YouSaid · the spoken record

Ryan Petersen

lines on the record: 128
first: 2025-08-05
most recent: 2025-08-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So we got 20, 30 years of just like building, going global. We got Flexboard employees in 18 countries. I want to be in all the world's countries be like a true network business, worship anything anywhere, make it super easy with tech. Actually, I think we can lower the cost of shipping anything by five to ten percent. I could have just like a massive impact on the world economy. So all this, all those things were like part of the success path. But we're trying to enjoy the journey, like learn every day, really help our customers on that path.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I like to be worldly wise, try to keep learning. I'm lucky that. That's why I like flex sports so much. It's like a really incredible vehicle to learn. And the best way to learn is to solve a problem, you know, be really engaged and do things and solve problems for people in the business context for Flexport. We want to be the number one logistics company in the world by far. We think there's real scale economies in this industry that you can unlock. But we're pretty far from that. We're only about 0.1% of global trade in the containerized, in the world, in the domain in which we play.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Example is from the elevator. You're stuck in an elevator with someone. Most people will say nothing. Is kind of polite to not say anything. But if you say hello, they'll actually, turns out most people will say hello back and be nice to you.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From the kinetic energy formula, it's a square function and mass is only linear. And so this is why in football, American football is hitting so hard knocking. Often it seems like this little guy can just like create more way more energy what they are. Their velocity, they're running really fast. Yeah, it's more important than how big you are, how fast you're moving. And now velocity is different from physics. speed, a velocity has a vector. So you got to go in the right direction in business. But it also, it's kind of an explanation for why startups out compete. Big companies have way more mass, but they start to become slow and bureaucratic and three guys in the garage can often out compete.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way to apply that is like you should be able to do all the things that your competitor can do, you can't leave any room for them to exist because they can do something you can't do. The opposite of this dogma that you should only do one thing and do it really, really well. It's like actually you should spread out and make sure there's no room for the other guy to stick around and maintain a relationship with your customer just because you're not able to do that thing. And we saw some of these. I mean, we very hard to do everything there's a Wikipedia article about it, the competitive exclusion principle. I think that's pretty interesting. I learned from actually just generally Peter's whole thing is the worldly wisdom idea is taking ideas from biology and physics and what's his other one is the formula for kinetic energy”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So many. I don't know if, you know, hopefully he publishes more books at some point. He's written a lot of stuff that he keeps offline. I really like his competitive exclusion principle. What is that? It's basically it comes from biology and it's this idea that in a niche, in an ecological niche ecosystem, there's only two species can't occupy the same niche, one of the must out compete the other one. If they're like for life, if they're both occupying the exact same niche, one will win. The other will get pushed aside, go extinct, or have to adapt. And so in business,”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it will work. So it's a hard problem, similar with military, like. Much artillery do you want to just produce and just have sitting around just in case there's a war? But like you want some when there's a war, you don't want to start your production then.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd be like, no problem. Yeah, and Missouri, I mean, inventory should be not that expensive to keep around, but it depends if it's perishable. Like COVID was a great example. The hospitals didn't have enough inventories all run just in time, which is just a ridiculous way to run a healthcare network just in time because in a crisis, you better have some inventory. But the problem, I think, becomes that these PPE, the masks and stuff has a shelf life and expiration log. So you can't just build a warehouse Full of stuff and let it sit there. You only need”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in southern Chile, like right next to Antarctica. Somebody crashed like a tractor into the wing. And he called me. He said, can you get me a, I need the wing. I need to fly it to Chile. I will pay any price. Connect with this guy. He told us like 10 times, like, if there's a way to pay more to get this there faster, we will do it. And so being the guy with all the parts for that type of customer.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because everyone else hates it. It was a contrary element to it. Everybody went to business school and learned that extras inventory is evil and carries working capital costs, et cetera. But he's in his business, which is airplane parts, aviation parts, having excess inventory means you can provide the part on demand, any part you have it. No one else does. So people are willing to pay a real premium if you're, especially in aviation. If your line is down or your plane's not flying, we have a whole branch of logistics called aircraft on ground logistic AOG aircraft on ground. People pay any price. This is now what Flexport does, but I know this guy's a billionaire and his plane G6 fifty.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, okay, that makes sense. That's hilarious because he loves inventory. He also had an inventory of extra rooms just in case somebody made a money.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“John Jones, or somebody gonna kick your ass I don't think we're the smartest people in the world, but within our little old school industry, we can do some damage.