The global fallout from Trump's tariffs

0:03I'm quitting. I'm quitting the podcast. This is my final episode. No. Yeah. You can't. We've only been going, what, five months or something? Well, you know what, I found my calling and I'm just gonna roll the tape that I've sent to producer Callum and then I'll tell you what I'm gonna do next. Oh! No! You guys are working as a team. This is actually kind of fun, Dad. Yeah? I like how you made it. So, thank you. So as a meatball mania, thumbs up or thumbs down? Thumbs up. For me, I think double thumbs up. double thumbs up i think love thumbs up that's because of your family there you go this is meatball mania this is meatball mania this is my video game i am now a video game developer okay so that's it you're not a journalist anymore nope i have money's in tech i've been you know searching in the in the desert for years and years looking for my true calling and it is to make very simple, very bad video games with AI, you know, and I'm going to sell them.

1:06So the boys love it. So now you're cool dad. They love it. Cool video game developer dad. Yes, exactly. And my eldest, he's eight, he came home from school first day back. He's like, Dad, I told everybody about Meeple Mania, like everybody. And I was like, wow, this is it. This is my new thing. I played Meatball Mania. I'd give it a thumbs up too. Double thumbs up? Would you give it a... I'm not family. Do you not? He only gave you double thumbs up because you're family. I heard him.

1:39Hello and welcome back to the Times Tech Podcast. I'm Danny Fortson in Silicon Valley. And I'm Katie Prescott in the city of London. Which means, let me look at my chart. there will be a 10 % tariff on everything you say in today's episode. You're welcome. 10%. That's quite, I've done quite well. It is a tariff special episode today. And I'm curious to hear how you think that putting a tariff on what I say is actually going to work. That's not important. No one's thought this through. Last week, we decided not to talk about tariffs when we recorded because we didn't know whether what we were going to say was still going to be relevant or correct.

2:19and actually that was probably quite a good decision given what's what's happened since so um is everything is everything sorted your side then we we know what president trump's thinking and and what what he's going to do next uh yeah yeah it's all clear super super clear um no but we've got a guest today who will be joining us who's perhaps um he's very well placed i'll say to give us a sense of what is happening now kind of on the ground in kind of amid the tariff madness and where this might all go. Well, should we go back to what has happened? Because it's been quite a journey. It has been a journey.

2:55As they say. Yes. So first up, on the 2nd of April, there was Liberation Day. I feel so free right now. I feel really, really free. I didn't realize how chained I felt before, but... Unliberated. So yeah, so on Liberation Day, April 2nd, Trump announced a 10 % universal tariff on all imports effective from April 5th. So three days later. Additionally, higher tariffs ranging from 11 % to 50 % on imports from 57 countries were scheduled to begin on April 9th. So a week later. And it was supposed to, you know, spark this new economic era, this new boom. But everything went bust. Indeed. Indeed. It was the biggest single day loss.

3:46on the S &P 500, the Dow and the Nasdaq since COVID. And even Elon Musk said it wasn't a good idea. Yes, indeed. Then the pause. After Trump had said it was a great time to buy, he truthed it out or tweeted it out or whatever. And then he announces this pause, 90-day pause, and the markets went up again. However, they've recovered, right? But not gone back to where they were before at all. So Tim Cook at one point appeared to maybe have pulled in some favors or made some phone calls. Who knows? He was one of the tech people who were very much on the scene at the inauguration. And the tariffs on smartphones and computers were pulled.

4:31But it did seem to be one of those things that no one had really thought through. I mean, Apple's always been the kind of conceived in Cupertino, made in China company. Yeah. And they've been moving some of their manufacturing for a while, but it is still very much the... It's China, very China focused. The American made in China business. Yes, yes. And, you know, America's biggest business. Am I right in saying that? It is. It's the biggest in the world. It's the most valuable company in the world. It's still, it's still, and then, and the company vying for that was NVIDIA. Yeah. Which this week was also, has also said it's going to be seriously hit by tariffs.

5:06And on Wednesday, last time I checked, its stock price was down about 7%. So maybe Jensen Huang should have, should have been at the inauguration. Maybe he should have, yes. I don't think he was there. But just to kind of muddy the picture further, Trump said this past weekend that the delays are temporary and that quote unquote, nobody, all caps, is getting off the hook. So, you know, here we are. This is all a very, very fluid situation. But something that's not fluid is obviously the impact that it's having on people who are trying to ship stuff around the world. So we've brought in a special guest today who's at the front line of all this.

