Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway. So, Tracy, we've
Speaker 1: been talking about supply chain disruptions, shortages, etcetera. For so
Speaker 1: long now it seems that we're now sort of at
Speaker 1: the point where we need to start getting updates. I
Speaker 1: think from the first people that we spoke to about
Speaker 1: the problem many months ago, we've come full circle by
Speaker 1: not really improving at all. Um, Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think so we started looking into these issues, well,
Speaker 1: if you include semiconductors and the sort of squeeze we've
Speaker 1: seen in semi conductor production, we started looking into this
Speaker 1: in and then of course we have the global pandemic
Speaker 1: in early and that just kicked off all sorts of
Speaker 1: additional supply chain and transportation gridlock issues. We've been examining
Speaker 1: those one by one by one, and we've had a
Speaker 1: lot of people come on the show, well maybe not
Speaker 1: a lot, but a few people come on the show
Speaker 1: who have predicted that at some point, you know, hopefully
Speaker 1: it gets better. And yet here we are more than
Speaker 1: a year later, and it seems like things are not
Speaker 1: only not getting better, they're actually getting worse. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: kind of the wild parts. So like we've actually been
Speaker 1: the logistical aspects of the pandemic. We're kind of the
Speaker 1: way we started. But then since the global economies have
Speaker 1: really like sort of reopened like really in the spring,
Speaker 1: and suddenly that's when all these things started piling up.
Speaker 1: And we talked about you know, tanker rates and freight
Speaker 1: rates and what's going on at the porch, were like,
Speaker 1: all right, yeah, but okay, it's gonna ease. When what's
Speaker 1: it gonna take the ease? And when when will we
Speaker 1: see so called normalization? And here we are early October,
Speaker 1: and I think the verdict is that not only has
Speaker 1: there not been any sort of quote normalization unquote and
Speaker 1: supply chains, it seems to be getting worse, Like almost
Speaker 1: every measure, Like if you were to just look at
Speaker 1: like how many ports are docked outside the Port of
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, it's more today than when we did like
Speaker 1: a Port of Los Angeles episode back early in the summer. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what I just said. I thought, Um, but
Speaker 1: this is I mean, look, we love talking about supply
Speaker 1: chain issues, and um, this also gives us a chance
Speaker 1: to revisit one of my favorite economic concepts, which is
Speaker 1: the bul whip effect and the idea that you know,
Speaker 1: a small fluctuation in supply and demand can reverberate across
Speaker 1: supply chains and just get worse and worse and worse.
Speaker 1: So I think this is going to be a good episode,
Speaker 1: and it's always good to revisit these, uh, these topics.
Speaker 1: So we are, as a noted in the beginning, we're
Speaker 1: at the point where we now have to go back
Speaker 1: to guests that we talked about to get their perspective
Speaker 1: of how things have gotten worse. So I'm very excited
Speaker 1: to welcome back on the show, Ryan Peterson. He is
Speaker 1: the founder and CEO of the firm flex Port, which
Speaker 1: helps companies deal with their logistical and shipping issues. So Ryan,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's great to be back. I wish we were back
Speaker 1: to celebrate our success and fixing the world's logistical problems,
Speaker 1: but we're not there yet. Well, we'll have you back on,
Speaker 1: you know, in five when we achieved the true normalization.
Speaker 1: But you know, I just looked it up, so it's October,
Speaker 1: early October. We had you on in May. So it's
Speaker 1: actually five months now since we've spoken, So why don't
Speaker 1: you just sort of give us your very like sort
Speaker 1: of brief description of what's happened in the last five
Speaker 1: months since we've talked to you. Yeah. So, what flex
Speaker 1: Sport does, by the way, is we help company ship
Speaker 1: cargo all over the world, and we have a technology
Speaker 1: platform to make this really easy to connect importers with
Speaker 1: exporters and with all the world's asset owners that ship stuff.
Speaker 1: So we're we're like from I sometimes cause a backstage
Speaker 1: pass to the world's economy. We see everything, we're in
Speaker 1: there and we're fighting through all the frictions. So what
Speaker 1: we've seen in the last five months, in the last
Speaker 1: more than a year, really is I think the way
Speaker 1: you might call it, the best analogy might be a
Speaker 1: traffic gym or another one of my engineer said, it's
Speaker 1: like a distributed denial of service ad DOS attack on
Speaker 1: on global trade is you started with just too many
Speaker 1: containers being shipped, and ad DOS attack in in the
Speaker 1: world of websites is when too many bots hit a server,
Speaker 1: hit a computer and the computer just overloads and shuts down,
Speaker 1: and you kind of almost have that at the ports
Speaker 1: where the volume of containers the amount of cargo being
Speaker 1: shipped shipped went up. Weard looking at about a depends
Speaker 1: on the month, but about a twenty percent and on
Speaker 1: the port, but about increase and container volumes over twenty
Speaker 1: levels over pre pandemic levels, which is really extraordinary. Like
Speaker 1: people who work in the software industry, that is no problem.
Speaker 1: Your systems can easily grow in a week if it
Speaker 1: needs to support just we just don't have the added trout.
Speaker 1: But there's a lot of manual work involved or physical
Speaker 1: assets that need to move growing in such a short
Speaker 1: time frame. Our infrastructure is just not made for that.
Speaker 1: And by the way, the reason that volumes went up
Speaker 1: so much what looks like is pretty clear in the
Speaker 1: data that consumers shifted their spend from going out and
Speaker 1: spying services and restaurants too to buy more stuff. Um
Speaker 1: and we joked about that last time that you can
Speaker 1: be you can be a patriot by going to a
Speaker 1: bar tonight. Try to fix this problem. So what happened
Speaker 1: with this traffic jam is you've got now so many
Speaker 1: containers flowing through that you get literal traffic jams. Trucks
Speaker 1: trying to get to the port are in waiting for
Speaker 1: hours and hours. It's taking truck drivers, you know, many
Speaker 1: many hours to get to get to the container to
Speaker 1: pick up their goods. And it's now happens. What's happened
Speaker 1: is that it used to be a truck driver could
Speaker 1: you two truck loads per day, but now because of
Speaker 1: the traffic, they can only do one. And so now
Speaker 1: you don't have enough trucks the same number of trucks,
Speaker 1: but you're not getting the capacity. And and actually some
Speaker 1: truck drivers are saying, hey, I can make more money
Speaker 1: doing something else than wait here because they get paid
Speaker 1: per load, right, so they make more money doing something else.
Speaker 1: So that's caused the problem on the trucking. Then if
Speaker 1: the containers don't get cleared out of the port, there's
Speaker 1: not enough space to unload containers from the ships because
Speaker 1: the containers have to get unloaded and put in the
Speaker 1: yard somewhere at the port. And there's those are overflowing.
Speaker 1: If you go, if you drive by a port, you'll
Speaker 1: see the stacks of containers are just sky high. And
Speaker 1: so then the containers ships are being docked off shore
Speaker 1: waiting for their turn to unload. And uh, it's a
Speaker 1: complex system it's hard to point it to one problem,
Speaker 1: but it just cascades through the supply chain. You're seeing
Speaker 1: now loading docks in China where if they can't get
Speaker 1: cargo shipped out, then the loading dock, it sits on
Speaker 1: the loading dock. And so wherever you try to solve
Speaker 1: the bottleneck, it seems to just kind of move it
Speaker 1: act one into this kind of bullwhip effect problem that
Speaker 1: you're seeing. One thing you mentioned just on the demand side,
Speaker 1: so you know, during the pandemic, we had a bunch
Speaker 1: of people who were stuck at home and ordering things online,
Speaker 1: ordering stuff from Amazon or whatever. But in the current environment,
Speaker 1: just fast forwarding to now, what's your sense of how
Speaker 1: much of the demand, how much of what's actually getting
Speaker 1: shipped is caused by companies trying to um hoard might
Speaker 1: not be the right word, but trying to boost their
Speaker 1: inventories in anticipation that stuff will be more difficult to get.
Speaker 1: It's hard to say exactly what we are seeing is
Speaker 1: the inventory levels are at all times lows right now,
Speaker 1: um that considerably the inventory to sales ratio is that
Speaker 1: is the one to track there, and it's lower than
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's all time low, but it's
Speaker 1: certainly lower than the less than pre pandemic levels, so
Speaker 1: you know, it's like, yeah, they're trying to repl inventory.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's over ordering or not, but
Speaker 1: that is one of my big fears is that everyone,
Speaker 1: you know, you get scarcity for a long time and
Speaker 1: creates this scarcity mindset and then you overorder and you
Speaker 1: do get that bullet effect. Well, we've done at Flexboard.
Speaker 1: We have a research team and economics team and the
Speaker 1: fascinating stuff that they're doing, and they created this thing
Speaker 1: called the post COVID Indicator, And what they're doing is
Speaker 1: looking at all of the data that we have we
Speaker 1: shipp and probably we're now more than one percent of
Speaker 1: the containers entering the US on the West coast and
Speaker 1: and you know, significant amount on the East coast. And
Speaker 1: they're doing a decent job of trying to strip out
Speaker 1: like sample biases that exist in relatively small data set
Speaker 1: even though it's a lot of containers. But they're studying
Speaker 1: this data to now try to understand what are the
Speaker 1: goods that being shipped and can that the types of
Speaker 1: categories because we have to classify everything to clear it
Speaker 1: through customs. And so we get really interesting data about
Speaker 1: what's being shipped, and they've actually been able to predict
Speaker 1: the personal consumption expenditure of the economy. So the US
Speaker 1: government publishes this data I think every quarter that says
Speaker 1: what percentage of goods are being what percentage spending by
Speaker 1: consumers is on goods versus services, And our data, through
Speaker 1: this work of this economics team, we're able to predict
Speaker 1: it about ninety days in advance of like our people
Speaker 1: going back to buying services or they still spending on goods.
Speaker 1: And what we're seeing is that we predict or at
Speaker 1: least for the next ninety days, which is as far
Speaker 1: forward as we look, the goods are just increasing and
Speaker 1: it's not shifting back towards people buying services. Companies are
Speaker 1: the consumers are buying goods. Therefore companies are, you know,
Speaker 1: buying ore are getting those goods in advance. I don't
Speaker 1: think that's gonna let up until Christmas at least, and
Speaker 1: then we'll kind of see what happens after after we
Speaker 1: get through Christmas season. That that alone is super interesting
Speaker 1: and I guess a little surprising because I guess from
Speaker 1: it just a strictly virus standpoint, it does feel like
Speaker 1: things are more normalized in some respect. You know, the
Speaker 1: restaurant in New York, they're all currently open for both
Speaker 1: outdoor and indoor dining, unlike last year in which the
Speaker 1: sort of school public schools openness was very spotty and inconsistent. Uh,
Speaker 1: schools are open. You know, I gets to be a
Speaker 1: raising some questions of whether there's gonna be like some
Speaker 1: permanent shifts and consumption patterns if we have this sort
Speaker 1: of like kind of normalization of virus patterns and yet
Speaker 1: you're not seeing a real big shift in spending patterns
Speaker 1: in the data. Yeah, I mean that's what our data
Speaker 1: showing right now. And it's been you know, we've been
Speaker 1: pretty good. We haven't been doing this for that long.
Speaker 1: We've been doing it since earlier this year back testing.
Speaker 1: Our model is pretty decent at predicting this thing thus far. Uh,
Speaker 1: And we show it for the next ninety days that
Speaker 1: people are still buying more good of course, remember Christmas
Speaker 1: season is right now, so people are buying lots of
Speaker 1: goods for Christmas. So we'll have to see how it
Speaker 1: plays out after that. But mhm um, So one thing
Speaker 1: we haven't talked about just yet is also the energy
Speaker 1: crisis that we're seeing in Europe, and probably significantly for
Speaker 1: this conversation in China. And you know, I've seen some
Speaker 1: headlines that it's already hitting production of things like iPhones
Speaker 1: and cardboard weirdly and things like that. What's your take
Speaker 1: on how that is going to flow into global supply
Speaker 1: chains and would you expect it to also impact container
Speaker 1: shipping and other forms of transportation. It's very real in China.
Speaker 1: So we've We've had a lot of customers had to
Speaker 1: cancel shipments, hundreds of containers and a single customer where
Speaker 1: the factories just closed. That. I met with a customer
Speaker 1: yesterday in fact too, whose factory can only work two
Speaker 1: days a week during the daytime and they've had to
Speaker 1: shift to nighttime production because of energy rationing in China,
Speaker 1: So that that's very real. I mean, I haven't gotten
Speaker 1: good details like how to predict from here, but I've
Speaker 1: definitely heard it anecdotes from our customers that yes, their
Speaker 1: factories are being rationed on energy and not able to
Speaker 1: work full cycles and it will cut volumes. So that's
Speaker 1: that's another force here that It's just these things are
Speaker 1: such complex systems it's very hard to point to a
Speaker 1: single thing and be like this is the solution or
Speaker 1: this is the cause of the problem. Yeah, so, I
Speaker 1: mean I think actually, and I was just saw a
Speaker 1: chart this morning some of the lines from China to
Speaker 1: the U S some of these indicries that try to
Speaker 1: track and aggregate with the price of shipping a container
Speaker 1: from say China to Los Angeles, they have come down,
Speaker 1: But it doesn't seem like a good reason, Like if
Speaker 1: the reason is that some of these factories have literally
Speaker 1: had to go dark because now the exports are just
Speaker 1: being turned off, That may on the service look like
Speaker 1: a normalization of some sort from a price standpoint, but
Speaker 1: certainly not a normalization from a sort of like we
Speaker 1: want the system to be working standpoint. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it might normalize logistics prices, but and logistics prices are
Speaker 1: gonna are flowing through to higher prices, like are the
Speaker 1: customer I met with yesterday said that because of the
Speaker 1: high price of freight, they were having to raise the
Speaker 1: price of their good which are sort of like home
Speaker 1: improvement goods. That there are things that are sold through
Speaker 1: home depot and they had to raise their prices. That
Speaker 1: was the impact of the high prices on freight that
Speaker 1: was passing through to the end consumer. That's just the freight.
Speaker 1: But there's a second piece, which is if you're the
Speaker 1: only person that managed to get your product, the only
Speaker 1: company that managed to get your products through, or there's
Speaker 1: just less products coming through their scarcity, and that will
Speaker 1: naturally raise the prices on its own, not just passing
Speaker 1: through the logistics costs, but just hey, you're the only
Speaker 1: person that has this product, you can raise the price.
Speaker 1: And so if less things are coming out of China
Speaker 1: because factories are shutting down, those that do come out
Speaker 1: are going to be worth more and you'll see inflation
Speaker 1: from that. So you mentioned people passing on higher US
Speaker 1: onto customers, and I'm wondering what else can companies or
Speaker 1: you know, importers actually do to try to offset some
Speaker 1: of these issues. So, you know, when we spoke to you, uh,
Speaker 1: initially earlier this year, these were still kind of newish issues.
Speaker 1: Everyone was trying to wrap their heads around it. And
Speaker 1: now we've had you know, almost a year of this,
Speaker 1: it feels like companies maybe should be getting better at
Speaker 1: managing some of these risks, and maybe transportation companies should
Speaker 1: be getting better at managing some of these risks, and
Speaker 1: yet it feels like we're still struggling. There's there's a
Speaker 1: few things you can do to offset risk, but there's
Speaker 1: no silver bullets, and there's no like, no way to
Speaker 1: forecast where prices go. I mean, what what you see.
Speaker 1: The number one and simplest thing that we recommend is
Speaker 1: go sit with your factory and you probably can't go
Speaker 1: there in person, but make sure you get them, really
Speaker 1: go deep with them and make sure that they're loading
Speaker 1: your container to the brim a cross to our customer base.
Speaker 1: We look and we we use machine learning to digitize
Speaker 1: the packing list. So this is the document that tells
Speaker 1: you what's in the container, and it has the dimensions
Speaker 1: of every carton in there and so by it would
Speaker 1: be a really slow process if you did it by hand,
Speaker 1: going through and doing the geometry of how full these
Speaker 1: containers are, but with our software it's trivial. And what
Speaker 1: we find is that actually, on average they're only sevent full.
Speaker 1: That's just a huge opportunity, a huge amount of waste
Speaker 1: for shipping air in a moment where you can't get
Speaker 1: more containers on the ship, we can't get more containers
Speaker 1: through the ports, but we can put more stuff inside
Speaker 1: the containers. That's that's simple, and that's the very first step.
Speaker 1: It's like, really go and you might we have people
Speaker 1: who are re engineering their packaging to kind of optimize
Speaker 1: the dimensions, make stuff ship smaller. Like your cartons themselves,
Speaker 1: there's often wasted space inside the carton. You've seen companies
Speaker 1: have gotten much better at this, like your iPhone or
Speaker 1: you know, these boxes now getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
Speaker 1: And that's that's the big reason why it saves a
Speaker 1: lot on logistics costs when you do that. Um second,
Speaker 1: you're starting to see the first long term deals in
Speaker 1: global logistics, where the first I think in history. I
Speaker 1: mean typically freight is purchased on an annual cycle, where
Speaker 1: you every May, every April May timeframe. These companies run
Speaker 1: an annual bid and they choose their freight provider for
Speaker 1: the next year, and they do a one year contract.
Speaker 1: And now you're starting to see for the first time
Speaker 1: people signing two and three year deals and those that's
Speaker 1: that's never happened before. It's pretty interesting. You're you're really
Speaker 1: you are taking some real risk. What you're basically doing
Speaker 1: is saying, hey, we'll pay well, we'll guarantee, we'll do
Speaker 1: a three year contract, and we got we want lower
Speaker 1: prices this year, and then we'll pay you above historical
Speaker 1: market rates for the year two and three. It's very
Speaker 1: hard to know what the price goes to. And the
Speaker 1: other big trend here is enforceable contracts. So logistics contracts
Speaker 1: have never really been contracts the way I understand a contract,
Speaker 1: which is like you must do the thing that you
Speaker 1: said you were going to do, And that's not really
Speaker 1: how it works in global logistics, where you sign a
Speaker 1: contract and sort of like an agreement and handshake, and
Speaker 1: if you don't follow through. So like someone says they're
Speaker 1: gonna ship a thousand containers and pay five thousand dollars
Speaker 1: per container, that was like a kind of a pretty
Speaker 1: awesome contract if you signed it last year, or if
Speaker 1: you signed it earlier this year, because of course the
Speaker 1: spot rate went to fifteen to twenty thou and you
Speaker 1: have this five thousand dollar contract to ship that container
Speaker 1: or ship those containers. But if the ocean carrier can
Speaker 1: just sort of say, hey, I'm not gonna load you
Speaker 1: at this price, so yeah, you have this contract, but
Speaker 1: I don't have to load your container on this day,
Speaker 1: and so you had all these contracts that were broken
Speaker 1: this year. And I mean, if if that was me
Speaker 1: and I signed that contract as a as an importer,
Speaker 1: I would probably not sign the contract again if you
Speaker 1: broke it. And so people are starting for the first
Speaker 1: time to do what the ocean carriers have always wanted
Speaker 1: but never been able to make happen, which is make
Speaker 1: these contracts and possible because of course it often goes
Speaker 1: the other way where you signed the contract at five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars and then the price went to four and
Speaker 1: then the importer says, yeah, you know what, I know,
Speaker 1: I have that contract, but I'm not gonna I'll just
Speaker 1: ship with somebody else who's offering me for it. Actually
Speaker 1: probably is progress to make these things enforceable and say like, no,
Speaker 1: you have to ship. If you don't ship a container,
Speaker 1: you owe us money anyways, And that's not how the
Speaker 1: industry has works. So I think that's the last thing
Speaker 1: sustainable change that you're gonna see from this is a
Speaker 1: real move towards enforceable contracts, which to my view is
Speaker 1: a good thing. Like I never when I first I've
Speaker 1: been in this industry almost a decade now, and I
Speaker 1: when I realized that contracts weren't enforceable, I was like,
Speaker 1: I just don't understand, Like, what is a contract that's
Speaker 1: not enforceable? Well, well, no, I was just I was
Speaker 1: just gonna say, like, this is kind of the thing
Speaker 1: that I think, Ryan, I first learned from you in
Speaker 1: the spring, and it's informed a lot of the thinking
Speaker 1: that's helped subsequent episodes on This is just how loose
Speaker 1: the industry has all seemed. And it's like, do you
Speaker 1: know a guy and do you know like you know,
Speaker 1: so is it? Do you know someone in Copenhagen who
Speaker 1: can get your get your box on the on the
Speaker 1: ship or do not and etcetera. And I think that
Speaker 1: really surprised me. And even like in some of our
Speaker 1: other discussions like trucking, etcetera, how sort of informal a
Speaker 1: lot of these arrangements are, how many of these deals
Speaker 1: are like other someone goes on a message board or
Speaker 1: like a WhatsApp group and says like, is there someone
Speaker 1: who can pick up this and this city and get
Speaker 1: it to this city? Overall, I've been sort of surprised
Speaker 1: by how like sort of loose and informal are sort
Speaker 1: of this highly fragile global shipping global logistic systems is
Speaker 1: I think we all imagine, like, you know, go to
Speaker 1: your nearest light switch and flip it on, and it's
Speaker 1: just so reliable. And what you're actually doing when you
Speaker 1: flip that light switches there's a power plant somewhere that's
Speaker 1: actually getting a little generating a little bit more power
Speaker 1: just for you. Like you're actually controlling an enormous machine somewhere,
Speaker 1: and there's this incredibly complex automated electrical rid that's providing
Speaker 1: you that power. And I think we imagine that when
Speaker 1: we buy something, there's the same sort of thing that
Speaker 1: must be happening. It's like this automated system that's all
Speaker 1: connected and orders automatically placed back to the factory and
Speaker 1: there's but in fact, it's like a bunch of people
Speaker 1: on phones and shipping pieces of paper around the world,
Speaker 1: duct taping forwarding emails. And I often joke it it
Speaker 1: should we call our industry freight forwarding, but I'm like,
Speaker 1: it should be called freight email forwarding because you're just
Speaker 1: kind of shuffling PDFs around the world trying to make
Speaker 1: things happen. Yeah, that's one thing I learned from when
Speaker 1: I was trying to send that Teddy Bear by containership
Speaker 1: is just like the amount of emails that that you
Speaker 1: have to send, and then you you get cced into
Speaker 1: some responses, and it's just like one person in the
Speaker 1: logistics chain talking to another person in the logistics chain,
Speaker 1: and it just goes on and on and on um.
Speaker 1: But just going back to what companies can do to
Speaker 1: handle this, have you seen anyone sort of reshuffling um
Speaker 1: their product offerings in order to incorporate these higher calls
Speaker 1: us or greater headaches of transport? So, for instance, is
Speaker 1: anyone just cutting back on big bulky stuff that doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily have a high profit margin given current costs. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: So people are shifting what if they if they're scarcely
Speaker 1: of what they can ship, They're shipping what we call
Speaker 1: the head skews. So these are just the best products,
Speaker 1: the ones that either sell the most or the highest margin.
Speaker 1: So you're seeing a big shift towards that and taking
Speaker 1: more time to prioritize what witch products do you ship.
Speaker 1: So we're seeing a lot of companies cut back on
Speaker 1: the number of excuse in their catalog and prioritizing the
Speaker 1: ones that where they make the most money the best economics.
Speaker 1: You're also seeing companies opt out and you have a
Speaker 1: classic sort of deadweight loss problem right now where the
Speaker 1: price of freight has gone so high. Actually the ships
Speaker 1: are not all full anymore because you've priced it at
Speaker 1: a level where certain companies, especially furniture industry, where you
Speaker 1: have these, like you said, big bulky stuff that's not
Speaker 1: super high margin, and there there are that's the first
Speaker 1: category we see where people are like, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm just not going to ship it until
Speaker 1: prices come down to the economics don't make sense for me.
Speaker 1: So yes, I've you've seen some of that. Very interesting
Speaker 1: to see that that deadweight lost problem in real life,
Speaker 1: like really explicitly, like, look, that container ship is not
Speaker 1: totally full right there, and yet there's lots of people
Speaker 1: who need to ship stuff, but at that price it
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense for a lot of businesses. It's literally
Speaker 1: that that restaurant is so popular and nobody goes there anymore.
Speaker 1: That that shipping rounde is so popular, nobody uses that anymore.
Speaker 1: You know. The other thing that we've seen, and I
Speaker 1: think these are sort of some new developments. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to remember like what's new since May. But I think
Speaker 1: one of the things we've seen is some of these
Speaker 1: big retailers in the US seem to be going upstream
Speaker 1: in terms of getting more hands on with their shipping
Speaker 1: directly or I don't totally get her chartering their own boats.
Speaker 1: So I think home Depot was early on in this trend.
Speaker 1: There was I think cost Go in their recent earnings
Speaker 1: call from about two weeks ago, made some comments about
Speaker 1: taking control of their own boats. Can you talk to
Speaker 1: us about a little bit about size and the degree
Speaker 1: to which companies that I guess, well, I would say
Speaker 1: have a high level of market power because they're huge
Speaker 1: end retailers like a home Depot or Costco are using
Speaker 1: their market strength to have a degree of control over
Speaker 1: the supply chain that smaller competitors may have a harder time. Yes,
Speaker 1: this is a real trend. It's something we're watching really
Speaker 1: closely and sort of uh, kind of chewing on our
Speaker 1: popcorn here as we figured out. I don't know how
Speaker 1: it's gonna play out, but it's fascinating. So you have
Speaker 1: seen those two companies, Deepot and Costco both charted their
Speaker 1: own boats. It's not they're not going full stack vertically integrated.
Speaker 1: We ship everything ourselves. They're sort of augmenting their capacity,
Speaker 1: making sure that they have the extra enough capacity. I
Speaker 1: want to say we did. Someone did the math on
Speaker 1: it was like maybe five of their total container volume
Speaker 1: for one of those companies that was going to be
Speaker 1: on their own ships. So the interesting thing here is
Speaker 1: first off, going to be fun to watch, Like I
Speaker 1: think it's pretty hard to run one of these ocean carriers.
Speaker 1: It's not a trivial thing to like run your own ships.
Speaker 1: And is if the freight doesn't ship, you still pay
Speaker 1: for it, right the fright, the boat has to go.
Speaker 1: And so actually it's one thing to ship a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand containers a year. And so you get this ship
Speaker 1: that has capacity to move a hundred thousand containers. The
Speaker 1: math looks great on the spreadsheet, but that ship is
Speaker 1: gonna leave like on Tuesday October, you know, whatever the
Speaker 1: date is in October, and if you don't have two
Speaker 1: thousand containers waiting at the port on that day, it
Speaker 1: leaves without your containers. So there's a lot of devil
Speaker 1: in the detail and operational excellence to pull those things off.
Speaker 1: And so you're kind of doing a big start up
Speaker 1: within a company to be able to pull something like
Speaker 1: that off. So that's gonna be interesting to watch how
Speaker 1: they do it. The other the other interesting thing is
Speaker 1: you're kind of competing with your vendors at that point,
Speaker 1: like you're a big ocean carriers. I don't know how
Speaker 1: they're going to react to that, but like you know,
Speaker 1: like wait a minute, that why are you doing my job?
Speaker 1: And how and so that ocean carrier when it comes
Speaker 1: to their time to decide, how do they allocate who
Speaker 1: gets space on their boat? Are they going to prioritize
Speaker 1: home depot or lows right next contract season? And so
Speaker 1: how it doesn't It's these things are have second order
Speaker 1: effects that are really hard to predict. So I'm very
Speaker 1: curious how it all plays out, but i can't. I
Speaker 1: can't make predictions. It's more just eat some popcorn and watch.
Speaker 1: So this is kind of a related question, although maybe
Speaker 1: it's a weird one, but you know, you were talking
Speaker 1: about UM some containers going out when they're not completely full,
Speaker 1: or some capacity UM not being completely taken up on
Speaker 1: ships just because of the higher prices. But is there
Speaker 1: like a secondary market for UM shipping capacity. Like, for instance,
Speaker 1: if I'm a company and exporter who's ending a bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff and I happen to have some space in
Speaker 1: one of my containers, or I don't know, I suddenly
Speaker 1: don't need a certain amount of space on a ship.
Speaker 1: Can I sell that onwards to someone else? There's not
Speaker 1: like a super liquid secondary market that everybody can participate in,
Speaker 1: but freight forwarders themselves. So a company like flex Sport
Speaker 1: is able to do that. So if we if one
Speaker 1: customer cancels and we've got a slot, we can reassign
Speaker 1: that and so we actually have built up this pool
Speaker 1: of cargo. We call this subject to role. So getting
Speaker 1: rolled is like when you fly in a passenger planing
Speaker 1: you get bumped. So being subject to role means, hey,
Speaker 1: you've got a ticket, but you might get bumped. It's
Speaker 1: going to be a cheaper ticket because I can't get
Speaker 1: you the same service level promise you may get in
Speaker 1: this market. You probably will get bumped, but you can
Speaker 1: get slightly cheaper freight. And then that way, if we
Speaker 1: have a cancelation, we have somebody who's like, we can
Speaker 1: always fill in. So that's that's one product that's that's
Speaker 1: out there some of the big ocean carriers have been
Speaker 1: have done pretty large deals with this type of thing,
Speaker 1: where they'll have just this that way that ships never full,
Speaker 1: there's always some backup capacity that they can plug in. UM,
Speaker 1: so that's the thing that exists, and then just generally
Speaker 1: there there's yeah, there's no real secondary market. There's also
Speaker 1: no futures market for this, so you can't like short
Speaker 1: the prices are really high. People are like, oh, the
Speaker 1: price has to come down, but there's no um futures
Speaker 1: market where you can short the price of containers. Again,
Speaker 1: I think without enforceable contracts, would be pretty hard to
Speaker 1: have a futures market. So one of the other things
Speaker 1: that I learned from you and others in this series,
Speaker 1: which again I didn't know anything about at the beginning,
Speaker 1: was that you know, like at the margins, at least,
Speaker 1: the disruption and air travel has put more strain on
Speaker 1: ships because even on a sort of commercial passenger flight,
Speaker 1: there's some space reserved for commercial cargo, and with fewer
Speaker 1: planes flying around the world due to the virus, that's
Speaker 1: a diminished capacity. We do seem to have bounced back
Speaker 1: a bit on passenger recreational leisure trail well, but definitely
Speaker 1: not business travel, which is a big part of the market.
Speaker 1: And I think there's a lot of ambiguity about when,
Speaker 1: if ever they will return to normal. How much is
Speaker 1: that still? Uh sort of I guess just crouping overall
Speaker 1: logistical supply right now. Actually, people know, I feel like
Speaker 1: flex sports better known for ocean freight, but we're bigger
Speaker 1: in the air front than we are in ocean in
Speaker 1: terms of market, in terms of market shore um and
Speaker 1: on the air side, what we're seeing is, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: there's customers. You know, passengers are coming back, but on
Speaker 1: very different lanes and different it's not business travel and
Speaker 1: it's not going to Asia. And that's where the cargo
Speaker 1: capacity comes from. And the air cargo markets one one
Speaker 1: of the more fascinating markets from an economic standpoint, because
Speaker 1: your supply of air cargo is driven by passenger travel,
Speaker 1: which is like a whole different market, and you know,
Speaker 1: so you don't have this normal supply and demand thing.
Speaker 1: It's like, okay, demand is all time high for cargo capacity,
Speaker 1: but the supply is for comes from a different market.
Speaker 1: It doesn't come from cargo, It comes right thing in
Speaker 1: the belly of these passenger place of all the air
Speaker 1: cargo before the pandemic flew in the belly of passenger planes,
Speaker 1: and those are you know, you're not seeing flights to China.
Speaker 1: There's a handful of flights that are passenger flights going
Speaker 1: to China. The airlines tell us that they're not projecting
Speaker 1: to redeploy at at pre pandemic levels on the trans
Speaker 1: Pacific until on passenger side. Um, so you're going to
Speaker 1: have supply severely constrained for air freight, and what you're
Speaker 1: gonna see. I hesitate to make predictions, but in all things,
Speaker 1: but next year on the ocean side, because these markets
Speaker 1: are intertwined, right, if air freight shipment could is often
Speaker 1: a late ocean freight shipment and something went wrong and
Speaker 1: they gotta fly it real quick. Um, And what's gonna
Speaker 1: happen next year? In the ocean market, you have the
Speaker 1: International Longshoreman and Warehousing Union. That's the West Coast doc
Speaker 1: Workers Port Report Workers Union. They have a five year
Speaker 1: contract that's up for renegotiation in summer of two and
Speaker 1: the last time they had a contract renegotiation, which was
Speaker 1: five years ago, it had a three month strike on
Speaker 1: the West Coast and nothing could be shipped on the
Speaker 1: into the West coast ports of the United States for
Speaker 1: three months. A lot of companies missed Christmas that year,
Speaker 1: couldn't get any inventory into the into the store. So
Speaker 1: I don't know if there's gonna be a port strike,
Speaker 1: but it's a decent probability that you're going to see
Speaker 1: a strike next summer. And when that happens, the air
Speaker 1: freight prices will go nuts because it's the only it
Speaker 1: will become the only you have to either go through
Speaker 1: the Panama Canal or to the East Coast or fly
Speaker 1: it by air. And so yeah, next next year is
Speaker 1: going to be another wild one for logistics and supply chain.
Speaker 1: Is if that if the Union and the Pacific Maritime Association,
Speaker 1: that's the sort of coalition of terminal operators and the
Speaker 1: ocean carriers, if they can't come to terms, you you
Speaker 1: will likely see a strike. Well, um, something to look
Speaker 1: forward to, I guess. But I mean that kind of
Speaker 1: brings us to the big, big question. And I feel
Speaker 1: like Joe and I have probably asked this more than
Speaker 1: a dozen times this year, But what is it going
Speaker 1: to take in order to rectify some of these issues
Speaker 1: and normalize and get back to where we were pre COVID.
Speaker 1: Take a long pause, because I think about it, it's
Speaker 1: a systemic problem. It's you're looking at a market failure.
Speaker 1: It's not that we just have this like perfect free market.
Speaker 1: I don't think you ever could when you're talking about
Speaker 1: ports and infrastructure. You don't want the wild West of
Speaker 1: like anybody who has a beach front property you can
Speaker 1: build their own ports and start unloading containerships like you're not.
Speaker 1: Of course, it's not going to be a free market
Speaker 1: if you don't have a free market in the first place.
Speaker 1: It's pretty hard to count on just free market solutions.
Speaker 1: And so I do think there's gonna be a role
Speaker 1: for government to come in and when there's a market failure.
Speaker 1: In general, that's a reasonable principle, Like there's a big
Speaker 1: part of the role of government is address market failures,
Speaker 1: which happened more often than we like to think. So
Speaker 1: I think there's gonna be a role for government here
Speaker 1: to come in and say, okay, for example, the ports,
Speaker 1: the ports are not running on the West coast. They're
Speaker 1: running Monday through Friday, a little bit of operations on Saturdays.
Speaker 1: They're not running at night. There's a technology opportunity here
Speaker 1: where I'd like to see Flexiport play a role. We
Speaker 1: have technology that can really work with these ports. So
Speaker 1: what happens with the truck driver is they go to
Speaker 1: the port and they have an appointment slot. They got
Speaker 1: to show up at a certain time. She's like kind
Speaker 1: of almost impossible to hit if you have a four
Speaker 1: hour traffic jam to get into the port. So they
Speaker 1: got to hit this appointment slote and then they go
Speaker 1: with a specific container number that they're going to pick up.
Speaker 1: And so the port the reason for that appointments slowest
Speaker 1: to make sure that container number is at the front
Speaker 1: when they show up. And I think that the solution
Speaker 1: is going to look like government intervention that comes in
Speaker 1: and says, hey, we're we're throwing out this system and
Speaker 1: let's use technology. Flexibord has already built this technology, so
Speaker 1: if they want to work, doesn't be amazing. But but regardless,
Speaker 1: the technology needs to be that the drivers just show
Speaker 1: up and there's no more appointments and there's no more
Speaker 1: showing up for a specific container number. Driver comes in,
Speaker 1: gets it, gets get handed a container, and then our
Speaker 1: mobile app or someone you know, the ports mobile app.
Speaker 1: We have this tech, give me a call. We'll then
Speaker 1: tell them where to go. They've got any old container,
Speaker 1: grab it, go deliver it, and turn around and come
Speaker 1: back and see if, like I think that you could
Speaker 1: really unblock some stuff if we just said, hey, stop,
Speaker 1: It's almost like the way Southwest Airlines boards their planes, right,
Speaker 1: They're just much faster. Just come in and just grab
Speaker 1: the seat, people, let's go. We gotta get this plane
Speaker 1: in the air. So this is kind of what I
Speaker 1: was gonna say, And I was kind of gonna like
Speaker 1: reframe Tracy's question, And because after you know, half a
Speaker 1: year of us asking guests, when all things returned to normal,
Speaker 1: maybe the question should be more like, well, what is
Speaker 1: permanently going to change? And you talked about Okay, we're
Speaker 1: starting to see enforceable contracts and shipping. We're starting to
Speaker 1: see people taking the packing of the containers themselves more seriously.
Speaker 1: We've all like had that experience where like we buy something,
Speaker 1: say on Amazon, and we get like a huge box
Speaker 1: in the mail and there's like four razor blades and
Speaker 1: a bunch of packing material and it or something like that,
Speaker 1: which you know does not seem like a great use
Speaker 1: of space. Do you foresee some of these things, like
Speaker 1: say more serious effort on the internal engineering of space
Speaker 1: within a container, having lasting changes on shipping, even if
Speaker 1: hopefully one day the pandemic is like a true distant memory.
Speaker 1: There's there's no doubt that you're going to see long
Speaker 1: term changes here and more sophistication and that. But there
Speaker 1: is a big doubt of like on what time frame
Speaker 1: do things happen? I mean, if you were like, like
Speaker 1: the ports should the port of Rotterdam, for example, has
Speaker 1: been fully automated for more than thirty years, where they
Speaker 1: have self driving trucks like thirty years ago, because why
Speaker 1: because it's a simple problem. There's no people around if
Speaker 1: you do it right and it doesn't need AI. It
Speaker 1: can just follow some lines on the ground, the truck
Speaker 1: can and like look at paint and just follow along.
Speaker 1: Uh So it's actually a reasonably simple problem that we
Speaker 1: don't have. And and the other thing is that the
Speaker 1: port of Rotterdam and Shinjen they're deep and they have
Speaker 1: bigger cranes. They're made to handle much bigger ships. Ever,
Speaker 1: given the giant ship that we all know now, that
Speaker 1: ship could not come to a US port fully loaded.
Speaker 1: It would be too big. It would be too deep
Speaker 1: in the ports. Our ports are not deep enough. Uh that,
Speaker 1: so these large ships can't come here. So we've got
Speaker 1: to invest in our infrastructure. There's gotta be a role
Speaker 1: for robotics, Like right now, A big part of the
Speaker 1: problem is we can't run these sports on weekends and
Speaker 1: at nights. The unions doesn't have enough staff to go
Speaker 1: and man up and run these things seven and you know,
Speaker 1: and so like a robot would be able to do that.
Speaker 1: The other big thing that I'm like, science fiction wise,
Speaker 1: why can't we do this? And I do think it's
Speaker 1: more of a political will thing than anything else, is like,
Speaker 1: we bring these containers into the port of Long Beach
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles and that's great, big city. Then what
Speaker 1: happens is what is Los Angeles known for? Besides it's
Speaker 1: small because it's traffic. So you're like, have you ever
Speaker 1: been on the four oh five. It's a nightmare, And
Speaker 1: that's where our containers show up. And then they're like,
Speaker 1: all right, cool, we made it from China. We're here
Speaker 1: and they're like, okay, great, we're on the four oh five.
Speaker 1: And so you have, uh, the boring company for example,
Speaker 1: like let's build some tunnels from this port and skip
Speaker 1: the city of Los Angeles and like drop that container.
Speaker 1: You know, see if we can drive a hundred miles
Speaker 1: an hour and you're you're in the you're in the
Speaker 1: desert a hundred miles east before you know it. So
Speaker 1: I think there's gonna be all for those longer term
Speaker 1: infrastructure things that just has to happen. And hopefully people
Speaker 1: our eyes are open right now. So wow, okay, we
Speaker 1: need technology. The fact that we still unload container ships
Speaker 1: one at a time really frustrates me. Like the containership
Speaker 1: was a massive innovation. We we reduced the cost of
Speaker 1: shipping things by or more since it was invented, and
Speaker 1: yet if you look at how these ships are unloaded,
Speaker 1: it takes three days to unload the ship. Well, why
Speaker 1: are we doing one container at a time. Isn't there
Speaker 1: a design fifty years since we first created the container
Speaker 1: crane that could I don't know. I'm picturing like a
Speaker 1: ski lift stype thing where you're a carousel and you're
Speaker 1: grabbing a container every three seconds instead of one a
Speaker 1: minute and you just just tie. How do you ten
Speaker 1: x the throughput of this system? So that's gonna be
Speaker 1: political Well, I'm not sure it's there, but I think
Speaker 1: it's now on people's minds. And you see the problem
Speaker 1: if you don't get it right the price you have
Speaker 1: sort of economic, real national security level economic challenges from
Speaker 1: from the lack of investment in our infrastructure. Some of
Speaker 1: its simple, like let's dredge these ports make them deeper.
Speaker 1: Some of its more futuristic and scientific or science fictionity,
Speaker 1: like the boring company tunnels. But I actually think it's
Speaker 1: all doable if there's political will, and there kind of
Speaker 1: has to be a role for government the nature of
Speaker 1: these ports. Like like I said before, you can't just
Speaker 1: have random people opening up a port and wherever they
Speaker 1: feel like it. So m um, So, just going back
Speaker 1: to this idea of permanent changes, I mean, one of
Speaker 1: the most basic forecasts or predictions that we've seen since
Speaker 1: all this, you know, kind of started all these issues
Speaker 1: and problems that we've been discussing, is the idea that, well,
Speaker 1: maybe people will just move production closer to their customer base.
Speaker 1: Maybe we'll see a bunch of manufacturing that gets re
Speaker 1: shored to markets like America. Is there any sign of
Speaker 1: that happening? Um? And I guess how long would that
Speaker 1: take and how feasible is that entire process thus far,
Speaker 1: it's all anecdotal, and in fact you see the opposite
Speaker 1: trend that we're importing more stuff from China than ever um,
Speaker 1: even on a on a percentage basis. So it's really hard.
Speaker 1: That's a force that's been at work for a long time,
Speaker 1: not re shoring it to the United States, but shifting
Speaker 1: it to lower costs labor, and that's a natural trend
Speaker 1: that happens. You'll see, Uh, lower complexity products have largely
Speaker 1: moved to places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh thinks, uh, there's
Speaker 1: not a lot of subcomponents. It's mostly human labor. It's
Speaker 1: kind of you know, making clothes, making um sort of.
Speaker 1: There's there's the thing in China is that there's this
Speaker 1: whole ecosystem of subcomponent suppliers and you can't just pick
Speaker 1: up the whole thing. So even customer of ours makes
Speaker 1: ceiling fans, and you know, there's just no way that
Speaker 1: they can get all the little motorized parts and everything
Speaker 1: you can move to Cambodia. There's no other companies around
Speaker 1: you that tell you those parts. So it's just these
Speaker 1: things are really hard to move. Even the tariffs didn't
Speaker 1: really do it. People are able to pass through the
Speaker 1: higher costs, and so it will depend by industry that
Speaker 1: that trend has been going on in in textiles, apparel
Speaker 1: and other kind of simpler, low complexity products for a
Speaker 1: long long time. Coming back to the United States less
Speaker 1: so you're seeing less up moved to Mexico. Latin America
Speaker 1: is probably a big beneficiary of this, in addition to
Speaker 1: Southeast Asia, but it's more about labor cost trends. But hey, wait,
Speaker 1: if this last in perpetuity where it takes sixty days
Speaker 1: to ship stuff, yes, that will have a big impact
Speaker 1: and people start thinking, you know, let's let's put stuff
Speaker 1: in Latin America where we can get from Central America
Speaker 1: to the Gulf Coast in in three or four days. Um,
Speaker 1: that's gonna be a big competitive advantage for for Latoan. Ryan,
Speaker 1: It's always great to speak with you. That was like
Speaker 1: the perfect update, and I guess we'll have you back
Speaker 1: on again in uh six months when things are even worse.
Speaker 1: As soon as I fix all this stuff, I'll give
Speaker 1: you guys a ring once we once we build that
Speaker 1: boring company tunnel straight to Las Vegas, so all your
Speaker 1: containers can flow freely out of the port. We'll give
Speaker 1: you a call, can't wait, Ryan, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: All Right, have a great day everybody. Thanks tuk to
Speaker 1: Ryan is always great. I mean, obviously, you know we've
Speaker 1: like sort of you know, we hit all these different
Speaker 1: subcomponents of the supply chain. I feel like from his
Speaker 1: perch in flex Port, he just has like a really
Speaker 1: nice view on like what's going on with everything and
Speaker 1: just like these sort of like the compounding mess at
Speaker 1: every step of the way. Yeah, I mean he kind
Speaker 1: of brings it all together and explains why one thing happening,
Speaker 1: you know, in one area of logistics, like say, um,
Speaker 1: what's going on with drivers, why that impacts another area
Speaker 1: of logistics like container shipping. But I gotta say, Joe,
Speaker 1: I'm very proud I have finished my Christmas shopping already.
Speaker 1: I took the supply Chain episodes to heart, and I've
Speaker 1: ordered pretty much everything that I need to order. Look
Speaker 1: at you I have. I'm just buying everyone n F
Speaker 1: T s this year, so I don't have to worry
Speaker 1: about that. No, I actually have to get on that.
Speaker 1: Thank you for the reminder. That's a good idea. Actually
Speaker 1: everyone gets n f t s and they're stalking, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: or a little hardware wallet that has a twelve twelve
Speaker 1: words seed phrase that gives them access to some n
Speaker 1: f t s. No, but in all in all serious
Speaker 1: and it's like, you know, I think there's like sort
Speaker 1: of two things that maybe or like why this is
Speaker 1: not as self correcting as maybe wanted hope did one is.
Speaker 1: I think it's just like the pure complexity of it
Speaker 1: all and so like there's no like obvious self correcting
Speaker 1: mechanism and it's just incredibly complex on its own. And
Speaker 1: it's interesting you ask that sort of like reshoring question
Speaker 1: at the end, and I calls to mind, like, you know,
Speaker 1: we did that semiconductor episode with Stacy Raskin recently, and
Speaker 1: it's like, look, even a chip crosses like what thirty
Speaker 1: five borders in the course of like getting from Like
Speaker 1: it's like so like the idea of even if you
Speaker 1: were to like re short like a few aspects of
Speaker 1: the production, what would that really get you? And then
Speaker 1: it's just like okay, but the and then the whole
Speaker 1: thing is like it was not only is it incredibly complex,
Speaker 1: it's like all tied together with duct tape, and like
Speaker 1: you know a guy, you know, a guy who can
Speaker 1: get your like stuff on the bloat. So you have
Speaker 1: an incredibly complex system all kind of like held together
Speaker 1: with duct tape. And it starts to make more sense
Speaker 1: why this deep into the crisis, like the idea of
Speaker 1: like normalization, Like I'm getting why it's not self correcting
Speaker 1: anytime soon? Yeah. Well, I also wonder if one of
Speaker 1: the more permanent outcomes of this is and again this
Speaker 1: is something that sort of came up with Stacy, is
Speaker 1: this idea that you know, maybe we sort of move
Speaker 1: back to some analog products, or we start stripping out
Speaker 1: certain features or products or materials that are just harder
Speaker 1: to get due to the supply chain issues. Like maybe
Speaker 1: the market actually has to adapt more to these problems. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I mean it'll be interesting. Like, you know, one thing
Speaker 1: too is on the financial side, and and just now
Speaker 1: mentioned like the idea of well, in addition to enforceable contracts,
Speaker 1: multi year contracts. And one way to think about a
Speaker 1: multi year contract is your essentially like you're buying an option, right,
Speaker 1: like you're buying a you're buying a put option or something.
Speaker 1: You know, like you're buying insurance, which is so that
Speaker 1: such that you pay more now, or you pay more
Speaker 1: you promised to pay more for your two or three
Speaker 1: shipping such that it's guaranteed. So I wonder if another
Speaker 1: thing is we're going to see a little bit more
Speaker 1: of this system get financialized, maybe perhaps some more derivatives, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Should we start the futures market for shipping containers. It
Speaker 1: sounds like they need one. So you know, another person
Speaker 1: that we should get back actually on the show is
Speaker 1: Craig Fuller of Freight Waves, but he tried that once
Speaker 1: with trucks. He tried actually to get to create a
Speaker 1: trucking futures market in the United States and it was
Speaker 1: very difficult. So that might actually be another one. We
Speaker 1: should probably rebook him and maybe dive more into that
Speaker 1: question of like because that was like I think one
Speaker 1: of his earlier entrepreneur adventures. He wanted to create the
Speaker 1: sort of like CEMME for trucks. They didn't quite work out.
Speaker 1: But why some of this stuff is actually seems to
Speaker 1: be pretty hard to create sort of like liquid futures
Speaker 1: market for this capacity. Yeah, we should totally do that. Great,
Speaker 1: let's book it Okay, uh, shall we leave it there?
Speaker 1: Let's leave it there alright. This has been another episode
Speaker 1: of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can
Speaker 1: follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe
Speaker 1: Why Isn't Thal? You can follow me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: the Stalwart. Follow our guest Ryan Peterson. He's the CEO
Speaker 1: of Flex Sports. His handle is at types Fast. Follow
Speaker 1: our producer Laura Carlson, She's at Laura M. Carlson. Followed
Speaker 1: the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levi at Francesca Today,
Speaker 1: and check out all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under
Speaker 1: the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening.