Crisis at Hormuz, and your $160b tariff refund clock, with Flexport’s Ryan Petersen

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/e65e6a09d5d48716

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The US post world war two kind of s established this order that said you can just send a ship wherever you want and the US Navy will provide freedom of navigation.
Maybe the U S Navy can't provide that guarantee anymore.
Oil is not just about pumping your gas at your in your car, it's part
Of so many different products.
Thirty percent of the world's helium comes from Qatar.
You can't make semiconductors without it, you can't launch space ex rockets without helium.
It is existential, I think, how all of the economy functions. Every company is interconnected with
with everybody else and if you stop that you you end up in a
Much darker place.

That's Ryan Peterson, CEO of Global Trade platform FlexPort, and a repeat guest on this show. Ryan's been dubbed Tech's hurricane reporter for global trade.
And with the Strait of Hormuz essentially blocked and the price of oil soaring, I wanted to get his real-time view of the on the ground and on the water impact.
We also talk about the prospect of tariff refund after the Supreme Court's ruling against the Trump administration and more. It's serious stuff, but Brian's sense of humor keeps it fresh.
So let's get to it.
I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Ryan Peterson, founder and CEO of Flexport.
Ryan, uh good to see you. Welcome back to the show.
Great to be here.
Do you have to check your like you get up on Monday morning, you're like what happened today in the trade, or is it do you don't even have to wait? You're getting woken up in the middle of the night with all the changes. I I do tend to wake up in the middle of night and check, uh, but that's that's just like my my insomnia. It does not be because of uh work, but
Does seem to be like every single day, multiple times a day there's new news and by the time this air
Airs everything may change.
The attacks on Iran have they've effectively closed
The Strait of Ormuz, the the world's most
Critical sort of oil choke point.
Oil prices up.
Ships stranded, global shipping kind of in limbo. So
I I know this is changing as we speak, but from what you can see is FlexPort, like what does the traffic jam look like? What's the snapshot of of right now?
The big story, of course, here is the oil
And energy generally natural gas, which is the all of that. I think that's pretty well covered out there in the in the media that the prices have been spiking and and shortages starting to appear.
Places like Australia, which is very energy rich but doesn't produce a lot of oil is
running out of diesel and moving towards a world where they're not they're just not gonna have enough fuel

Um things that are less well covered, which are maybe even more impactful around fertilizer.
That's actually probably a more important story here. It's planting season and if those don't
come to market. You're gonna have big
big big problems in the food production of the world.
Container shipping is not that impacted, actually.
Um, just because the Persian Gulf is a it's a cul de sac, you don't really need to go in there.
Air freight's a bigger deal. Um
The Middle Eastern Airlines own
Somewhere for between fifteen and twenty percent of all the cargo airline capacity, depending on what source you look at.
Uh and Dubai's the biggest cargo airport in the world.
Huge amounts of
Planes that go from Asia to Europe make stop over there to refuel and kind of it's a hub for transshipment of cargo. So
There, you've seen the price of airframe double.
In the last year
Uh since the war started. Uh even and it's even up
Fifty to sixty percent on trades that would seemingly have nothing to do with that, like Vietnam to the US.
Across the Pacific, air freight prices have gone up fifty percent.
Um, I saw the United Airlines CEO said that
They're modeling that this is gonna cost eleven billion dollars of
Uh fuel expense.
So these costs are going up because the the fuel prices are going up, or also because it's disrupting routes or
forcing people to change their direction or is it hard to know right now? It's both. Um
Fuel price is the big one, but it's going up also because of supply and demand is sort of a global market. And if you pull off all that Emirates and Etihad and Qatar airways are
Big airlines. Um and if you pull that out, they start moving planes around. You just like
It's kind of fungible. Like a a plane that's flying across the Pacific could instead fly somewhere else. And it's just like
It's a very mercenary market for like they get away with what they can get away with, you know. So
Actual big impact here is that in February
The
The container shipping lines for the first time had started to return to the Red Sea.
We haven't had shipping container shipping through the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal
since December of twenty twenty three, because of the Hooti
uh terrorist attacks in the Red Sea.
And they just started to return in February.
Following the ceasefire in Gaza.
And then now they've all just immediately returned to going back around Africa. So that's actually the bigger impact for container shipping because they're
Again, the red the the Persian Gulf's the cul de sac, whereas the Red Sea is is just massively important for for container shipping. I mean are are container ships like are they
Stranded? Are they stuck?
Uh
Yeah, a small percentage. I saw someone who had gone and counted them all, and he said there are fifty seven ships, container ships inside the Strait of Ormuz. Now many, many more
Are
on ships that would have called in the Strait of Hor Moose and have been had their routes disrupted and are dropping containers at random ports that you know, if if you had a container that was met
To go to Dubai.
They're just leaving it wherever
Uh, and now it's your problem as a business to go, you've got a container stuck in some random port that you didn't plan for. And Oh, really? They're just like I'm letting it off here. Yeah. Like let's say you were going from Argentina
To Dubai.
what they've been doing is saying, All right, just drop it at the next port of call and so now you have a container stuck in Morocco or Brazil or France or somewhere and you're only given seven days
Of free storage at that port before you start paying
Big fees. Um
So yeah, there's like definitely some cases where people are living kind of business nightmares right now.
Listen, we've had a lot of disruption in trade over the last few years. Lord knows. Is is this like where does this rate on that sort of how how this ripple effect is feeling uh uh compared to some of those other things we've been going through?
From a container shipping w view, it's it's like very pretty insignificant.
COVID all the congestion we had at the ports, let's say that's like an eight.
There's no ten, right? We haven't lived a ten yet. Let's say that was an eight.
Um
The Red Sea disruption is probably like a six.
Or a five.
And then this is like a two or a three.
For container shipping.
Um
Now for air freight
This is probably a much bigger deal than
Than those things were
for the world economy, I mean, this is like one of the worst things you can imagine.
Because the price of oil is just upstream of everything else. The bigger impact here again is like oil price.
Oil shortages, frankly, like the US will

markets across Жя.
Yeah, I was just looking at the Philippines, ninety six percent of their oil
comes from the Strait of Hormuz.
And I mean the poor Philippines, right? At first AI like decimates their
Call center jobs.
data entries wiped out and now they they don't have any oil. It's just like a country that's gonna be um struggling. And that's one of many allies in the U of the US and the Paci the Pacific that's gonna have these problems.
As you talk about this it's sort of uh America, the United States is a little bit
Um
more insulated from some of this than places in Europe and Asia. Like is there is there a scenario where sort of American companies like gain competitive advantage from this? Like it's good, or or is that uh is that a misread of the situation. I mean, taxes are gonna boom, like the price of oil's gone way up.
Texas college football is probably gonna have some great N I L team. No, sorry, it's not appropriate to joke. Um
The uh I certain segments of the US are are gonna do very well. We're the biggest oil producer in the world, so it's gonna be very good for them. But uh at net net on the ec economic basis, like
Most of America's Yeah, we we might be better off than other countries because we have oil and g and energy and food.
But it's not a zero sum game, the economy, right? It's like if others do worse, it doesn't mean that we do better. It w we actually also do worse.
when you're interacting with the shipping customers that you deal with, i is there a
Is there a breakdown yet about who's feeling it most? You know, big global organizations, small businesses.
Right now the people who are feeling this the worst are air freight shippers and especially air freight from Asia to Europe.
Um
And who who ships air? It's high value stuff.
Or it's new product launches.
Um
So one of our customers makes
fashion accessories, I guess you would call it. And they have a very successful product launch right now.
In Europe and it's running out of stock and they need to air freight the stuff over there. The rates are so expensive that the economics don't make sense for their product.
Uh so we've been getting creative. So we created a a service. We actually um do a fast ocean express service to Los Angeles.
