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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Ryan Petersen** (0:53)
The US post-World War II kind of established this order that said, you can just send a ship wherever you want, and the US Navy will provide freedom of navigation. Maybe the US Navy can't provide that guarantee anymore. Oil is not just about pumping your gas in your car. It's part of so many different products. 30% of the world's helium comes from Qatar. You can't make semiconductors without it. You can't launch SpaceX rockets without helium. It is existential, I think, how all of the economy functions. Every company is interconnected with everybody else. And if you stop that, you end up in a much darker place.

**Bob Safian** (1:40)
That's Ryan Petersen, CEO of Global Trade Platform Flexport, and our repeat guest on this show. Ryan's been dubbed Tech's Hurricane Reporter for Global Trade, and with the Strait of Hormuz essentially blocked and the price of oil soaring, I wanted to get his real-time view of the on-the-ground and on-the-water impacts. We also talk about the prospect of tariff refunds after the Supreme Court's ruling against the Trump Administration, and more. It's serious stuff, but Ryan's sense of humor keeps it fresh. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response. I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport. Ryan, good to see you. Welcome back to the show.

**Ryan Petersen** (2:32)
It's great to be here.

**Bob Safian** (2:33)
Do you have to check your, like you get up on Monday morning, you're like, what happened today in the trade? Or is it, you don't even have to wait. You're getting woken up in the middle of the night with all the changes.

**Ryan Petersen** (2:44)
I do tend to wake up in the middle of the night and check, but that's just like my insomnia. It does not be because of work, but it does seem to be like every single day, multiple times a day, there's new news. And by the time this airs, everything may change.

**Bob Safian** (2:59)
The attacks on Iran have, they've effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most critical sort of oil choke point. Oil prices up, ship stranded, global shipping kind of in limbo. So I know this is changing as we speak, but from what you can see at Flexport, like what does the traffic jam look like? What's the snapshot of right now?

**Ryan Petersen** (3:23)
The big story, of course, here is oil and energy, generally natural gas, which all of that, I think that's pretty well covered out there in the media that the prices have been spiking and shortage is starting to appear. Places like Australia, which is very energy rich, but doesn't produce a lot of oil is running out of diesel and moving towards a world where they're not, they're just not going to have enough fuel. Their secondary things are less well covered, which are maybe even more impactful around fertilizer. That's actually probably a more important story here. It's planting season and if those don't come to market, you're going to have big, big, big problems in the food production of the world. Container shipping is not that impacted actually. Just because the Persian Gulf is a cul-de-sac, you don't really need to go in there. Air freight is a bigger deal. The Middle Eastern Airlines own somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of all the cargo airline capacity, depending on what source you look at. Dubai is the biggest cargo airport in the world. Huge amounts of planes that go from Asia to Europe, make stop over there to refuel and it's a hub for transshipment of cargo. So there you've seen the price of air freight double in the last since the war started. Even in it's even up 50 to 60 percent on trades that would seemingly have nothing to do with that like Vietnam to the US across the Pacific, air freight prices have gone up 50 percent. I saw the United Airlines CEO said that they're modeling that this is going to cost 11 billion dollars of fuel expense.