How shippers are trying to keep up with Trump’s trade war

On today’s episode of Decoder, we’re talking tariffs and trade wars. One of the ways I’ve been trying to sort out the chaos of this moment is by talking to the people behind the software that actually runs our global trade systems.

We got a lot of notes from listeners who really appreciated our episode with Altana’s Evan Smith, which laid out how data from his supply chain systems illustrated where manufacturing was moving as globalization starts to break down. So today I wanted to bring back one of my favorite Decoder guests: Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen, whose software manages the logistics of moving things around the world, from the factory to your doorstep. 

Petersen has been on Decoder twice before, once in 2022 and then again in 2023. Check those episodes out; they’re great. What makes Petersen such a fascinating figure is that he’s unique in that he runs a software company in Silicon Valley, but his product is all about the very real and very complicated process of actually shipping things on planes, boats, and trucks. I’ve always enjoyed his perspective to connect the dots between what’s happening on the screen and what’s happening in the real world. In the case of tariffs, that means Petersen has a real-time view of how his customers are dealing with them as products arrive in US ports and go through customs — Flexport is itself a customs broker, so it manages the tariff process pretty directly. 

But nothing about Trump’s tariffs are business as usual, so I really wanted to dig into how they are working in reality — at the highest level, the Trump administration has launched into what feels like a game of chicken with the Chinese government that’s completely upending the stock market and putting industries of all kinds into outright panic. We can all see that, but down on the ground the systems still have to work, good and services still have to move across the ocean, and these tariffs need to actually get paid. You’ll hear Petersen say tariffs are already changing where things come from, and that shipments from Vietnam on Flexport’s platform overtook shipments from China for the first time in the past week.

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What you’re also going to hear is that Petersen has basically been in war mode for the past several weeks trying to keep up with all the changes — Flexport is running a literal tariffs live blog for its customers just to try and keep the latest information going out the door. In fact, Trump’s tariffs are so unpredictable that when we sat down to record on Monday, we knew that the numbers we were talking about would change by the time we published this episode on Thursday. And we were right — the tariffs on syringes from China somehow went from 154 percent to 245 percent, and lithium ion batteries shot up to 173 percent.

So instead of specific numbers, Petersen and I really focused on how this system works, how it’s supposed to work, and how it’s working now, if it’s working at all. If you follow him on X, you know that he thinks things are breaking in ways that create nothing but paralysis in the short term and potentially widespread bankruptcies in the long term. 

So I just asked him: is there anything anyone can do right now to pressure the White House to make this make sense on a timetable that saves the US economy from devastation? I’ll let you listen to his answer. Petersen, to his credit, takes a pretty valiant demeanor here — he says he wants to give the people in charge the benefit of the doubt and to keep his cool so he can keep advising his customers. But I think you’ll hear how quickly he’s running out of patience, and he didn’t hold back when it comes to describing the kinds of scary consequences that might happen if things keep escalating at their current rate.

If you’d like to read more on what we talked about in this episode, check out the links below:

• Flexport tariff live blog | Flexport
• US tariffs: how Trump’s tax is hitting Big Tech and beyond | The Verge
• How much will Trump’s tariffs cost US importers? | NYT
• How much are tariffs on Chinese goods? It’s tricky | NYT
• How Trump’s tariff chaos is already changing global trade | Decoder
• Can software simplify the supply chain? Ryan Petersen thinks so | Decoder
• Why Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen took his company back | Decoder
• The US-China decoupling arrives | Axios

_{Questions or comments about this episode? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!}