Across the Pacific and then hot
shot transfer it from the port to LAX and fly it to Europe.
Same day.
And that's
A lot faster than going around the tip of Africa.
And a lot cheaper than flying it to Europe. So it's like kind of a hybrid.
Yeah.
I mean they're they're fine. They have a hot product launch, like
Good for them, you know. For the most part in air freight, it's things like the iPhone, you know, like really computers, really high value stuff that you fly by air. My my iPhone prices are gonna are gonna be going up. I did a math on this once. It's a the the price of freight on your iPhone's probably like a
A buck or something out of the thousand bucks. Maybe three bucks, I forgot.
So we' we we're we're not gonna notice it compared to all the other things. It's it's one it's one gallon of gas.
For my car.
And yeah, again, you know, I think California is gonna see some problems here. They closed down a lot of the refineries for kind of green climate change reasons, but now we import the oil from South Korea.
And they get their oil from the Middle East.
So we're gonna have some problems there. That's why
Trump suspended the Jones Act for oil.
You know who's gonna benefit actually is Hawaii. The Jones Act says you have to
for to transport between two US ports.
It has to be a US made ship with a US crew.
And there's not a lot of those, so the price is way, way higher. And Hawaii and Alaska are the big sufferers of the Jones Act and Puerto Rico.
Um, and so Trump suspended that like an emergency suspension.
Uh, so now all of a sudden Hawaii can get oil
from American ports on non US ships and it's gonna be much, much cheaper.
For folks listening to this, like what do you feel like is at stake for global trade right now, in in this moment?
It goes beyond trade. I mean you're just starting to realize how im how
How tied
To
globalization, how tied our economies are to each other, how interconnected everything is. You know, I had someone last night tell me, Oh, that we'll just be we should just
close the straight of four moves forever and just get on with it and just like
the the naivete to not realize how it's not just oil
And it's oil is not just about pumping your gas at your in your car. That's what you're used to because that's where you see it in your life, but like it's a it's part
Of so many different products.
that that it's a precursor to so much in the chemicals industry. It goes into all sorts of all the plastics, these classes that I'm holding. Helium, forty thirty percent of the world's helium comes from Qatar
It's not just for your clowns, your children's parties. It's it is used uh to make semiconductors. You can't make semiconductors without it. You can't launch SpaceX rockets without helium.
Um, there's just a huge percentage of the the we just don't understand this stuff.
The US post world war two kind of s established this order that said, Hey, everybody can trade with everybody.
And you can just send a ship wherever you want and the US Navy will provide freedom of navigation.
And that worked until
Really? This is we're now seeing with the Houthis and now the
Iranians that
If uh
Maybe the US Navy can't provide that guarantee anymore.
And so much of our civilization depends on it.
That
It's a really, really important question. And and
If the Trump is there an off ramp here.
That if the Trump administration backs off, does that mean Iran backs off? If they don't, then what?
It is existential, I think, for the modern
And and we say oh for the economy, people look at the stock market or the price of fuel or something, it's like this is m much more than the the price of some commodity or s or equities or s or bonds or something. It's like
how all of the economy functions now is like every company is interconnected with
with everybody else and if you stop that you you end up in a
much darker place. So let's all pray for we
Civilization depends on peace and we we often just take it for granted. So
Pray for
Those who are trying to bring back this peaceful world.
As Ryan points out, we are a global economy, whether we're talking about oil or iPhones, which makes any military action disruptive.
Meanwhile, for businesses here in the US, should they be expecting billions in tariff refunds after the Supreme Court decision?
We'll talk about that more after the break. Stay with us.
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Before the break, Flexport's Ryan Peterson shared a real-time view of the trade impacts from military action in Iran.
Now we dig into the Supreme Court's tariff ruling against the Trump administration and whether$160 billion in refunds may be coming to businesses. Plus, how AI is changing logistics and software based firms, and whether all the trade turmoil might actually be good for Flexport itself.
Let's jump back in.
You and I could have be having this conversation today even
if there were no uh activity going on in the Middle East, because we've had other things going on in the world of trade and tariffs, the Supreme Court reversing Trump's initial tariffs, new tariffs under a different statute.
Can importers count on
Getting a refund in this situation? I mean I know you've built
Tools to help businesses sort of calculate their claims.
Our take is yes. My strong
view bordering on certainty is the the
government will pay these terra free funds. Uh it's question of timing and what the process is and how arguous the paperwork is and like do they reject a lot of the claims and force you to go back and refile and stuff like that. But
Uh, our take is that it's pretty clear that the refunds are owed and the court has compelled them to do so. And there is a sec a very active secondary market now where you can sell your refund.
Uh
And just get take away the risk. So the fact that there's sophisticated buyers on the other side of that paying
Um
You know, w we're hearing rumors and
Depends on the size of your claim, but the bigger claims are going for
uh above seventy cents on the dollar. And these are hedge fund buyers who
Yeah.
They're they have a high
Expectation of return.
What is it th thirty cents is like a forty percent return or something like that.
That only works if you're gonna get paid within two years after that. Um
That that's not enough of a return for a hedge fund to want to be interested. So they're betting that you'll get paid. But it it uh it's unclear when
It's a huge question, though.$166 billion in
Customs and border protection said three hundred thirty thousand companies that are owed a refund. Only six percent of them have gone and
enter their bank account info to get the refund. Most companies are asleep with the wheel on this. I mean, i is it hard to do? You just go on a website and put it in, or do you have to do this like manually?
We have a guide. If you go to terrorist.flightsport.com, there's a free guide there to show you how to do it. But uh
I don't know, I think a lot of people we we forget that big companies like no one's job is to
Collect the tariff refund and people are just used to doing their job, not like figuring out what their job should be.
Mm.
And and the the um this
this sort of financing option for like
Basically securitizing getting paid today for whatever you might get tomorrow. Is that something that like
That you see
bigger companies getting into or is it something that smaller companies do like I need the cash now?
Up until now, it's really only been an option for companies with claims above ten million dollars. I'm actually working right now Flexport to try to create the option for people below ten million dollars. We hope to be able to announce that soon.
But uh we haven't seen a lot of activity below that. And frankly, people don't know what to do. I'm getting text daily from importers with claims of all sizes.
Uh including some big claims over twenty million dollars who just
looking they don't know it. You know, it's a very difficult to operate on uncertainty and there's
twenty million dollars at stake for for the company that texted me this morning. I don't know what I would do. My take is that there will be refunds soon, but um
But you might take the seventy cents on the dollar from from a hedge fund to to get your money today.
And not have to worry about it.
Yeah, it's tough. You'll feel stupid if there's refunds in ninety days and you left uh
Uh thirty percent of your money on the table.
At the same time that this is happening, right, like the the Trump administration has not backed away from tariffs. They're you know, they have these new levies. Does that
Does that restart the legal fight?
It does. Um, they've put in section one twenty two, it's called, and that's gonna get challenged.
They've also rolled out there over eighty different um investigations.
either from commerce department or the US trade representative.
to add tariffs on
Either country specific tariffs.
Or sector product commodity specific tariffs.
Um
And these are
Under different statutes because the current tariff, the ten percent. Trump said it was fifteen percent. Nobody should remind him that they only did ten. Don't tell anybody. I hope they're not listening. Um but uh
That has a limit of a hundred and fifty days.
And so they're trying to get these other tariffs
implemented by that was July twenty fifth.
Fourth is the deadline for when that g rolls off.
And yes, it may get challenged and those might get refunded too. We'll see. There's two other types of tariffs.
And those require investigations.
by either the Commerce Department or US trade representative. Investigations that can take months.
So they're not as easy as AIPA, the one that got overturned by Supreme Court.
Allowed the president just kinda wake up in a bad mood and say, you know, F U Canada.
So he's a little bit more restrained, but likely end up in a very similar place. He has a lot of tools in his tool belt.
And and these these reviews have to take months or can they like
You know
Accelerate them and short shorten them. It is a great question. I feel like with AI you could probably do the you know, two months of research with one prompt, like hey, write me a section three oh one investigation, Claude, don't make any mistakes. Like it might just work. So
Is all this turmoil
Oddly like
good for Flexport. I mean y you're here talking about the crisis, you know, you do it on social media and elsewhere. It must help
your brand awareness for Flexport. It helps the case for your tools.
Or or is there risk of all that kind of
Backfiring on you.

I
You know, nothing that's bad for trade and bad for our customers. It should be really good for Flexport in the long run. Um that said
I think
It's a good principle in business that if you're better at operating in conditions of uncertainty and disorder
Then your competition
Then then you can benefit from uncertainty. And and we've proven that over and over again. We move faster, we make decisions, we just take action.
Yeah.
And part of it is being a younger company. Our competitors are
Really
good companies, but they've been around for
In some case 125 years. It's just harder for that. Like it's managers all the way up and down the top. They don't have that same like take some risks, make a decision, launch some stuff. We expect to launch a fund to buy people's refunds
uh at a discount and help these small businesses that haven't been served by the hedge fund market.
Um that started with a phone call from a hedge fund guy that I know.
Uh
You know, twenty four hours l we had a term sheet.
T you know, within a week we have multiple term sheets, like we just and we're gonna go live with it. There's no one whose job is to do that at a big company. And so it's just like harder for them to kind of
Execute like that.
How much do you think that sort of these um
Opportunities, turmoil, whatever can sort of distract you from from longer term strategy, whether it's things like AI advancement or thing, like how much do you worry about that that sort of urgencies get in the way of priorities?
For sure. In October of last year, we rolled out this AI agent.
That does customs compliance audits.
And we still do the exact same audit process we did before for our customs brokerage.
which is human experts reviewing some small percentage, like four to five percent of all the customs entries we file, we review them and do them a second time.

A sort of standard compliance procedure. In October, we built this AI agent. So we audit 100% of our customs entries before we transmit them to the government. And it reduced our error rate.
From one point eight percent, which was given the turmoil of last year was already industry leading in terms of error rates.
It reduced it to zero point two percent in that same compliance review, and that was the thing. We had that data.
Around November of last year.
Where we saw, oh wow, this is not just cheaper, but it's way better. It's letting us audit everything. Like it's way better than humans could ever be.
And we set the whole company on fire.
But
all of November through February
applying AI agents to everything that we do. That's all I wanna work on right now. And I was
Pumped to was doing a lot of coding myself and just building this stuff and like then
Terror you know, terra free funds hit and then ten days after that, the uh
The Iran war started. So yeah, it's super distracting.
Um and trying to kind of
make sure that it doesn't the the vast majority of our team is still s staying the course and just applying AI to everything we do.
I'm curious'cause you say you're you're in there coding yourself and I know you you have that background, but like
I I just find it's hard to keep up with all of the new things that are coming out. How do you try to do that?
Um, you know, actually I really like what X did recently, Twitter. They they on the mobile app, they created this for you.
drop down menu and there's a choice in there for artificial intelligence.
And you just block it. I wish for some reason it's not persistent. It only
stays for one session and you have to return it on because but it blocks out all the other news that's out there in the world because there's so much stuff and I just
In part of me, I just want to see the what's new on AI. So that's been the best way to stay. And there are there's like four or five new breakthroughs every single day.
Yeah. Uh that I go deep on
read, uh, read about and try.
Um so that's that's the number one thing and too is just trying it yourself, leading but leading from the front, like going out and using these apps, um, Cloud Code being my favorite right now and cloud go work as a close second.
Um codec from OpenAI's
Just as good as far as I can tell. So all these things are just, yeah, you want to be all over everything.
I really think every company's gonna get replaced by
people who are good at using AI and you either do it yourself
And replace yourself and your processes, or someone else is gonna come along and I'm paranoid'cause
We're in such a good position to be that company for logistics, but
If we don't do it and there's no guarantees that it doesn't just happen, like it has to happen through force of us.
wanting to make it happen. And someone else will do it if we don't.
Well, I mean and there is a lot of um you know
Whatever, conversation that sort of software businesses are great beneficiaries, but also what are most at risk.
Yeah, for sure. I mean I
I feel um vindicated because for a decade
Uh all the smart investors and some many smart employees told me we should just be a SaaS company and sell access to software.
And I always felt like the service business that we're in of shipping things.
is a much bigger market that's way more defensible and hard to get into. And uh you know, AI is not gonna ha build your relationships that you need
With all of the ocean carriers and trucking companies and ports and governments and when the AI doesn't work.
It's not that oh my AI didn't work, oh well, I just won't ship the thing, like
You know, you know, it still has to ship. It's a little bit like Tesla self driving approach, like
I've had a Tesla for ten years and the self driving is finally really, really good. But for years I was holding the wheel and making sure you know it didn't screw up. And now I don't have to do that. Well, that's that's kind of how we're trying to make it.
Come to life in supply chain.
I was talking to someone who works for a a SaaS company.
And you know, Google had just came out with a new sort of
product iteration that like the market was like oh this company's going away, you know, and the stock price went down. And then they went and they used it and they were like, Yeah, it doesn't really quite
Like how often are you finding that you find these tools and you get in and you try them and you're like
Yeah.
I see there's something there, but it's not really doing what I need it to do yet. For sure, yeah. Especially if you're trying to replace a whole software.
Company.
You know, with one shot or like
Google doing some I don't know, they launch some new design tools. I think Figma's still miles ahead of them, for example. And there's a lot of that. Um but
Well and a lot of what we see in our in our particular applications of AI is like
It can do really interesting important
Point solutions like
So automate some job.
There's not a whole company in that.
And yet it's important.
That you do it.
And so it's actually much better to apply it within
a company than it is to build a
a new AI focused software company around it.
Uh and
If you are building an AI focused software company, you have to go into these industries, into these companies.
Convince them to give you their data, to teach you their workflow, to like allow you to figure out what's going on here.
And I
Most of these companies are resistant to that, including Flexport. Like we've been approached by all the foundational model companies. They want to come in and
automate our business for us and I just am like
Don't really want to teach them how freight forwarding works. It's like it's dark art that we spent 10 years figuring out. And I'm not really eager to like teach others how it works. So we rather be the ones that apply it to ourselves rather than let these other guys come in and forward deploy onto our teams.
We've seen this sort of nonstop series of trade crises.
COVID, the Suez Canal blockage, the Houthie attacks in the Red Sea, Tariff War, Supreme Court involvement, now the now the war closing hormones like
Do you think things are ever gonna get predictable again i in supply chain?
No, I don't think so. I
You know, and there's there's um
We've now learned that these choke points are are just
Super important. We had also, you didn't mention, but the Panama Canal was not operating properly two years ago. Yeah. Yeah, not enough water.
Um
There's always rumors about the China and Taiwan. So
Uh I don't think anything's gonna be normal.
Maybe ever. I I think you should operate with that assumption is you have to figure out how to operate under uncertainty.
Well, Ryan, thanks as always for coming on and and and sharing with us.
Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Bob.
Listening to Ryan, I'm struck by where he's confident and where he sees uncertainty. He's pretty sure that tariff free funds will be coming. He's also pretty sure that AI is a game changer, but he's uneasy about the economic impacts from Iran, and he doesn't see much stability ahead for supply chains.
In such chaotic moments, I'm reminded what an expert in chaos theory once told me, that the key insight with chaos is understanding where things are truly unpredictable and where they aren't, and then acting accordingly.
with a war going on, it can feel trite to say focus on what you can control, but sometimes that's all we have. By taking action, we can start to influence the conditions around us. And if we're deliberate and thoughtful about it, well
That's progress.
I'm Bob Sapphian. Thanks for listening.
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