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was like, oh, you had a great business because the key to success is dumb competition, which that's kind of insulting. We have some really smart competitors, but I always say that to people who are like building AI companies, it's like, what a nightmare. Your competitors are literally AI geniuses. Like, you should find a way to apply AI in some other domain. So you're not competing with the smartest people on planet Earth because it's like trying to be a boxer. Like you're kind of, you might beat all the people in your local gym, but at some point you're going to run into.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I love that. It really inspired me. And then one day I was at a party at a house in Silicon Valley. Not like a fun party, but like, you know, gathering a cocktail event or something. And I didn't know anybody and I this older guy, older gentleman was there and I struck up, he struck up a conversation, but he saw me not talking to anyone or something. We started talking to each other. And he at some point asked me what my favorite book was. I told him, oh, it's poor Charlie's almanac. And because he's like, why do you like that book? And I told him all this. And he's like, well, I know that book really well, actually. I'm the author of that book, Peter Kaufman. And so he's like one of Munger's really good friends for many, many years. And he's the one that put together this almanac. So he just thought that was so funny that he started bringing me to Charlie's house and like tells Charlie the story. One of my favorite things that Charlie told me at one of these dinners at his house was when I told him about Flexbort.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You should late to it. It's wonderful. And it's about this idea that there's like 300 domains in the world of knowledge, 300 as kind of an arbitrary, I don't remember what he says 300 or not, but there's some number of limited quantity of domains in each of these or two or three big ideas that carry all the 80% of the freight, as he said it. And so if you were to go and learn those two or three big ideas from each of the disciplines, your alley, I'm sure you've written about this before, you have all these mental models and you have lots of stuff to hang things on. And then also a lot of the innovation in the world comes from taking an idea from one domain and applying it elsewhere, a mental model from one and applying it elsewhere. So I learned about this when I was like 25 or so living in China, not really set me off on a lifetime journey of like trying to really learn as many of these domains as I could. Do you try to be worldly wise?”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To become friendly with Monger towards the end of his life. I went to his 99th birthday party last year, actually, before he passed. I got lucky. I got in fact the person I'm closer with is Peter Kaufman, who's the author of Poor Charlie's Almanac. And that's one of my favorite books. And when I lived in China, I've got a copy of that book. And really, it's like a coffee table, but Stripe just re released a copy of it. It's now available in print again. It used to be kind of out of print. And I had that book and I loved it. It really inspired me. Munger has this really wonderful essay, which I actually discovered on the Y Combinator website. called the art of worldly wisdom or something to that effect if you if you google munger worldly wisdom you'll find it um and it's a us it's a speech of that he gave at USC It's a graduation speech.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doing all the tasks until it's complete. That, I think, Toyota kind of pioneered that piece of it. Better for the worker for sure, or you have more agency, you're more involved, you know more of the details, you're like, your career's more interesting, you're learning all the steps, but they really, the other thing that sort of really does is empower the workers to like elevate problems, right? They famously have their rope they can pull or shut down the whole line if things aren't right and take quality super seriously. Quality costs last. I think that comes from W.E. Deming. So it's all a very interesting area that we try to apply. This is where I needed help at some point because I'm not unnatural on these things.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little bit, yeah. I mean, the Toyota production system, I think. Like two companies that have taken it really, really seriously and advanced it in the United States. One is one is Amazon and one is Obdonahher Manufacturing Company. The idea is a couple of things. One is one things that we do that is very Toyota production system like is in the Toyota production system. And I've never been to Toyota and got a proper tour of this. I'm a bit of a chauffeur knowledge like repeating what I've heard and learned a little bit from a distance. But is the worker, the line worker follows the part down the line and does many of the steps, operates several of or many of the machines instead of like in a US production Toyota auto production. Each guy does one job and kind of more robotic like I was describing earlier. And our models are very similar to the Toyota one in that sense that we're like the same worker follows this shipment down the line as it were.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, eliminating variants is like lean six sigma type stuff. It's one of these things. It doesn't come naturally to me. So I'm like trying to study it and take an interest in it, but it's not my natural forte to go deep on this area. I do find it quite intellectually stimulating, but it hasn't, it's not like my training and background.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“the goods to flow through. It's a fascinating world of like WE Deming is the kind of business philosopher of quality. He's written a lot on statistical process control and creating even flow through a system that you don't want to have these spikes of flow because it makes planning really hard and labor and assets people become idle.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the asset intense part should be always operating. No, but you should have excess capacity there. That way you don't get stuck with this machine holding you back. You have extra machine. But it's a strategy for people with a lot of capex. That's Amazon's model, but plenty of CapEx. And I'm not sure that they do it right. Like one of the things that they do that pisses off their merchants is they have this endless line of trucks at the warehouse they can't unload. They've pushed the bottleneck often into the unload piece. The loading docks and charkers and can't get appointments and stuff. So I think that'd be wrong in that framework that like they should.