5:43He's the founder and CEO of Flexport. And they basically deal with the logistics of moving goods around the world, the paperwork and planning and managing shipping. And he is Ryan Peterson, who started the business less than 20 years ago. Hello, thanks for having me on. I was going back to the archives. I think we spoke when the world was on fire for a different reason, early in COVID. That's like my role, apparently my role in the world now, I was the hurricane reporter. Yeah, exactly. We're bringing you on to make sense of all of the entire world. So thank you for doing that. Well, that's a bad thing.

6:21It means when you pop up, we know something's wrong. Global shipping is collapsing. So Flexport's in a really unique position here because you plan and manage shipping and you deal with all of the paperwork around that. What has the reaction been of your customers over the past few weeks? Is everyone completely freaking out? Yeah, that might be an understatement. I mean, anyone who's sourcing goods from China, which is a large percentage of businesses in the United States, are facing what looks like a catastrophic result if this holds. They just, you know, the business models don't work anymore with almost zero notice, just instantly vaporized decades of work, people's whole life building their business.

7:05So, yeah, there's a lot of panic, a lot of helplessness, a lot of prayers probably to like, let's make a deal. It's not it can't be the way this all goes down. So so is there just is it just paralysis? Because I guess the question is, is like, as we talked about, there is tariffs on tariffs off. And then there's a minimum level tariffs on everybody, including the penguins. And then everything is delayed, but not taken away, just delayed for 90 days. And then we have the China tariffs, which, as you say, are just extraordinary. And so I'm just wondering, as a business, what are you seeing people doing if, you know, there's just a swirl of chaos and every day brings a different story?

7:51Yeah, well, the China ones are the big thing right now. And in 90 days, I think most people feel like the rest of the world will get worked out and those will actually come live. We might be wrong on that. Maybe they do come back. But the China ones are the big factor. And then the other big one is they killed the de minimis program. So a lot of companies were using that. That's what lets you import goods into the U.S. that were under$800 per item. If it's shipped all the way to the final consumer store from overseas, you didn't pay any duty at all on those. So direct from China to my house, if it's$800 or less, there was no duty.

8:27Correct. And it didn't have to be direct from China. It just had to come from overseas. So, like, actually, you know, the famous brands doing this are Timu and Sheen and a few others, TikTok. And they're shipping direct from China. But actually, a huge number of small, medium-sized businesses set up fulfillment centers in Mexico and have been fulfilling goods from Tijuana across the border and then going direct to your house. Even those Chinese goods shipped into Mexico and then inbound because it's about the country of origin, not the shipment origin. Now, May 2nd, that ends for Chinese-made goods, but they also announced it's going away for everybody else.

9:03So Vietnam, it doesn't matter where it's made. So when you say going away in May, what is it replaced by? You'll now have to pay duties. Like the minimum 10 % or the? If it's Chinese, it's going to be 125 plus 20 plus, I mean, it's 145 minimum for China. But the rest of the world, it'll be 10 % plus whatever the duty rate was already pre-existing. By the way, a lot of European brands use this too. shipping from europe european made goods where they'll ship direct to consumer fly it in now may 2nd it doesn't hit europe may 2nd is just chinese made goods but coming soon thereafter we don't know when they didn't give us a date uh it'll go away for the rest of the world too and you'll have to start paying duties on everything those type you ask what people are doing so those companies are scrambling to go okay i need to put up fulfillment center in the u.s by the way this part's been good for flex sports business the one saving grace in all this is that we have u.s fulfillment centers and those have been getting a lot of demand we also have a customs business We do brokerage and trade advisory to help people navigate these tariffs, help them with solutions to minimize and be compliant on their duties.

10:04But the bad side of our business and really impacting our customers is bookings are way down. So people have paused freight out of China. We see industry wide around a 35 percent decline in ocean freight bookings from China. 35 percent. So people are just throwing up their hands and saying, not right now. Yeah, they're saying a few things. One is a lot of them knew this. Everyone knew this date was coming. So people preordered and kind of have inventory stocks. So that's one scenario. Two is they really feel like this can't last. This can't be the final state. So let's hold off as long as we can and wait for a deal to get negotiated, hopefully, and then import the goods.

10:45Three is if you have multiple factories, which many of these companies do, have like a China plus one strategy. They've shifted all their orders down to Vietnam or wherever else. So we saw three in Flexport's business. We saw a 3x growth of our bookings out of Vietnam week over week, like unprecedented. China is now bigger than Vietnam for Flexport for the first time in our history. Vietnam's bigger than China. Sorry. Yeah, that's what I meant. Vietnam's bigger than China. And then the fourth possibility is your business doesn't work anymore and you're screwed. And that I think it's too early.

11:16No one's going to throw in the towel this early, but there will be some. I think if this holds, you're going to see a large wave of bankruptcies from companies that might surprise you. Because even I have friends who do manufacturing in America who have said, hey, I'm going to stop manufacturing this product in the U.S. because I have to pay duties on the components. But if I have another site in a different country, I don't have to pay duties on the components. I import the product there. It's now cheaper to sell to the rest of the world. So it's going to crush the U.S. export manufacturing market, which is like the whole point of all this is to promote industrialization.

11:51So it's a well-intentioned policy, perhaps, but just terrible results. And we've got to judge things by their results, not their intentions. And when you talk about industries that might surprise you, what do you mean in terms of who might be hit? You know, I don't want to speak to any specific company, but like car factories, American-made cars, they've got components that come from other countries. and Boeing airplanes have like all kinds of parts coming out of China. You know, it's like an American made company. I'm not saying Boeing is going to go bankrupt, but you might see some surprising.

12:20They're probably too big to fail and we'll get bailed out. But the little business, the little guy doesn't get the bailout. And that's what really frustrated people with the carve out that they did for smartphones last week. This is the whole point was to like bring high tech manufacturing on shore, right? And they're like, okay, it applies to everything but the thing that we were talking about. Yeah, and then meanwhile, there's like small SMBs. Nobody, you know, I guess they didn't donate enough to Trump's inauguration or something. That's the meme. I'm not trying to be too critical here. No one's picking up the phone.

12:51Not everyone has the Tim Cook hotline. Here's the thing. I think we have to understand like Trump's style. We've been around long enough. we should all know by now that his style is like take a very extreme position act very erratic and unpredictable so you don't know what he actually wants leaving lots of room for a bargain for a deal to get made but be willing to walk away and so you're like okay we're still right in the middle of all of that and like if you're judging the thing by where we are today you're probably reading the room wrong and like at the same time you know what else do you have to judge it by so people are kind of sitting here going and business craves uncertainty you use the word danny of paralysis and there's a lot of that right now because you're like you're certainly not going to start manufacturing in the u.s when like we're still in the middle of deal making you're not going to move to vietnam or mexico when you know we have a 90-day hiatus on those tariffs and they might go way up so like you can't set up your supply chain until all of this is worked out and that might be many months from now and so in the meantime you're like what do we do we kind of just sit on our hands, raise prices.

13:58We've seen that. In fact, I saw it's going viral and like a lot of, I'm not really in these mom, mom groups, but I heard about them. Um, up a baby is like the big, like high end stroller manufacturer. And I saw, I was reading about some stories where they had to raise their prices this week and it's kind of going viral amongst the moms of like the stroller prices are going up. Up a baby has raised its prices. Those are expensive. I know. And they had to because the tariffs. And, you know, don't mess with the moms. Trump might find out soon, like American moms are going to get pissed. The next thing after the iPhone.

14:33And on the point of paralysis, are you seeing anything happen to goods that are already being shipped? Like a port's getting clogged up. Is that starting to be a problem with people kind of goods that are already on their way? People don't want them to leave? Not yet. But what's going to happen? So there was a scramble ahead of you had to get the goods out by april 9th and there was a scramble to kind of get everything loaded ahead of time but there wasn't that much time to do anything about it anyways it was announced on april 2nd to actually get cargo onto a ship that's leaving by the 8th you have to gate it in to the port if to deliver the container to the port by call it the the fourth right so you had like one you know you had 48 hours to do something uh before it was too late.

15:18What you're going to see, I predict, first off, with volumes declining this much, carriers are going to do what's called a blank sailing. And that's where they just cancel the sailing. The ship just doesn't sail. And all of those containers then get, we call it getting rolled. It's like getting bumped when you're, if your flight gets canceled or something. So all those containers are going to get rolled to the next ship, which is going to be overflowing. And they're going to, they just have to pull capacity from the market because if they don't, the price will collapse and their carrier, the ocean carriers themselves will be at risk.

15:50Right. So they're going to pull a lot of capacity out of the market. That's going to lead to bad service and cancellations. And then where, and then you're going to see these weird shifts because if you have a three X surge in Vietnam, I mean, it's not like there's three X more ships leaving Vietnam. So you're going to have like pockets of ports, which is like massive amounts of backlogs of containers. They can't move and price spikes and craziness on the destination side in the U.S., yeah, it's like a big decline. Everything should be smooth. I don't think any, it'll be the opposite. Like truck drivers are going to be out of work.

16:23The price of trucking in the U.S. is down. I was just looking at this graph. It's down about 30 percent per mile in the last week. Wow. And truck drivers are the number one, number one source of employment in the United States. Number one job in the United States. Yeah. 30 cents decline. You know, that's per mile. Their cost doesn't go down. I mean, fuel prices are down a little bit, but basically it costs the same. So you're going to see waves of bankruptcies in the trucking sector. Like none of this can last. It just can't be that this is their plan. They can't last. The administration won't be able to hold out.

16:56There's just going to be too much pressure once they start seeing all the economic data come through. American moms and truck drivers. Yeah, exactly. Now, I'm curious because we referenced it at the beginning. The last time you and I spoke was during COVID, which is a very different shock. Is this the kind of opposite or are there any echoes of what was happening to the global economy then that you're seeing now? It is sort of an opposite. I mean, it feels more like the initial couple of weeks of COVID when everyone thought the sky was falling and the world was going to fall apart. Yeah. But what actually happened in COVID, at least in the goods economy, was people were stuck in their houses and didn't know what else to do with themselves.

17:37So they started buying stuff. and they got a lot of subsidies from the government. They were getting checks. They had a loose balance sheet. They had a lot of money or excess cash and no other way to get dopamine besides clicking the buy button on Amazon. So people were just buying stuff and you had a 20 % increase in the number of containers entering the country. Wow. So that is kind of the opposite of what we're about to see. We'll probably see a 20 % decrease in the number of containers. But that first couple of weeks of COVID before that happened, no economist predicted that, by the way. I can't find one economist who predicted with COVID that global trade was going to go up.

18:12Everybody who said, you know, recession is coming, trade's going to go down, we're going to have this collapse. So be wary of experts and their predictions, including mine. I don't know. You know, the economics profession kind of everybody's letting them get a free pass on that. But like they all missed what was going to happen. And it's very interesting because you're kind of in this game of chicken between the United States and China. And I don't know if you know what the game of chicken actually is, where it comes from. It's the two cars driving toward each other, right? Yeah. And who's going to drive off the road into the ditch?

18:44First one to blink loses and the other one gets the girl. That's the game. Or if they don't, they both die. Famously, yeah. Or they both die. If you're in a game of chicken against China, it's just not great for the United States It's because, well, Trump is going to have all these people, all these moms with their stroller prices going up who are pissed off and going, hey, you did this to yourself. Whereas the Chinese can look at it and go, hey, these imperialist Americans did this to us. Like we all have to, you know, in Chinese they call it eat bitter. But we all have to kind of like take it on the chin and suck up.

19:25And they've been through worse as a country and just muscle it out and you'll be OK. but it's, this is these bad people over there doing this to us. Whereas on the U S side, everyone's just pointing at our own leadership going, why are we doing this to ourselves? Right. It's just like the wrong, you know, not a great dynamic for a game of chicken. One side is probably going to give in before the other.

19:53Two questions. One is, you know, you talk about the truck drivers, which is a huge as you say huge sway to the economy huge source of employment you have the moms with their strollers when you look at where you are kind of in the middle of this whole world of goods coming in and out and moving around the world when you're thinking about okay what's the domino that could be like the kind of the uh-oh moment for either side you know what i mean like do you think there's a there's this thing out here that if that happens If this collapses, then that will be like a kind of an event that will force the issue.

20:32Yeah. I mean, it's probably things in the bond markets. U.S. interest rates on our bonds going way up. And we have$10 trillion or$9 or$10 trillion of debt that we have to refinance this year. And if the interest rate goes way, way up on the bonds, the government just basically is crushed by debt. It's already, you know, kind of crushed by debt load. But if it were to go way up and this this already started to happen and that's what caused that's likely what caused them to back off of the tariffs on the world. Yeah, yeah. Was something that we haven't really seen before. I'm not an economic historian, but so I don't know when the last time this happened.

21:09But it's been very, very unusual where stock prices went down and bond prices went down at the same time. Usually when stock prices go down, people are moving money over to the bond market and saying, hey, I don't trust the companies. Let me put it somewhere safer with the government. But this time they were going, wait, I don't trust the stock. There's something's bad in the economy. I don't trust these companies with my money. I also don't trust the government. Let me just take my money out of the market altogether and maybe put it overseas. Now, I don't know that that was retail investors. I think there was probably some major countries that were like selling U.S.

21:44bonds, et cetera. But that's the kind of thing that like forces the government's hand because they have to finance the government. And that's also a large reason why they're doing some of these things is like tariffs are a major source of revenue. They're trying to make it a bigger source of revenue. The U.S. government has a sovereign debt problem. Our deficits are$2 trillion a year. And the interest income plus entitlement, so like welfare programs, are now those two things alone are more than all of the tax revenue we bring in. so there's nothing left for defense or any other programs science, research, anything else so it's all financed by debt and so there's one reasonable argument for like we should have some tariffs to help pay for this, it's like it's either that or income tax or austerity of cutting costs AI is going to save us all, it's fine maybe AI is not going to be driving the trucks yet but I wanted to ask you about the change in the mood music in Silicon Valley.

22:48You know, it wasn't that long ago we had the inauguration, this massive kind of love-in between tech and Trump. And then, as you say, the tariffs on iPhones, and then maybe Tim Cook made a phone call, but we saw overnight that NVIDIA is going to be massively hit by tariffs and their stock price is down pretty sharply today. Do you feel like that honeymoon is over? A bit, yeah. I think a lot of people in tech felt like, well, after the last four years of just like heavy regulation and like very anti-corporate, non-friendly behavior from the Biden administration, a lot of people felt like, oh, we definitely need this.

23:24Trump came in with saying a lot of the good things that people wanted to hear about deregulation. I mean, I still think there's a good story there, a really positive story that the country needs. But a lot of those types of people are kind of libertarian ethos. Yeah, let's deregulate. Let's have more economic freedom. And then, you know, you slap crazy tariffs and what looks like central planning coming out of the White House without listening to market reactions or understanding second order effects and the complexity of global supply chains. And now you start going, oh, I have a real second.

23:55I'm seeing a lot of second doubt, second guessing and doubt about this. And beyond that, like actual opposition and people going, oh, this is, you know, not what I thought I was voting for. When did you start Flexport? What year? around 2008 was the first idea that i started working on but 2013 is when we got our license from customs and border protection so the first five years uh we didn't have any customers or money or employees or just me being a little crazy just you and your and your as the brits would say your garage yes okay i'm curious because you've been doing this now well effectively for 17 years then this is a long time and i would guess that the whole conceit of the your entire idea is global trade this interconnected global economic order and i'm just wondering because again you know i listened to a podcast the other day about a woman who's making a different baby product but she's making it in china and now she's like this doesn't work i can't sell this product anymore.

24:58I can't make it with these tariffs, you know, and just wondering, you know, it feels to me like the global economy is a little bit like a bowl of spaghetti. Like it's just everything's crossing and all these different ways. Do you think there is a realistic prospect to pull all those strands apart and to kind of turn back inward? Is there a kernel there that you're like, yeah, we can actually do this and it makes sense. Or is it, you know, is this, to use another food analogy, is the cake already baked? It's a question of our age, really. You know, you go back, global trade has gone up 4 % annually, not just since World War II, but actually since the Mongol invasions of 1200 AD.

25:41You've just had this, like, steady compounding growth for 800 years at least. And if you look at that curve, you know, exponential growth curves are non-intuitive. You literally don't even notice the Black Death. when 30 % of everybody died. World War II is a blip because 4 % growth. When you're looking at the graph. Yeah, because 4 % growth on today's huge dollars is more than the decline that we had in World War II. So it doesn't show up. So I think nothing that we're going through right now, you know, God help us, is anything like that. I think you'll see that there's an innate desire by humans to trade.

26:18We want to find our best customer and our best vendor, and we're not that concerned of where they happen to be located. We're all, you know, businesses are trying to make money and water flows downhill. So that piece alone is just like, it's very hard for a government. Governments are very powerful. Trump's very powerful. The U.S. government, Chinese government, they're very powerful. But at the end of the day, you know, it takes an immense amount of force to rein in this like market impulse. And I'm not sure it's there, certainly not in a country like the United States where we can vote people out of office if they are anti-markets.

26:51That's not to say that there's nothing good about the Trump administration's plans or what they would like to do. You know, I have this principle, like, don't get in arguments with people unless you can make their argument for them better than they can. And so I do think there's some valid reasons. I already mentioned one, like we need to generate some more tax revenue from our government and tariffs are a reasonable place to do that. But we also, from a national security standpoint, need to manufacture things so that in a time of war, we have industry that can create armaments. This is great negotiating leverage.

27:26I mean, we're right in the middle of him negotiating. So we should withhold a little bit of judgment until, you know, see what the deals come out. But we've already got governments lining up to say that they'll lower their tariffs on U.S. products and other things. So I don't know. Maybe there's some part of the deal magic that we that I should wait. Let the artist, you know, you're watching, you're judging Picasso. Let the chef cook. Yeah, he's still cooking. He's in the middle of cooking. Maybe it's going to be a beautiful cake. And then, yeah, there's probably there's there's an element to where those deals are kind of necessary.

27:56A lot of countries have done created industrial policies that the government does. the U.S. administration does have a point. Like there's industrial policies where, whether it's environmental regulations, labor regulations, you know, I mean, they've got a six-day work week mandatory in Korea. They had that for decades. They've eased up on it, but it used to be mandatory run by a dictatorship. Like that's not really fair. We're trying to compete with that. Like, you know, and they subsidize manufacturing. They give cheap credit and loans. So like there's some valid points to all of this, but it's a bit reckless the way it's been managed.

28:32very reckless and it's going to likely not have the intent you know you're probably not actually going to address those problems because you're in if you go through with the current state you're going to end up in some kind of a massive recession or depression yeah and in the middle of all of that cake baking or picasso drawing or whatever we're calling it are all your customers um didn't didn't you try and get them together when the tariffs were announced and and spoke to them about it well we did like a live stream the next day how how did that go down what happened what What do people say? Well, we usually we do live streams every couple of weeks for our customers on different topics, like kind of education around global logistics and customs and stuff.

29:09But usually we get like 300 companies to show up. We had 2 ,600 companies show up to this thing. So a lot of desire to find out what's happening. We had a ton of questions. Probably most of them were too technical. I didn't take that many. Like a lot of people were like, what about this? You know, I'm importing this part. What's my new duty rate or something more like better for a one-on-one conversation with our trade advisory team. But the main sentiment that I was trying to convey to everyone was like, hey, stay calm. I didn't think that. I still don't think this is the final deal. You know, we should stay calm.

29:38Don't freak out. And that's like a very good rule for leaders in general in a crisis. It's OK to freak out on the inside or like you should have some outlet. You can freak out to your, you know. As Trump said, be cool. Be cool. Be cool. He's right. I mean, in a crisis, everybody rallies around the calmest person in the room. You know, if you're leading a company and you're freaked out, which you probably rightly should be, you don't you should not convey that to your whole company. They should see you as like cool as a cucumber. Nothing flusters this guy like, you know. So, yeah, that was the message I was trying to convey to everybody.

30:17And I was right about the deal getting cut for non-China stuff. I still hope I'm right that there's a deal going to get cut on the China side of things, but we will see. Right. And how much of your business was exporting from China to the U.S. or the rest of the world? China to U.S. is 35 % of Flexport's business. And that's down something like the 25 % already. So that's a pretty big hit for Flexport. Now we're growing, you know, as I said, Vietnam's up 3x. We're going to see growth in other parts of the world. And Flexport has a great balance sheet. We've raised a lot of money. We're in a good place financially to ride this out.

30:54I think we come out stronger at the end. But, you know, it's super painful for our customers. And I don't know, we're just trying to spend as much time with our customers solving problems as we can right now. That's like one principle we have, too, is like don't lose sight of the long term. We're building a lot of incredible technology. I don't know if there's going to be more trade or not. I believe there will be because of that long run trend. But I think in 10 years there will be more trade. But we don't need that to be true for Flexport to succeed. What I do know is that people want better technology to manage this more efficiently.

31:24to cut costs, like have better visibility and control over their trade, better data flows, better compliance tools, all those things. So we're like, all right, let's not lose sight of the long-term goal, even as we kind of reposition our short-term roadmap in a lot of ways. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Ryan. It's been fascinating to hear from you. I hope things calm down a bit. Yeah, I mean, you know, like we said, a bit of a hurricane reporter, so they call me in whenever things are going terrible. So I hope I don't see you again for a long time. there's a war reporter in the UK who's very famous called Kate Adie and it was like every time she appeared on the screen you knew things were really serious I feel like you're the Kate Adie of tariffs well it's great to see you guys thanks for having me on thank you so much for taking the time and last question so are you feeling I know you're a founder so maybe you're just default optimist are you feeling optimistic or when you get off this call are you going to be like throwing stuff against the wall and screaming and being like, oh my God, the sky is falling.

32:25No, no, no. Channel that energy. I think there's a lot of, in a crisis, one, you got to stay cool so you can make good decisions. Be very decisive. There's a lot of action we can take right now. We can't afford to be helpless and sit around and wait for things to happen to us. So there's a lot of actions that we can take to set ourselves up to win. And in a lot of ways, this is true for all the businesses going through some of this stuff right now. It's like same things happen to your competitors. and we live in a competitive world yeah that's fair yeah well we live in a competitive world like you know the point of business yeah you're trying to make money but you're also trying to beat your competitors and if you're better at responding to this situation making better decisions taking better action having a better impact then you out compete your competitors and some people will come out ahead and you know i already used the black death analogy once but after the Black Death, like 30 % of people died in the Black Death.

33:20But the people who survived, like their wages went up. They did great. There was like excess land available. I can't believe you're making that comparison. So we gotta be one of those people that comes out the other side of this ready to, you know, have a century of glory. Awesome. Well, we wish you luck navigating the madness and thank you again for taking the time. All right. See you guys.

33:44My overwhelming memory of trying out prams was the lady who was showing them to me bringing out different terrains so you could try out your pram on gravel on turf yes because as you say they all have different wheels and some are better i guess like buying a bike for cities and some are better for rural areas but if you want the cot and the pram it's a thousand pounds but that's i mean that's kind of to his point i think that's what's so fascinating about what is happening here is like i think everybody's like you know at least his supporters trump supporters are like yeah we need to kind of reorder the financial economic order we need to kind of rebalance the scales and you can have a very long or actually very short argument about you know the merits of that but when you start making prams more expensive when as he mentioned 30 million truck drivers are all of a sudden going to be struggling to find work these are not small things um and i think that's you know we're still to his point I think we're still in this phase of OMG what is happening but I think a lot of people in anticipation pre-ordered a bunch of stuff pre-shipped a bunch as much as they could like we're not feeling it yet we're feeling the chaos but we're not feeling the you know like the increase in prices or the lack of availability of things and I think that's when the rubber hits the road and I think it's also the two very different groups of people that you're describing You know, the upper middle class moms who'll spend that much money on a pram system who are getting furious about it.

35:34And then the truck drivers as well. And so how this starts to bubble out into all sectors of society and comes back to bite the administration is interesting to watch. Yeah, for sure. But it's good to get it. It's good to get a kind of a sense from, you know, somebody, you know, on the coalface, so to speak, of just like right in the middle of all of this and having, as you said. I'm going from 300 people on a normal call to, you know, 2 ,500. And everybody being like, what does this mean for me, for my business, for my employees? You know, it's just, it's quite extraordinary. Well, I'm sure next week we'll bring something else.

36:11Yeah, that's the one thing we know is that there's always going to be something that awaits us. See you next week. Bye.

36:25Thank you.