Is A Healing Supply Chain Fixing Our Economy? — With Ryan Petersen

Ryan Petersen is the Founder and Co-CEO of Flexport, a supply chain technology company. He joins Big Technology Podcast to talk about how the supply chain is rounding into shape and whether that will help cure our inflation problem. Stay tuned for a discussion that starts in the weeds of shipping and moves into broader areas including consumerism, climate, and Amazon Culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay?

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razor were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  LinkedIn presents.

• 1:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Our guest today, Ryan Peterson, might be the person with the best view into the core of our inflation problem and whether you're going to get your holiday gift on time. Peterson is the CEO of Flexport, a supply chain technology company that's valued at $8 billion, and he sees all the comings and goings of cargo, including the bottlenecks that caused the product delays and price increases that we've suffered in the past few months. When the supply chain works, our economy works. And so let's talk about whether the supply chain is rounding into shape and starting to work again, and whether some relief is in sight, or whether we're going to end up spending more time in this chaotic, inflation-driven, and terrible economic cycle.

• 2:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Nobody better to talk about it than Ryan. Ryan, welcome to the show.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me on.

• 2:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, Ryan, so we're seeing shipping rates at about a tenth of what they used to be during the height of this shipping crisis, which is really unbelievable that they've dropped so much and shipping times are down as well. Is it a coincidence that inflation is cooling off now that the supply chain is starting to right itself? Like, how linked are those two things?

• 2:27Speaker 02

  They're very, very, very linked. I'm not, you know, as far as like how the government officially measures it with CPI, I'm not exactly sure. Like, I can't say that, oh, last month's decline was actually tied to this as directly. But, but of course, mathematically, it has to be linked because the price of ship gets flowed through you and the price of everything that you buy. And the price of shipping went up so much, you know, when it was 15,000 or even, you know, at peak, you saw some containers at $20,000 to ship a container from Asia to the US. That, that, the average container has about $100,000 worth of goods at wholesale price, meaning consumers pay $200,000 to $300,000 based

• 3:06Speaker 02

  on markup. So you're like 20,000 over 200,000 is 10%. Now, that's just goods. There's other kinds of other things in the economy, services, doesn't affect fuel, which isn't shipped that way. You know, many other things, but for the price of goods themselves, especially imported goods, which is most of our consumer goods get, get imported, you are, you are talking about a really material impact on inflation. So on, on any one month or one quarter, I'm not sure how, you know, how it's measured and how, how long it takes to flow through, whether that's really what's driving this down, or if there's actually more declines in the future, but, but sort of mathematically, it has to.

• 3:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I remember before all this inflation started, there's a guy I know in shipping, I wouldn't even call him a source. I would just, you know, a guy I know and that works in shipping. And he was telling me that like, he was like, listen, our business is amazing. The shipping containers have gone from 2,000 and now he was making 15 and it would eventually go up to 20,000. And he would, he was, you know, responsible for finding freight and getting it on these containers and make a percentage. So he's like, you know, people are suffering a lot of pain and people are making a lot of money, you know, as long as that continues.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 4:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  And there was this sense, there was this sense that it would like never get back to normal. So, but looking at the data that, that your head of ocean shared, it looks like it is getting back to normal. How did that happen?

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I might take issue with that word "normal" because what we've seen over the last decade is sort of gyrations. You also have had these moments where shipping is incredibly cheap. So in 2016, the price to ship was only 600 bucks. And one of the major ocean carriers went bankrupt and created all kinds of problems of its own. So it's more, and you've had trade wars and, you know, new tariffs and things. So there's kind of always something new and volatile, but it has returned to sort of long-term historical averages, which I guess is, you know, average can be deceiving because it might actually be moments when it's much lower than the average, much higher, et cetera. But, yeah, things have normalized to an extent, if we can use that word. What happened to get there was mostly that consumers, you know, the same trend that led to the

• 5:15Speaker 02

  spike, which was consumers, when the pandemic hit and folks were locked down, whether voluntarily or their cities weren't allowing things to open up, people were not going out and not spending money on travel or restaurants, services, all the services industry, there was just this huge shift of spending from services over to goods. And people were pretty flush with cash. They were flush, both, you know, people like to talk about the stimulus check, but probably more important was 40% of houses in the United States were refinanced last year. Got a nice low interest rate, put a bunch of cash in the bank, you're like, what are you gonna do? Well, you know, a lot of people are gonna buy some cool stuff with all that cash. So a lot of expenditure, a lot of expenditure on goods flowed through

• 5:59Speaker 02

  from that. And those trends have now reversed. People are traveling, travel is booming, as you see, you go to any airport, the flights are all overbook. A lot of this stuff is coming back and services, restaurants are doing, the ones that survived the pandemic are doing great right now. So that, that trend is just reversed. And so, less goods, I think there was a 11% decline last month versus the year prior in terms of amount of volume entering the port of LA. And so, less, you know, supply and demand imbalance and you just like the price can collapse because it's relatively inelastic, meaning the price, you're not gonna ship more stuff just because the price of shipping went down. Like, you're gonna

• 6:43Speaker 02

  ship stuff based on like, what are the economics of the product itself? And are you making money as there demand for it? If the price of shipping falls in half, it doesn't mean you're gonna ship like twice as much stuff, you're gonna ship about the same amount of stuff. And similarly, if the price of shipping goes way up... You're still going to keep shipping stuff as long as the it doesn't totally break your business and bankrupt you, which if you have a decent business, you could absorb that. It wasn't pretty and it, you know, it was uncomfortable, but so that's where you get these price gyrations.

• 7:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And then the price ends up largely getting passed to the end consumer. So we had, when I was talking to my guy in shipping, he was saying, okay, price is going up. And and he said, the retailers, they're paying that right now. And the prices are remaining the same. There is no way that those prices can stay. And that he expected that inflation was going to come next. And then that's what we've seen. We saw the inflation and now, now, you know, the pricing is coming down on a lot of products. And you have these retailers that are starting to, you know, discount, you know, that all this discounting is a result of excess inventory that they stockpiled. So that's another good sign, don't you think?

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, it all depends on where you sit, but people are overstocked. I should have mentioned that people order too much goods. We thought the pandemic boom would never go away. Everybody wants to believe that the future is always brighter than the current. But you know, when it comes to business, I've never seen someone make a business projection for their company that went like up and then went down. It's always like, oh, we're gonna do a little better, a little better, a little better. And so when suddenly that does happen, you know, the most classic example for this is probably e-commerce. Like people just thought that the last 20 years, like every year more, a larger percentage of retail spending was done through e-commerce. And with COVID, that really, really spiked. And then people thought, okay, it'll just, it might continue at a lower, the trend line

• 8:33Speaker 02

  will continue from that high point. It'll never go back down. Like, that's pretty much what everybody thought. Shopify made that bet. Amazon's made that bet. And in fact, it has gone back down. Yeah. Well, actually, I'm glad you brought Facebook. That's like another big problem for these e-commerce guys. Facebook change, Apple changed like the privacy rules. And it's made Instagram ads not perform as well. And so a lot of these e-commerce businesses are really like built around the Instagram ad format. And I have like one friend whose entire product was chosen because this is the type of product that sells on Instagram. And when Instagram, when this ad stopped working because the Apple privacy changes, you can't retarget people, his whole business model just basically stopped working. So you see a lot of that, too.

• 9:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, now you see this up close. Do you think that the Apple changes were made in, you know, in particular in the name of privacy? And are they actually helping people's privacy?

• 9:25Speaker 02

  I'm sort of cynical on these things. I think that they're trying to build their own ads business. And now you have to run ads on Apple instead of on all the platforms.

• 9:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can your and how about all the businesses that built themselves? I mean, I always think that there's this liability. Don't build your whole business based off of on the back of the Facebook platform or even relying on one channel alone. But I guess, well, I'm curious, do you think the Apple, you know, is there a hope that Apple will be able to deliver that sort of economic benefit to the smaller businesses that Facebook was in the past? And is that is that fair?

• 9:58Speaker 02

  I'm not close enough to like the ads, the ads market. And I believe actually, Apple of all the big tech companies is the most committed to privacy. And like, I think that's a good thing. So I'm not, I don't want to be overly critical of them. But but I'm also a little bit cynical when I see that there's an ads product from them. But I'm not, I'm not close enough. We Flexport doesn't run ads on these platforms ourselves. Like, we're not, we're like more of a B to B marketing company. So.

• 10:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, Ryan, how did how did all these companies make the mistake that these COVID conditions were going to last forever? We just had Roy Bahat from Bloomberg Beta on it. We were talking about it last week. And it's just one of the most interesting questions because like, you're right, you see it everyone from Shopify, Amazon. And Amazon, now they're going to do this 10,000 person layoff, which is actually kind of tiny, given the fact that they've hired like a quarter million people in a year and a half. But but all these and Facebook, for instance, and a lot of the e commerce companies, how did everyone make this mistake?

• 10:51Speaker 02

  The simplest way is that, you know, these are really data driven companies. And data, there's a problem with data is it all it all comes from the same place, which is the past. And if the future doesn't look like the past, like you're being data driven, actually, it's not really helping you that much. And and and by the way, everybody made the mistake before, like no one, I can't find a single economist when COVID first hit. There's this pandemic that made the prediction, hey, this is going to lead to a huge increase in the amount of goods being shipped and global trade is going to go up like. Everybody thought trade's gonna collapse, like all previous recessions meant trade went down, there was less goods being shipped and it was real pain for the industry. So, you know, it's just like incredibly hard to predict things. I'm kind of like, try to

• 11:35Speaker 02

  keep flexible out of the prediction business and make sure that we're instead just like the most, the best at reading what's happening right now, rather than in the future and being really quick and agile to adapt to current situation. Um, because I just find it would like, we're just not that good at predicting the future.

• 11:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  But your business is sort of, we talk about Amazon, Shopify, Facebook, these are almost like tangentially related to like whether the economics of COVID would last forever. Yours is directly related because you're, if you're in the shipping business, you know, you, you have to make a decision. Is this going to, uh, last forever? And how does our company adjust? Or is this going to be temporary? And how does our company, you know, get by for the time being and then eventually return to normal? So what was your prediction of that? I mean, I know you don't want to be, but you had to have made some assumptions. And then how has that gone over the past couple of months?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  We made the prediction that it would change, like that things would come back to normal, that these prices can't last forever, that it's gonna revert.

• 12:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  But is it because you were so, yeah, were you so close?

• 12:37Speaker 02

  The timing, we were very uncertain. We sort of, you know, I never put any faith in the projections. You want to kind of have like a base case of, uh, okay, let's say this price has collapsed and we're not able to grow volumes. What does that look like in the P and L? And can you survive that? You know, can you, can you, can, can that be acceptable? Like to lose money the way you're gonna lose if it doesn't go. And so, but it's impossible to model these things out. We're, we're lucky that we are not an asset. We're, we don't own the assets. We don't own the ships, the planes, the trucks. Now, for the last two years, owning the assets meant you just printed money. The next two to five to 10 years, it's going to be pretty ugly for those asset owners. And I think hopefully they, they did responsible things with the capital while they had it. Um, and so that they, they don't experience crazy amounts of pain.

• 13:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, one of the interesting things I've learned from you in previous interviews is that planes like that you end up, we end up having 50% of cargo coming in on passenger planes and you actually rented your own planes in order to maybe ease some of this crunch.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we did, we leased at the very start of the pandemic, when it first hit, the big problem that we saw was that the, I mean, the real problem, not in our business, but civilization level problem is that our doctors and nurses and hospitals didn't have enough masks, enough PPE to protect the frontline healthcare workers. And when we, as being in this industry of like, okay, how do we get them masks? We saw that there were huge quantities of masks available for purchase in China and that the hospitals had resources to purchase them, but they just couldn't get the masks over. So like, oh, great, this is a problem we know something about. But as you said, 50% of the cargo capacity for air freight, and this was all air freight because we were in a hurry, it goes in the belly of passenger planes. And those were all grounded.

• 14:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is it 50 or 15%?

• 14:24Speaker 02

  5-0, 5-0.

• 14:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Really? And that's, that's just air freight versus what's the percentage of air freight to shipping freight that comes into the US?

• 14:32Speaker 02

  It's like 80% ocean, 20% air, depending on the lane and the commodity and stuff like this, it can be higher or lower. But, and so you, so you had this like crunch, but if you listen carefully, you can hear the answer to the problem is like, hey, the passenger planes are grounded. Okay, let's go use them. So we leased, we put, we did 87, we had 87 planes that flew over and got masks. We shipped about 500 million masks to frontline healthcare workers on five continents, not just in the US. So that was our, we had to make a bet for a bunch of those, like, we had several where we signed multi-year contracts. And to like lock in, we had our own 747s, we still do, because we signed multi-year contracts

• 15:17Speaker 02

  on those. And we had to make a bet. Now, we were fortunate, we were fast enough in making this bet, that everybody still had this mental view that, oh, trade is going to collapse. We, and so the asset owners were happy to sign a long-term deal with us at what what turned out to be really good market rates. I mean, we're the price of air freight is still above where we signed those long-term deals. So that was, that turned out to be quite profitable for us. But we actually thought it would lose a lot of money, but it was the right thing to do to get, you know, masks to the frontline healthcare workers. We've been fortunate that the bet paid off, but I suspect in the coming year, that bet will turn underwater and we'll lose money. It's okay because we made a lot of money in the last couple of years on it. So financially, it's still, I'd do it over again, but.

• 15:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Interesting.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  But it's a small piece of our business. As I was saying, like, we're not really asset heavy. We don't usually make, you know, it's a small percentage of the air freight that we do. We're the third largest provider of air freight in the United States for international air freight. And this is a small percent that we have on these like long-term where we have our own 747s. Most of it is kind of brokered out to other people's assets.

• 16:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, fascinating. And so we're talking this whole time about, you know, how temporary is this? How long is this going to last? I mean, that's sort of, to bring it full circle, been the key question about inflation. You know, is this transitory or is this just a factor in the system? And it's kind of, that comes back down to the supply chain question, right? Because you're starting to see the supply chain is correcting itself and now inflation is, is easing. I'm curious if you ever thought, we just had Sagar and Jetty and Marshall Koslowski on from the realignment, and they had mentioned that like the number, you know, we were relying on the Fed to fix the inflation issue. The number one thing that the current administration could have done from day one is to say, there's a supply chain crisis. We're going to fix it and that will help us with, with inflation.

• 17:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, you know, I'm curious how you, you think about that in terms of like the, whether the inflation is transitory or, or, you know, permanent? And how much does, does the actual supply chain actually factor into that?

• 17:15Speaker 02

  I'm always like really hesitant in macroeconomics. It's just like, there's so many complex factors that is like, human brains are really good at kind of creating a narrative from complexity, but it doesn't mean that that narrative is predictive or, you know, accurate, even, even accurate looking backwards, much less predictive going forward. That said, I'll weigh in on it with that caveat. I think the inflation is important, but rather, supply chains are important to inflation, but they can't be all encompassing unless, for example, the oil is not really a supply. I mean, I guess you could broadly define the price of energy as part of the supply chain, but it's really like upstream or like, are we investing in the infrastructure

• 17:56Speaker 02

  to pump more oil, do more drilling, generate, lower the price of oil like that? We're not. And so that's going to lead to long-term inflation of the price of energy, which ultimately the entire economy is running on energy. It's just conversion of energy into other forms of things that we want to consume. And so I think that's going to be a lasting influence. The interest rates, you know, because of things like the refinancing that I was mentioning earlier, where people, you know, nobody's refinancing a home next year at these higher interest rates. And so that's a huge amount of cash that people had to spend. So that's going to actually be a force towards lowering inflation. That's where, that's kind of how the high interest rates work to lower inflation. So people aren't going to have as much money in their pocket. And then it all comes down to like printing at the end of the day.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  It's like, does the Fed continue to kind of print tons of money? Do we, and there's going to be real political reasons where the moment they stop and the budget, it's like politicians just love kicking the can down the road and spending more money. It's, you know, and so there's just this huge influence, incentive for a politician to say, no, I'm not, we're not going to have austerity and lower our spending. Well, I'm in office, like let the next guy do that. We've been kicking that can down the road for a long time. So my, a lot, a lot of factors, but yeah, supply chain, at least to the extent that logistics and the price of freight, as I was indicating before, has impacted it. That's going to come back and normalize and maybe, and maybe go the other way to where

• 19:23Speaker 02

  it's actually cheaper than it was pre-pandemic. Because we've got about, over the next two years, it's going to be 25% more ships coming online. The capacity for ocean shipping, we, people respond to that high price and say, hey, let's build some more ships and make some more money. And then you get increase of supply of shipping. Takes a little while, but now demand's going to be down and supply is up. So you should predict like really cheap prices of shipping for, for the, in the coming years would be my prediction if I had to make one.

• 19:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's amazing that we're already seeing, I mean, the fact that we're seeing the movement downwards so quickly is pretty wild. How does this holiday season look like? I feel like that's the key, right? That people are going to spend during the holiday season. Maybe they haven't spent yet. They're, they're waiting. I feel like I've had this running conversation with some of your executives for the last couple of years. Like, are you doing your holiday shopping now? Are you going to wait? Like, are you going to try to get the lock in that price now? Or, you know, kind of risk the, the inflation going up as we go?

• 20:19Speaker 02

  So we have Flexport Research is our economics team and they put out great reports, by the way, flexport.com slash research. For those of you out there who want to kind of follow us along. We have, we have great intel. We're like in these transactions. We represent about 1% of US trade and, and have, and then the team studies also other macro indicators and things. So what we're seeing right now is actually that people are, this expenditure is still there. We're seeing spending about 1% up over last year on consumer goods. So it's, it's still there. But what's happened from a shipping standpoint is that brands over ordered. They thought it was going to be even higher than that. They have too much inventory. So they're shipping a lot less. And so as long as this consumer spending stays about there, eventually the brands have to ship more to keep up, uh, keep up with it.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  But the, the good expenditure is not, it hasn't collapsed to the extent that we thought, or that, that's been widely reported. Now inflation's up a lot. So if spending is up 1%, absolute volume of goods may be down a little bit.

• 21:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I mean, do you expect the holiday season to run smoothly? Or, and do you, you know, if, if you have to, but when you're buying your holiday gifts, are you going to wait now towards the last minute? Or are you going to lock in the rates that we have now?

• 21:31Speaker 02

  As a consumer, I never, you know, let's see, I don't have advice for the average consumer out there. I think probably go buy what you want for your family, take care of them. I wouldn't expect, I wouldn't expect like big changes.

• 21:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. But you personally?

• 21:46Speaker 02

  My, my, you know, I haven't gotten a Christmas present in so long. My family, like when I was 18, my dad gave me a road atlas.

• 21:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Sort of like get out of the house.

• 21:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Go, go do experiences of things.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Here's a map.

• 21:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Most holiday, most happiness experts would say that's the right path. Ryan Peterson is with us. He's the co-CEO and founder of Flexport Supply Chain Technology Company. We're going to take a quick break on the second half. We're going to talk a little bit about Flexport's plans to hire in this really wild economy, some questions we got from Twitter, actually, about deglobalization and climate, and we'll see where else we'll go. Back right after this. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data, and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it,

• 22:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales without scaling risk. App Point, the unifying trust layer for AI. Head to apppoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast.

• 23:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Violent threats against executives are growing at an alarming rate. When a company experiences backlash, executives are the first people blamed. When their address and other personal details are sitting online, this backlash can lead right to their front door. The team at Ironwell knows this better than anyone. They've protected some of the most targeted executives and individuals on the planet for almost two decades. As a wide-glove enterprise security service, they protect your people with continuous personal data removal, proactive prevention tools, and human-led emergency support. So when someone goes looking for your executives, Ironwell ensures they hit a dead end. So here's what to do. Go to ironwell.com/bigtechnology, fill in the quick form, and request your free risk assessment. Their team will show you just how exposed your executives are

• 24:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  and how to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door. That's ironwell.com/bigtechnology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 24:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on the second half of Big Technology Podcast. Ryan Peterson is with us. He's the co-CEO and founder of Flexport. Been looking forward to speaking with him for quite some time, and I'm really glad you're here, Ryan. Ryan, can you give us a bit of a sense as to how much stuff is actually shipped across the oceans? I mean, is it possible to even put into words?

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Well, it's, I mean, almost everything. We don't, we're not producing that much. There is a kind of a great reshoring that's happening right now. I would argue a little bit underreported, the amount of re-industrialization that's taking place in the United States as companies learn the lesson from the last couple of years that it's hard to get stuff from overseas. They're starting to evaluate, can we produce locally? But nonetheless, globalization has been this great boon for the world. I mean, we've had incredible amounts of prosperity generated by the ability for everybody to trade with everybody. And we got to the point where, in the United States, we're very reliant on international manufacturing. Something like 80, 90% of everything is shipped by, goes on a ship. But of all the goods that an ordinary consumer touches,

• 25:37Speaker 02

  not, you know, America is thankfully pretty close to independent on energy now. So we're not, we're not super dependent on imports of oil anymore. But yeah, vast amounts of stuff and you know, you just kind of, it's a little bit out of sight, but almost any object that you see, you can ask like, hey, where did, where did this thing come from? You know, you take a look at the label, oh, this one's made in Portugal, you know, so.

• 26:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  It, it, it's kind of a fun mind experiment to spend the day looking around and ask that question that you kind of forgot, oh, how did this stuff get here?

• 26:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And so it's interesting, we ended on the second half of, you know, where you talked about how you got the road atlas as a Christmas gift and yet your, your job is to move stuff, you know, move things, you know, across, across the globe. I'm curious, you know, you talk about, think about the state of, of consuming and the state of experiencing and what, what you must as, as CEO or co-CEO of Flexport have some thoughts about like the state of consumerism in, in the world right now. You never think about that? Yeah.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Of course. Well, and I think, uh, I think it's a really important aspect of modern culture. It's often degraded or people are insulting of it and, and don't quite appreciate how much it leads to prosperity. I mean, you're buying things and that's other people's livelihood and people are generating a living and they spend money elsewhere. And there's this great circulatory system that's, that's really powered by the consumer. And, um, that one of the great, as one of the things that's driven American prosperity, we have the greatest consuming culture in the world. Um, and, and in fact, every other company, a country in the world kind of depends on the American consumer. Whenever we have a recession, we export it. Other countries experience recession. America's never imported a recession from somewhere else. It's always kind of consumer led here in the United States. And so you can sort of say, hey,

• 27:26Speaker 02

  we're too consumer, we're too consumer, consumer oriented. We should be more meditative and learn to enjoy nature and not spend things. But guess what? You'll be a lot less prosperous and you'll have a downstream of prosperity as longer livelihoods. Uh, you know, people are healthier as a result of all that prosperity. So it's a, it's a dangerous system to mess with.

• 27:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. But are they happier? That's another question, right? Like, I mean, what your, your father's lesson to you is that, you know, stuff can't bring you happiness or maybe not as much as being out on the road.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  It might be true, although happiness is sort of an ephemeral emotion. I try, I try, you try not to get too attached to it. I'm like, uh, Don't want to, it can come and can go and that I don't, you certainly shouldn't depend on stuff for your happiness, but at the same time, I'm not, I'm not convinced that the alternative is, oh, don't consume anything.

• 28:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, right, of course. Interesting. So let's maybe let's get to some of these, these questions. So talking about all, all the stuff that we ship and climate, right? So we actually had a question from Vernon, this person Vernon3Austin on Twitter, you know, talking about the market of the electrification of cargo ships and fleet zero. You know, how big of that market can there be? And is there room for lower cost electric cargo ships? So, so is there a way that we are able to continue this pace of consumerism and preserve the planet that we have?

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Fleet Zero is a company actually that Flexport invested in is working on electrification of ships. And I think their, their current target market is, it's a maybe a minimum viable product or an entry point to the market, which is, hey, let's, let's power these ships while they're docked off of electric, off of electricity and off of batteries. But rather than powering them off, running the, the combustion engine while they're sitting at the dock. The problem becomes that, that they're going to have to solve and others, and I'm not, I'm not close enough to the physics, but friends who are say this, this might be impossible problem, is that, that the, the size of the

• 29:37Speaker 02

  battery in order to cross the Pacific becomes so big that you run out of any space to ship cargo.

• 29:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  And, you know, you're like, oh, well then we'll just make the ship bigger, but then the battery has to get bigger. And so I'm not, I don't know that that works. I think, I'm really interested in nuclear cargo shipping. There are two civilian nuclear ships in the world. Both of them are run by Russia. But it, and the US Navy's run off of nuclear, they have, I think, 750 nuclear powered vessels. So it's, and never had an accident. So I think that's probably the answer. To get to a zero carbon world, I think that the idea that we're just gonna get off of carbon and get off of fossil fuels for our ships without nuclear is probably a fantasy. I'm have invested in, I'm cheering for the fleet zero guys and I like their early market entry point, but I'm

• 30:28Speaker 02

  as yet unconvinced that it can work on the long haul. And I, you know, I have to remind people there's this idea that we're just gonna rapidly transition off fossil fuels, but be careful because the fossil fuels have powered all of the prosperity that got us out of what, before the industrial revolution, it was very, very bleak. Standards of living were horrible. Twenty-five percent of people died from homicide. It was just an ugly time to be alive. And, you know, you wanted to switch back, but if you don't actually have the technology, you can't solve that with policy. And there's this idea that we're just gonna like use the government and policy to get us off fossil fuels and off energy, but policy can't generate new energy. You need actual technology, you need

• 31:11Speaker 02

  you need solutions and until people get really behind the nuclear movement, I don't really take them that seriously because these other forms of energy aren't there right now.

• 31:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And yeah, I guess this debate, the nuclear debate has been sort of, it's been renewed now that the Russia crisis is happening and people are looking for alternatives. So maybe, maybe that's where it ends up.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  There's finally a little bit of progress there, finally a little progress. I'm very interested in nuclear shipping. If anyone's working on that, reach out to me. I'd love to, I'd love to learn more.

• 31:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Now, just going back to one thing we talked about in terms of the consumer economy. It feels a little circular to me, like the economy is doing well because people are buying things and people are buying things because the economy is doing well. Like, how do you have an economy based entirely off of consumerism?

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Well, that's a hundred percent what happens in economics is that it's circular and the why, it's why recessions can be pretty dark. You know, take, it doesn't have to be just consumerism, take software. SaaS businesses, where SaaS businesses sell to all the other companies in the world and including other SaaS businesses. And when, one of the first things that we've done, we're like, hey, you know, the economy's turning, we gotta cut our costs, let's go look at our expenditure. And what's the easiest thing to do is cut software spend that you're not getting an ROI from. It's much easier than cutting people or office, real estate, etc. It's like, hey, let's just cut some of our contracts. Well, if Flexport, as a software company, we cut back on our software spend, that creates problems everywhere else, and then those companies have to cut their software spend. It's just the nature of an economy.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Um, the alternative is called autarky, where everybody produces for themselves. It's called subsistence farming. And people have tried that too, and you, what you get is poverty.

• 32:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Um, and Yeah.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  And if you haven't lived in poverty, it's, uh, it's nice, you know, it looks nice, people like to travel and take photographs, it's very picturesque and it has great aesthetics going around the world. People love going to like African villages and taking picture of the people. But if you talk to those people, you go hang out with them. I lived in El Salvador, I've lived in Brazil. They wanna live like us. They don't wanna, they don't think that this is like cute and picturesque. They're like, I wanna live in the shopping mall, I wanna have air conditioning, I wanna go to shopping mall, I wanna have air conditioning, I wanna have all the, all the nice healthcare, all the things that we have. So it's kind of a luxury belief to, to think that we could like overthrow this, uh, the system that we have.

• 33:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, instead of overthrow, I'm just curious how, how it works. It's, it's just, it seems, again, circular, but I think you're right, that there is a circularity to, to economies.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  It's, uh, well, it's the same eco in economy as in ecosystem. Like, it's the same Greek root, you know, and you could think of an ecosystem where in fact, one of the principles of the environmental movement is, hey, don't men, don't mess with complex systems that you don't understand, uh, because you might disturb it. You don't want, you don't want this one species, even though it's annoying, like I'd like to, personally like to see us eradicate poison ivy from the face of the earth, because I'm highly allergic and I hate this stuff. But it's probably a bad idea, because you don't know what other cascading effects that that creates and the, you know, other animals that are eating the poison ivy, that maybe they go extinct, etc. So it's a very similar principle that can be applied to economics and, and the economy. It's like, hey, you don't really understand the system that, no one really understands it all.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  It's a very complex adaptive system, multivariate, it doesn't subject itself easily to science. Like, science loves to isolate a variable. It's kind of the way it works is like, let's isolate this variable and see what its impact is. But if everything is connected to everything, the scientific method doesn't really have worked for that. You need, you need, maybe machine learning can start to handle the, the degree of complexity, but it's basically beyond the realm of us, of our simple brains to understand. We can, in, in, at a detailed level, we can kind of get a grasp, grocking of it in a holistic view, but.

• 34:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Where in El Salvador did you live?

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Uh, in, um, Santa Marta. I didn't really live there. I spent a couple of months there.

• 35:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  What were you doing there?

• 35:01Speaker 02

  I was a tour guide.

• 35:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Really?

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's a former, um, actually it's interesting, a former, uh, El Santa Marta was one of the like homes of the guerrilla movement during the civil war in El Salvador. The FMLN, uh, was, I mean, it was kind of this guerrilla village and we, we would do tours down there to meet the, they meet the people, sleep, hang out, live in there, uh, cinder block houses, et cetera. And, um, yeah, it's, it was kind of interesting. This was back in my early twenties.

• 35:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's a beautiful country. What do you think about the Bitcoin experiment?

• 35:38Speaker 02

  Hope it works out for them. I, I like the boldness of it all, but the bet, you know, timing is not being great.

• 35:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I mean, I was more bullish on it and thought that there were some real uses and I still think there's some real uses, but geez, um, probably not doing very well. Especially given that they bought so much crypto at the, at the peak.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Relative to their GDP. I mean, I think the more interesting thing that El Salvador has been really forward looking on currency is they just adopted the US dollar. That's actually the, the national currency of the country. They don't have the, I forget what the old El Salvadorian currencies to be called, but, um, but the, the reason I think that's amazing for them is that 20% of their GDP is money sent back from Salvadorans living in the United States. Well, if you're 20% of your GDP is from, uh, in US dollar generated, you don't really want to pay currency conversion fees on it, on 20% of GDP. So just adopt the dollar, uh, and you get, you get a sounder currency as well. So I think that they've been kind of like, you know, everyone talks about the Bitcoin experiment, but the US dollar experiment was pretty radical and, and I think has really paid off for the country.

• 36:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and also in Ecuador, the dollarization there, their currency had been notoriously unstable. And going to the dollar actually caused a tremendous amount of pain at the outset. People saw lots of their household wealth disappear overnight. But I would say, having been there recently, a lot of people are quite happy that they're now on the dollar. But of course, there's other problems with it, which is that the US now has a lot of control.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, these things are hard to do, and I'm glad I don't have to be a policy maker. And I'm not as clear with the Ecuadorian economy. I don't know, I doubt they're nearly as dependent on remittances from the United States as El Salvador is. Because El Salvador has, these stats are a little old, I haven't been as fully as close to it, but 5 million people and a million of them are in the United States. So it's like, you know, 6 million total Salvadorans in the world, and kind of like, almost 20% of the whole population lives in the United States. They're much more, I suspect they're much more connected to the US economy than Ecuador is.

• 37:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and this is a nice little segue for, you know, a moment to think about globalization. Because, you know, you had talked about how like it increased prosperity all over the world, and now we're at a moment where a lot of that seems to be rolling, well, yeah, rolling back. I mean, we see what's happening with the US and China starting to move away from each other. And of course, there was the Russia issue, and we had another good Twitter question from Brooks Bergreen, who said, you know, what do you think global supply chains are going to look like in 20 years out, factoring in geopolitical tensions and deglobalization trends?

• 38:13Speaker 02

  This will be the great issue of our lifetimes, I think, is whether we hold the system together and allow for any country to trade with any other country, any company to find its best supplier anywhere in the world, find customers anywhere in the world, or do we move to a much more Balkanized world where you sort of have less trade and people buying things more locally and not able to find cheaper sources or better customers elsewhere? And it does seem that all the trends are in that direction. Politically, nationalism is on the rise. We things, we learned a lot of lessons from this COVID and supply chain resiliency and said,

• 38:56Speaker 02

  hey, we maybe we should be buying things more in our neighborhood, if not locally in the United States, but in Latin America rather than in Asia. And so we're gonna, that, that, that is, that does seem to be the trend. And I think it's worrisome from my standpoint, not just because, of course, my business is all about trade and shipping things globally, but because if you look at the last 50 years, we lifted a billion people out of poverty, across a lot in China, but India, throughout Asia, throughout the world. The, it's, it's really, we like to report on all the doom and gloom in the world, but you could also have written every single day for the last four, 30 years, you could have written the headline, 100,000 people lifted out of poverty today. But no, you know, that headline didn't get written once. And, and so

• 39:40Speaker 02

  reversing that in the same way that you have this boom on the way up, the reverse can be really, really painful. America is reasonably well positioned for this. America, meaning the United States, reasonably well positioned in that we are self sufficient in food and energy, have most of the raw materials that we need. We depend on trade less than almost any other country on planet Earth from a percentage of GDP standpoint. It's really other countries depend on US consumers and, and our dynamic economy. And yet, it's not a zero sum game. So, America is going to do better relative to everybody else if we de-globalize, but we will do worse than if we hadn't de-globalized. Trade makes both

• 40:22Speaker 02

  parties better off. And then losing sight of that, I think, is really dangerous for the world and will likely lead to pain.

• 40:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Where do you think we're heading? I mean, we do have, like, you know, that's theoretical, but we do have concrete movements away from globalization in many parts of the world.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  It seems to be where we're heading, yeah.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  What, to what timeline and what degree is the, is the big open question? And, and what are the, what are the counterforces? Is there anybody out there who's advocating for it? Not many. I think I'm one of the few who feel often left alone. I mean, our mission at Flexport is to make global trade easy for everybody. So we will always be a voice that's pro, supportive of trade and trying to show people that it's not obvious that both parties are made better off when, when they trade with each other voluntarily, but it- Sort of tautological when you think about it that you wouldn't do the trade if you weren't better off. So let's uh but it's also trade, you know, it's underappreciated, but trade has really depended on the US Navy. The US Navy has guaranteed freedom of navigation and made it so that cargo ships can call anywhere in the world and and and go circulate

• 41:24Speaker 02

  without worrying about pirates or foreign navies attacking them. And if the US Navy and the United States government loses interest in that and doesn't want to police the seas and and cargo ships, all it takes a couple of cargo ships getting blown up to end trade in a region because you can't ensure it. Nobody, nobody in their right mind wants to sail through the region if they're getting attacked. So you saw this with Russia and Ukraine. There was one, maybe two cargo ships that got hit by missiles and all trade in the north end of the Black Sea has ceased. Uh, no more maritime, no more shipping in that region. Um, so it's pretty precarious. I don't think we recognize how fragile this global order is that was created after World War II.

• 42:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  How does your company adjust or prepare for that possibility?

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Um, well, we not, you know, some, some, you, you, you work on the things that you can control to a large degree. Um, and so we're, we are developing more capabilities for things with trade in our own neighborhoods. So we've been investing in Latin America, being able to United States trade, US trade, our biggest trading partners are Mexico and Canada. We've got offices in Canada. I suspect, uh, our roadmap has us opening offices in Mexico. I'm not sure if 23 is on the timeline or the year after. We'll see, which it tends to be a talent problem as much as anything, but building up capabilities to support trade uh within those regions. And um, just overall being, being adaptive, we want to be the most agile company in the world, understanding what happens in real time so that we can,

• 42:52Speaker 02

  we can, we can act against it. I, a lot of these headlines are overblown. You know, trade with China was bigger than ever last year.

• 42:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Oh, interesting.

• 43:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Interesting. Okay, a couple more for you before we have to head out. First of all, tough time in the public markets right now. How enticing is IPO and being a public company to you?

• 43:12Speaker 02

  So, we thought about going public in the boom. So much pressure from investors told me, "Just do it. Man up and do it. Don't be scared. You can go public." A lot of our, some of my close advisors internally wanted to go public and I started to question whether that was really the best for the company or best for their own personal shareholders. Like, a little bit tricky because I've never had to question that before, but I just strongly disagreed with a lot of the forces that were people putting pressure on me. I didn't think we were ready. I thought also that the capital markets were overheated and I didn't want to go public. If I was like in it for the quick buck, go public, sell some shares, life is great. But I was looking at future me and going, "Well, and then we're going to have, when capital markets come down, when freight markets restore sanity,

• 43:56Speaker 02

  we will not be the darling and I'll still be the CEO and still be suffering."

• 44:02Speaker 02

  I feel very smart impression about that. We raised enough capital beginning of last, beginning of this year, we put, we raised $935 million. So, we are really well-funded and can stay private for as long as we want. I think internally, it's less about capital markets at this point. I mean, you're going to be valued at what you're going to be valued at. We frankly just weren't ready internally. We've got a lot of work to do to earn the kind of valuation. You know, like your private market and to an extent also public market, your valuation is always, it's never like, "What are you worth today?" It's, there's some, what is the probability that you're going to be worth 10 times that amount and that probability is worth something? You know, and a private, earlier-stage company tends to have more of its valuation tied to that probability. Whereas a mature company has been around for 100 years, like the probability is really small

• 44:47Speaker 02

  and it's not, that's not actually meaningfully impacting its valuation. It's like based on today's free cash flow. And Flexport's valuation is largely driven, I wouldn't say largely, we're a good company, we're profitable last year, but a lot of our valuation is like, "Hey, if we really crush, we're the, we're the leading technology platform for global trade." That's a huge market. The biggest player in our market has 2% share and we're still about one tenth their size. If we crush it, we could be 10 times their size. What would that company be worth? It would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And if there's a 10% probability of that, then you know, you get an elevated valuation. So we have to increase that probability a lot. And I think as you go public, people are giving you less credit for future stuff. That's not what

• 45:32Speaker 02

  their venture capitalists are in the business of like, understanding what's possible rather than what's present today. And I think public market investors are much more focused on the next couple of quarters or next couple of years at the best. So we got a lot of work to do to make that, to bring that story to life and make it so people can believe in it.

• 45:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and it has been such a roller coaster for companies on the public market recently. You look at Peloton, right? I mean, I'm not comparing you guys to Peloton, obviously very different companies, but you know, their stock has been down 90, 91, 92%. Are they one tenth of the company they were? Likely not. There was this, you know, up and down movement, even a company like Meta right now is down 71% on the year. Are they one third of the company?

• 46:14Speaker 02

  Everybody went public last year, regrets it pretty much if they had a choice.

• 46:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  And one of the things that I think maybe I might be, you know, assuming here, but I imagine that one of the things that, you know, that this has enabled you to do is not lay off this year. And in fact, you're looking at, I think, what, double headcount or double new employee adds? Like, talk about what it's like to be hiring now.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  It's really in our engineering department where we're, where we're going to double the size of the engineering team. We're going to have to be really lean in other parts of the business and look very closely at all our costs and like, keep things in line. We've had a hiring freeze in the rest outside of tech already for many months. And, but it's, we believe deeply, regardless of what's happening in the short term, in the long-term secular trend of like, technology is going to transform global trade and global logistics. And regardless of whether trade comes down a lot or not, like, we are today like 0.1% of global trade. We're tiny. So even if it got cut in half, like, Flexport can still become a massive, massive company. So none of the macro trends, whether it's capital markets, freight markets, global trade,

• 47:19Speaker 02

  really matter that much on the long term. We're still deep believers that technology is going to transform this space. And we see so much potential and yet like, you know, look internally at our teams. We've got like amazing areas of the business that have great business plans, that have funding and that just don't have a team or like have two engineers when 12 could transform the nature of our product on that one team. You're like, why don't you have 12 engineers? So we just looked at it and said, hey, this is the moment everybody's cutting their engineering hiring. We're really well capitalized. Um, we've got 1.6 billion in cash. Uh, we were profitable last year. Let's go, let's go lean into the tech hiring. But the rest of the company, we've got to look very closely at like, are we overstaffed? Or we have the right amount of staff doing the right things? Do people have the right KPIs?

• 48:04Speaker 02

  So it's, you know, it's not a, um, it's a, it's a difficult moment to manage for every, for everybody. I don't think Flexport's immune from that.

• 48:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And you, you also, speaking of hiring, you brought on a new co-CEO, uh, Dave Clark from Amazon. So a couple of questions about that, then we can, uh, we can wrap up. Uh, first of all, what was it about, about Dave, uh, that, that made you want to bring him in? And what, what's the deal about, um, yeah, what's the deal? Like having a, a co-CEO? That's kind of an interesting, uh, decision. So why did you do that? And I'll point out, and I didn't give him this nickname, but Dave's nickname at Amazon was the sniper. So it's kind of an interesting, uh, type of nickname to carry. So I'm kind of curious if you can answer that one.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, people who actually worked with Dave were called him like a big teddy bear. So I think, I think it's a bit of a, uh, unfair nickname.

• 48:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  Doesn't super, he's not, definitely not, uh, embracing that one. Um, Dave, uh, Dave, there's probably nobody on planet earth. There were like maybe two or three people on earth that I would hire to be the CEO of Flexport. Like I actually really liked the job. I think I'm pretty good at it. Uh, there's, but I have real weaknesses and I was trying to compensate for those weaknesses by hiring a really strong number two, like a COO to run operations. I'm not. You know, the act of running a company like Flexport, maybe it's true of any big company, but certainly in logistics, is like all about day-to-day progress and getting a little bit better at the thing you did yesterday. Like for us, it's can we improve the transit time of our containers or our air freight by a little bit every single day? Can we look

• 49:35Speaker 02

  at what caused, and it's statistical studies of, okay, let's look at all the transit times for all the containers on this trade lane, look at the outliers that took too long, figure out what went wrong, do this sort of deep root cause analysis and make sure that doesn't happen again. And kind of like, it's real operational intensive, heavily in the metrics. It's not my thing. I'm more like creator, create new products. I like the technology. I love being in the, looking at the product area. How can we make this user experience better? How can we be a growth company, get in front of more customers, launch in new regions, et cetera? My core skill set is like, actually not the main thing that Flexport needs. So I was like, all right, trying to hire a COO. I basically caught a whale, where Dave's like the best tech and logistics guy on planet Earth. You

• 50:20Speaker 02

  won't find someone with a better experience and more love of the game than Dave. And it's kind of a generational leadership change happening at Amazon with Bezos leaving, Jeff Wilkie, who was Dave's longtime boss, leaving. There was just a little bit of, there was an opportunity that was created by some of those changes where Dave was, for the first time in 20 something years, looked open to a conversation. And I didn't think it would really happen, but. And then, again, I was trying to hire a COO, and then I, once Dave and I started talking, I started reflecting personally. I was like, which department would I run and what would Dave run? How are we going to divide this up? And I actually couldn't find a department that I thought I'd be better at running than Dave. And so we ultimately settled on the idea that I'm going to be exec chairman and Dave will be

• 51:04Speaker 02

  CEO. I'm still going to work at Flexport every day and still be available, but actually be more available for, hey, for things like this, or speak at a conference, go meet an investor, go meet a customer, and less like, I gotta be in every meeting managing the metrics day-to-day. So that, right now, we're co-CEOs, but in March, Dave becomes CEO and I step up to exec chairman.

• 51:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is he already having you write six pages for meetings or is that something that will come later?

• 51:30Speaker 02

  So we've adopted that three years ago.

• 51:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Really?

• 51:34Speaker 02

  It's been a relatively easy transition because we look at our top 60 people, 28 of them came from Amazon.

• 51:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  We've leaned into that unapologetically. We think Amazon's the best logistics company in the world, certainly the best tech plus logistics company. And it's kind of hard to find people with that experience. We've hired a lot of people out of there.

• 51:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Fascinating. Yeah, that for those who aren't ready, although I'm sure many listeners are, that Amazon meetings start where people who are going to run the meeting instead of like doing a PowerPoint and kind of talk, bullshitting their way through, you know, presentation, they'll write basically six pages worth of information about how this project will, will work, let you visualize it, everybody sits down, reads it, and then the meetings start. Do you guys do do silent meetings also?

• 52:16Speaker 02

  We do this as well. Yeah. You can never go back once you do it. My problem with PowerPoints is too bold. Like one is that the power, whenever I ask a question, I'm like, oh, I'll get to that. It's like, it's like three slides from now. And I'm like, well, what like, let's just talk about it. Why do I have to wait? Like, you know, it's much easier to fake kind of competency. You throw some nice graphics up there or something and very hard to fake it when you're writing. And then it gets everyone on the same page. And I find that smart people, given the same information, agree with each other 99% of the time. Like most disagreements from smart people come when they just have different information. But actually, the 1% where they have the same information and they disagree is like, you spend all your time on that. Like, that's the interesting part. Like, so it allows that kind of much, to me, much higher quality of discussion.

• 52:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Very cool. Ryan Peterson, thanks so much for joining.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you.

• 53:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thank you, everybody, for listening. We've got two great shows coming up next. We have Peggy Johnson, CEO of Magic Leap, and Aaron Levy of Box is going to be on within the next couple of weeks. So make sure to subscribe if this is your first time here. We have some really good shows coming through. If you've been here for a while and want to give us a rating, five stars goes a long way on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Thank you, Nate Glatton, for mastering the audio. Thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. And thanks again to all of you, the listeners. Appreciate you coming back week after week, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.