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pick, pack, outbound, you know, and ship again. And the way that Amazon does this, as I understand it, is they try to make the bottleneck the most capital intensive piece. And then they overstack it so that there's plenty of capacity on that, whatever the machine is probably that is capital intensive. It requires a lot of capital and have like lots and lots of that machine so that that way they're never it just keeps flowing the goods you don't hit the bottleneck. You don't actually hit and if you do it's because okay didn't nothing I could do there is like more capital needed rather than if it's labor you're like cool just throw more labor at it that should never be the bottleneck it's only where oh I need a lot more capital here even that I plant and then they overinvest in CapEx so they don't hit the bottleneck”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not right, like there should not be a bottleneck for I can't get cargo loaded on a ship and therefore I can't help the customer or the customers getting excused delay and getting loaded and getting their cargo delivered. It is a fact of the industry right now, but that bottleneck shouldn't be in a warehouse environment. You've got a picture of this flow of goods at the loading dock. You can choose where to put the bottleneck in the flow of those goods. Loading dock, unload, put away.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What it feels out of control as it, and we need to get our handle on that. And I hate that. I want my problem always to be like, oh, I need to be more creative in my marketing and sales and like work on the pitch and the user experience and the things there. So yeah, if you're bottlenecked in how much space. We've had bottlenecks move all over the place during COVID and since how much space there is on ships, there's been a bottleneck for us even as recently as last couple weeks with this huge surge of new bookings following the relaxation of the terrace.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bottleneck is going to be the point, the choke point, the point at which the limiting factor. And I think you're in a company, your bottleneck should always be customer demand, should never be like bottleneck. Oh, I can't. Right now we're bottlenecking our customs team, our trade advisory team, the people that are helping solve these problems that I was describing around how much dudes you owe and how to minimize it, how to be compliant. That team is super bottlenecked. We didn't plan for a world that would require this much this much expert headcount. And it's hard to find these types of people that really know the space. So we're bottlenecked in a place that we didn't plant. The bottleneck should be, I don't have enough customers wanting my thing. You'd like that to be in a B2B environment. That should be the bottleneck. But if it shows up somewhere else, yeah, I'm not in control right now. It feels very uncomfortable. I'm like, do I want, I don't want to just hire more people, especially if it's not, if it's the temporary surge.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that accurate? I know how hard it is to get accurate data out of my own company. So the idea of the government economists getting accurate data about all of the companies, I'm like always very skeptical on these things.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just don't know. The sales date of fine, I let public companies report on their sales, inventory data. I've never understood like the US government publishes these inventory metrics every month. Where do they get that? I have no idea. I haven't gotten any good economists to answer that. Look how they run a survey.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've never been like a macro person. I'm not an investor like that, so it doesn't matter to me that much. I guess it's, I mean, Buffett's right, like the logistics say, but it's the international stuff is so There's a lot of weirdness lately in this tariff state of it's just like, I don't know if that means you want to know what the consumers are doing ultimately. Are they buying and selling? And a lot of there's just a huge amount of noise. Like they didn't ship that much less or more because of consumer demand. That was like, you know, cost and inventory forecasting. So I don't, it's probably if I had my access to any data, it would be the consumer, you know, sales data from all the customers and inventory levels.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Volumes from China collapsed sixty percent down when on april ninth, the day the duties hit, stayed down for five weeks, and then as soon as he relaxed, as soon as the Trump administration relaxed the duties on China to 30% instead of 145, it surged to 80% above pre-tariff levels. That lasted for two weeks, and then it came down. It's still above pre-tariff levels. I haven't studied enough the market data, and now I'm looking at flexport data. And we have got 30% growth over last year. So then I start to figure, we're actually up again from the trough like it came down, and now we're back up. But I think that's a flexbort thing. I think the markets. shrinking again from the peak that we hit post COVID, but our own volumes were like 30% here over year growth.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every single company in the country Applies for a refund. You probably won't see the check for like three years. There's going to be so much fraud. Oh man, it's going to be kind of a total mess if they lose that lawsuit.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's going to be, and then it already takes like about a year when you get one of these refunds from the government. It takes about a year to get your check.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably it ends at the Spring Core, yeah. That will be really an interesting case if they lose again. Everybody gets a refund on all their duties, but they won't just refund it. You're then going to have to file paperwork.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's the level below the Supreme Court. So, presumably, if he loses again, it'll get appealed again to the Supreme Court. So that's probably, I don't know enough how this works, but towards the end of the year is my imagination, is my guess that it would go to the Supreme Court.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You've done in and out of the country, and then our experts kind of walk you through and be like, okay, here's our checklist. This is ways that we think we could maybe get you a refund. Now, Trump has lost the lawsuit, on these new tariffs. It's going to appeal to the oral arguments for that start on July 30th next month.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So every year in the United States, 7 billion goes unclaimed. And that was prese new tariffs. So it's presumably much higher, yeah. So we help companies with that. We've been getting people like big checks back that haven't, and you can go back five years in time. So that's like a really important one. If you haven't done it, it's called duty drawback if you haven't done that. And other countries offer this to most countries. So yeah, there's a lot of strategies. In fact, the one thing that people should really know is your data on all your past transactions with the US government or with US customs are your, it's your data you have the right to it under the freedom of information act so you can pull your last five years of transactions from CBP now they won't they give it to you in a very unusable format I think like giant CSV dump basically maybe even on CVs I forget but they give you like not not useful it is still your data so it's useful but you have to know how to clean it up so we've built this interface that like visualizes all of this for you and shows you every transaction”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you have to, you don't just get to automatically do that. You have to like file all the right paperwork and stuff. And then importantly, if you import something you pay duties and then you later export a product with the same classification, you owe a refund on the first pass.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, the good strategy is let's not talk about the illegal ones anymore. I mean, but be careful. Make sure you get any good advice, is have that database know all the subcomponents. There's a few things like valuation. There's a thing called first sale. I won't bore you all with the technicalities of it, but it's called first sale, which basically says that you pay the value of the goods based on the first time it was sold, not the price that you paid at import. So there's legal ways to do that if you bought it like there was a middleman or an agent that bought it in China, marked it up to you. You can actually import the goods at the price they paid, not the price you paid. You can deduct the portion. If you file it all correctly and don't quote me on this because you want to get good legal advice, including from Flashports team, but you can deduct the portions US made.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understand there's a few bills looming, but I haven't read the text of them yet in Washington that would shut down the ability for foreign companies to import or put in new requirements for it. So that's like one creative thing that will happen is you get offered as an importer. You've been buying these goods from your factory and then all of a sudden they offer them to you for way cheaper than the duty alone. You're like, that's not my problem. I just bought it in the US. Guarantee you like you are reliable for that as a warning and look at the camera UFCB DOJ has announced it's their number two priority in white collar crime division of the Department of Justice is customs fraud after healthcare fraud is number one and then customs fraud number two.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a creative LC. It can be foreign owned LLC, but you'll have to have an LLC that can be held accountable. But it's very unclear exactly how it will be or should be structured. Like, does it need to have employees who could face jail time? Like, what's the, you know, does it need to have a certain amount of cash in the bank that could be taken if there's fraud? There's a lot of ways, but I have no idea what's going to pass. There's a couple.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Customs and border protection and DOJ. The problem is what the factories will do is set up a shell company. Not in the US. You don't have to have a US entity to import goods into the US Most of us are in Europe. So you can just, they set up the shell company in whatever country, it could be China, it could be anywhere. Company registers not as it LLC or any kind of legal entity, but they just register with CBP with customs. They import the goods into the US from abroad. If they cheat, they just disappear and customs doesn't have agents in China to go chase it down. So then they just do again under a different shell company. And that's a huge amount of what gets sold on Amazon. I'm not saying it's fraudulent, but is these foreign registered companies?”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be careful, there's some illegal stuff that I see, not so much of our customers. We talk them out of this, but one of the temptations that a lot of people are falling into right now is letting your factory import the goods for you and then buying it from them in the US. And then not turning a blind eye if the factory cheats. The value of the goods or their classification. That's kind of rampant in the industry right now.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of were the only one founded, only one in the top 100 in the world founded after the web browser was invented. A lot of good companies, but they're not tech companies fundamentally. So we have to The world is our oyster. We should win it all.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Complex, yeah, carbon, they want to know the carbon border adjustment factor, I think it's called, that they want to know all the input, all the carbon inputs of every single subcomponent of every product in the world. How much carbon went into making it so they can measure the carbon footprint. And then you, coming soon, you're going to have to provide like a QR code on every item that you can scan and they'll tell you the carbon footprint. So, the world just keeps getting more and more complex, which plays into the hands of the hands of the ha Customs company, companies like Flexport, because everybody's cool, you need technology to track all this stuff, kind of classic regulatory capture type stuff. We're not lobbying for any of these things, but”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On Chinese maids on aluminum. Maybe I should know all these details, it's very complex, but if you have a couch that has sealed aluminum, you don't want to pay that 50%. You don't want to pay that high duty on the entire couch. You want to only pay it on the portion that's stealing aluminum. So you really have to build this great, we call it a product library, which Flexboard offers as technology product. So you want to be able to track all these things at the subcomponent level. Where's every item made? And then there's all these new regulations that have been coming out for many, many years. There's one called the Uyghur Force Labor Protection Act requires you to track the cotton. Anything cotton, where is it made, specifically like what down? And then the EU has the new ones very similar, but any forestry, any wood product, you'll be able to show where the wood was grown anywhere in the world. Track that.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there are all kinds of legal ways, and you need to get really great advice on legal advice or advise trade advisory on how to do this, but there are ways that you want to be able to really track every single component of a product. Where is it made? And what is its cost? So like if you have a cow, there's steel and aluminum duties right now. They're really high. Forget the exact number, but they're quite high. Think of 50% or more.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's temporary, though. You're still going to pay the tariff, so it doesn't really work for changing their nature. But Bondedware also let you make a bet that tariffs are going to come down. So when tariffs were at 145 on China, we helped a lot of companies move into bonded warehouses because we all predicted that it would come down from there. So you're better off waiting and only enter the goods, only exit them out of the building, but enter them into the US commerce after the terrace will come down. So there's some hacks around the edges. There's a lot that you need to do before you didn't care about valuation. The value of the goods, if it was time zero, who cares? When all of a sudden, if his time's 30% or whatever number, you care a lot more of how is it valued.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's kind of like three categories of these two or three. One is people, for example, we have a bicycle, a company that makes bicycles in the US, kids bikes. For some reason, they made an exemption for importing bikes they're duty free, but not bike components. So their cost went way up and their competitors from overseas didn't. So they are cheaper to manufacture overseas. So they're moving their factory that has been a well-known brand, reasonably well-known brand, known for being made in America and they're like, doesn't work anymore. So that's one example. Two is if you're doing it for export, you're exporting goods, you're paying, your costs have gone up on the import of the goods, of the components doing assembly in the US and then exporting, you're better off setting up that factory now somewhere else where you don't have the costs on the imported components. Third would be machinery costs like fact a friend of mine was setting up a line for a fad like a semiconductor fab and just like the machines are made in Germany for that particular line and the cost was going to go up 30%. It's like, oh, all right.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's the thing. And you have to judge policies not by their intention, but by their outcome like the one of the mistakes that a lot of people make is like, oh, it's good intention. So therefore, the policy is fine. That's just not right. And these tariffs have had the opposite impact that Trump would like. I think his intention or some validity to it all, some of the things I said from national security and employment, other things. But the result has been thus far and it's pretty early in the cycle. We're only a couple months since the Liberation Day or whatever, but the I've met way more infinitely more. I haven't met anyone who said, oh, because of these terrorists, I'm going to start doing production in the US. I've read some headlines on it and they've done some White House announcements and things, but those aren't my customer base. In my customer base met at least a half a dozen companies that said stop production in the US because of the cost of the components coming in.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, it increases the cost for companies that are sourcing goods. And we've become so globalized our economy is just like supply chains are unfathomably complex and interdependent and they're full of independent actors making their own decisions about how they want to do things. And there's these component, subcomponent ecosystems of supply, moving goods all over the world and doing assembly and production in different countries and bringing things together. Introducing massive changes on short notice to the tariffs has caused borderline chaos, certainly a lot of disorder in global supply chains, which ultimately affects all the stuff that would buy. It's not true that America doesn't make anything anymore, but like a lot of the kind of consumer goods that are all made over, a lot of them are made overseas, obviously.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To fund the government via tariffs instead of income tax, like I'm not sure I hate that idea. I don't know what would happen. So it's source of revenues, very, very important and valuable to the government. It's a way to control protectionism for companies. That's been a major reason to use tariffs over the years is to protect U.S. businesses from competition. In part, just for employment reasons, in part for national security reasons, like you want to have certain industries be successful, steel has always been one of these and Otto's most major countries believe their auto industry is like SIPASU. Important not just for jobs, but for armaments like you make tanks, Ford Factory during a war, et cetera. So yeah, those are legitimate reasons for terrorists.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT