real cannonball is from the Red Ball Garage in Manhattan to the Portoino uh hotel in California. And uh it's been done for years.

Alex Roy was the famous guy who did it originally and then Ed Bolian destroyed the record during COVID when there was no one on the streets. It's a fascinating story. You should go check it out. But yeah, this will be big in trucking.

Um Oh, not you know, jobs aside, it's like I think truck driving is the most number one profession in 34 states. Yeah. Uh by number of people doing the job. So that'll be massively impactful.

Um, and yeah, like I think there's a lot of positives for the industry and productivity and stuff, but certainly it's an interesting problem for the for the society.

Yeah, going speaking on AI, you know, something we've talking about on the show is like you had this Giblly moment last week where something that was historically super timeintensive and expensive and costly, like if you wanted this sort of like beautiful handdrawn animation style.

Yeah, you could go on Upwork or Fiverr and get that kind of thing done. It's not going to cost a ton. Most people wouldn't even bother to do it.

And I think that we are racing towards like the giblificication of like all goods right on like a long enough time horizon like automation robots will just you'll have sort of an idea for something that you want and in theory like you know you just you know something could be made with no human involvement and that could really drive the cost down.

Now if the cost of a lot of goods goes down over time then in theory there would also be a lot more sort of like a Jevans paradox dynamic where like if things get cheaper people want more of them which means that like we we there's a scenario where like we're ordering 10 times as much ch stuff from China in you know 10 20 years.

How do you think about just AI?

Like it's easy to see how AI is, you know, going to make Flexport a better business by rolling sort of systems out internally and building these sort of customerf facing experiences, but have you thought at all about like how automation broadly can actually sort of like impact like the flow of goods around the world at sort of a more macro level?

Well, um, actually just coming back to the giblification of everything. So, I'm a, uh, I'm a I'm a published children's book author, you guys may know. That's great. Yeah, there you go. Big shift and the little digger. I wrote this myself. It was not written by Chad TBT. It was not illustrated. I didn't illustrate it.

I just wrote it. So, you can write a children's book about 45 minutes. Uh, I love it. And, um, but the design took a long time. My designer who used to work at Flexport did this. Yeah. Great. It looks great. Beautiful. Oh, yeah. It's a wonderful story.

Um took him like man the better part of like six or eight weeks to do that. Yeah. I when the um when ChatBT released their new image model last week, I was like, "Oh, I'm going to write a new children's book. " And I did it in an hour and on my phone.

I could have done it faster if I would have been on desktop and had parallel tabs open or whatever, but on the phone app didn't let me. But in one hour, I was able to create a really cool book. Uh yeah. And and and like I think I could publish it and be done.

It's also so cool the customization being able to like make it about these really cool iconic flexport posters. We have 40 offices around the world and one for each office that like Oh, that's super cool. Well, yeah. So, usually like iconic from the golden age of like ocean ocean travel liner tunnel.

Good prompt for that. And it I asked the same designer to do it for me. I wanted these posters like you know I asked him six months ago and he quoted me something I couldn't afford. So using children effort made them all last night in like an hour and I'm Yeah. So let's use a children's book as an example.

My son is obsessed with reading. He's three years old. He could easily burn through five six books a day. Like he would happily read he'd probably read 20 new books a day if we had 20 new books available in the house. And he'll read I bet you he'll read even more if he's the protagonist of the story. Yeah. Exactly.

So if like he's a protagonist, it's customized to his interest. It's perfectly matching his level. But I also don't want him on screen. So like there's a world where if like the cost of producing the books drops, books are, you know, 80% less because there's it's just generated.

There's a world where I' I'd order five times as much. And that means that you're going to be shipping in theory like a lot more goods. And that's just like for one category, right? Could be. Yeah. Um and there'll be categories like that.

I I you know, if I wasn't so busy, I would definitely try to set the Guinness Book of World Records right now for whoever wrote the most children's books in the world. Like that's great right now before they in a 24h hour in a 24-hour period. Yeah. 2,000 children's books.

Uh can we hear a little history of the Flexport Lion and the Generative AI stuff? And is the Flexport Lion coming back or Yeah. Well, when Dolly first came out, I you know, I think every company should have a mascot and ours is the lion because he's king of the jungle.

Um, you know, lion probably kill any other animal in the world. So, that should be but you know, I wanted to claim that and make it really we're the lion. You can be something else like we're the lion.

Uh, and so yeah, I probably I like went a little crazy on Dolly when it first came out making lion in a shipping container in port, whatever. Yeah. Um, yeah. Yeah. So, you should expect to see more Bport Lions out there. Yeah. I remember you got me access every should have a children's book for your marketing.

It's great marketing. Kids love it and parents love it. And then uh then you should have a mascot. The best at this is by the way Dolingo. Like apparently their owl is like Oh yeah, their owl has like 50 million followers on the different apps. That's amazing. Uh yeah. Yeah.

We need to instantiate the the flexport lion with its own Yeah. I need I need to make more people know about it. Yeah. It can be posting. It's not an obvious shipping reference.

I don't even know if lions are good at swimming or anything, but um Well, I mean, you do you do shipping over land as well, but yeah, it's not a pack animal and it's not king of the seas. I would expect, you know, an octopus, tentacles everywhere. Who knows?

Are there any uh transportation platforms is probably not the right way to think about it, but things like airship, you know, drones that you're excited about? We had a founder on earlier this week who's building uh sort of kind of plans. Yeah.

It's like a a sea plane drone for like short-term transport, you know, if you that the one that went viral or they like five guys that made it in their living room or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. David David co-ounder. That thing seems sweet.

If you like forgot something at home and you lived by a body of water, you could there. I don't know. Yeah. But yeah, like I've been pitched airships, you know, there's been a bunch of attempts, you know, at that. Uh I'd be curious to think as you think about the future 10 years out.

What's what's exciting to you and and are there is there whites space? Definitely the um actually the uh man I'm forgetting the name. I think Eli Dorado is a backer of it of this uh airship company. Yep. Yeah, I know that one. Pretty high potential. I met with the founder recently and I originally was very skeptical.

I'm like, I don't think anyone needs this and sounds really complicated, whatever. But he walked me through it. It can carry the same volume as a 747, take three days to cross the ocean instead of 15 hours. But like three days is pretty fast compared to a ship container.

So if you get to a price point in between air freight and ocean freight, um that's very compelling. It's just a new tier and so some people will opt into it for a certain class of goods. That will be very compelling as a replacement for air freight. That'd be cool.

Does that kind of unblock the port system because we'd have a new se new set of ports. We could go automated from day one. What's really cool about his model is his idea anyways is that it would just go straight to your warehouse, not go to a port at all. That's amazing.

Land at your wherever your warehouse is and not trucking or any you know like land on. That's pretty cool. Um, hopefully somebody awesome funds it because it's not cheap to go launch these things and uh, yeah, that's what real venture capital should be, right? Take some risk and do some badass stuff like that.

So, um, rooting for them. Yeah. Um, I think the self-driving ship, I see that all the time. It's really stupid idea just because there's only these ships are like 20,000 containers with 20 guys. Like there's just not that much labor savings here.

And most of those guys are doing maintenance like they're like painting it and Yeah. doing engine maintenance like you still need them even if it's self drive. There's one guy driving the ship like Yeah. Well, yeah. You you you we've had pretty good autopilot in boats. Yeah. It kind of drives itself anyway, right?

So, I think the self-painting ship is kind of interesting. Like that's cool. Just kind of painting itself as it goes. What about those crazy uh ships that have sails or nuclear power? Different different modes of power for ships.

Yeah, the nuclear power I think is going to be probably regulatory problem more than anything else. Like nobody really wants your nuke uh sailing into their harbor has been probably the problem there.

Um I've seen some cool ideas where like the ship the mother ship would stay offshore like 200 miles and then deploy like little baby ships that would bring the cargo to port uh so that it never had to get within your coastline. But it's still a ways away. What about the sales? Um, yeah.

So, I've also seen there's a really cool company called Clipper Ship, a really tiny seed round company.

So, but with a big vision of little autonomous drones, sail sh sailboats that would carry like five or six containers worth of stuff and again like sail not to your warehouse but to like a little tiny port a river or something and set up their own network of ports. They're they're trying to go live soon.

I all of this stuff's pretty cool and I have no idea, you know, it requires venture capital and it's it's very interesting, you know, founders fund's the obvious one, but like it's really interesting to see when do they get excited. Yeah.

About something it's not everything could be the next SpaceX and SpaceX was a crazy vision until it worked, right? Uh and could have lost a lot of money if it didn't. Yeah. What about SpaceX pointto-point? Um, yeah.

Uh, I mean, obviously the first the the the first like beach head is like the most expensive like private jet traveler needs to get to Tokyo in like an hour from New York and so they're like, "Yeah, 50k, no problem. " Uh, but but where do you see that technology going over the long term?

Uh, the problem is like flying in the to can it can SpaceX launch like in bad weather and it's raining or something like you're No, not really. I think they need pretty clear skies, but they're in Florida and Texas. It's pretty clear most of the time. They don't scratch too many.

I think the from a cargo standpoint, it's probably not worth any premium because cargo doesn't care that much. If it gets there in 15 hours or in 30 minutes, it's basically the same for most almost everything. For military, it's a big those are very big differences.

Like if you need to get supplies to some soldiers on the ground in 30 minutes, like that can be life or death versus 15 hours or whatever. So like sure, military applications are huge. Rich people Yeah, care a lot more about their time.

Um, so yeah, I would be certainly bullish on that, but it's just like cargo doesn't care that much if it takes 15 hours. Very rare you would spend that much extra for something to get it there that fast. I mean, maybe it would shorten down your trips, which would be nice. The one that I'm very excited about is Zipline.

Oh, yeah. Um, which is I can't figure out if they launched or didn't launch yet. They're supposed to launch any day now in Dallas. And you'll be able to buy anything that's for sale in a Walmart on a drone delivery. Wow. Uh in less than five minutes. That's amazing.

Out of there's 25,000 items in a typical Walmart and 24,000 of them are small enough to fit inside their drone. Wow. Uh and then I understand they're going to go live. I don't want to reveal anything I'm not supposed to, but they're going to go live with some restaurant chains. Oh, cool. Get your burrito.

Be able to get like a burrito in five minutes.

This is this is one of those things like you know they they had the early hype where like everybody was like oh this is the future and then like they had to do the thing and like actually like make it work so the hype like dies down and then suddenly like a burrito lands in your backyard in 5 minutes and you're like we are so back.

Uh last last question for you.

Uh how do you think about sort of managing like the team and the company at a time when you're running a business that's you know most companies have the benefit like you know if you're running like payroll software you can be like let's ignore sort of like politics and like what's going out on each other. Yeah.

And like let's ignore the world and just like focus on our business and our customers. But like you're in a business where like in 30 minutes they're going to announce some news that's going to be very impactful to your customers. like, you know, h how have you messaged um everything with the team?

Like, do you got are you going to be like, you know, doing a war room as as the news breaks out? What does that look like? I'm curious.

Uh we always there's we do we have war rooms as we call it too and they're slack channels basically where we get people together to go run UDA loops and observe what's happening in the world orient ourselves who needs to know about this uh make decisions take action and and our our ultimate you know my message to the team is is what my dad used to tell us when we go camping it's uh you don't have to outrun the bear you just have to outrun the the the campers in the next sight over.

That's great. And our competition, um, we've just got to be better. We can't outrun this bear of tariffs or geopolitics, terrorists blowing up ships in the Red Sea or Yeah. Yeah. Whatever it might be. Uh, but we have we can be better at responding to this than any other competitor.

And, uh, it's a moment for us to actually double down on being the most customer centric, you know, like and tech gives us a huge advantage here. when when the new tariffs hit, we will be ingesting that into our databases and publishing it to our customers uh within minutes, right?

And our account management teams within the hour will have a plan, a script, and start calling down and letting people know what it means for them, what it how much it would have cost them, like start setting up advisory appointments to talk through, you know, things like your in tariffs, um it's your value of your goods times the tariff rate, times the duty rate.

Well, there are a lot of perfectly legal compliant strategies you can do to reduce the valuation of your goods. Uh that nobody bothered with when it was time zero. Uh and you can get refunds as I was saying before. So it's all about how do you respond to these things? Um and yeah, we think we have a big advantage there.

So it's fun. It's why Flexport's the most fun business in the world. Yeah. I don't want to sit there and run payroll for other comp. It's boring. Get out there, see what's happening. Hey, it's an entertaining time to be in payroll. You picked a bad day for that analogy because it is high stakes.

It's James Bond out here as well. We got the We got the guns in the studio straight from China. The team pistols. They're water pistols. But we're having a lot of fun today. Uh we got James Bond on the soundboard. We're having a great time. But thanks for stopping by. This was fantastic. Always great talking to you.

Good luck on tonight. See what happens with these. Maybe I'll maybe I'll need to come back and talk through when we actually have. Yeah. Yeah, that'd be great. We'll have you back. Of course. Yeah. All right. Take care, guys. Have fun later. We'll talk to you later. Great to see you. Fantastic.

Always an entertaining interview. Uh thanks to So we got an absolute lion. We got James from Profound calling in. We are going to be talking about uh I I spoke with James yesterday for the first time. What he's doing is absolutely fascinating. He's helping uh companies understand how they are appearing in LLMs. Okay.

Yeah, let's bring him in. James, how you doing? Boom. What's going on?