Tariffs didn’t bring manufacturing jobs back to the US | Decoder

Evan Smith, cofounder and CEO of Altana, was last on the show in early 2025 to talk about how Trump’s first few waves of tariffs were starting to affect global trade. It was a very alarming and also very illuminating chat; Evan and I got into the existential weeds of international relations and economics almost immediately.

A year and a half later, and everything is somehow even more chaotic than it was the last time Evan and I talked — and that’s true about both trade and also the world of running a software company. Agentic AI, whack-a-mole tariff policy, war in Iran — we jumped right back into weeds yet again.

0:00 - Cold open: "Here's my take on Canada"
0:40 - Intro: Nilay Patel welcomes Evan Smith, CEO of Altana
2:43 - What Altana does and the "Globalization 1.0" thesis
5:38 - The Cervo AI acquisition
10:58 - Altana's size, structure, and Servo AI
12:33 - Decision-making and agentic product development
18:04 - Balancing reliability with new agentic software methods
22:34 - Token costs and pricing models
30:45 - History of customs targeting and post-9/11 risk systems
34:53 - Is manufacturing really moving out of China?
40:09 - Manufacturing output vs. manufacturing jobs
47:40 - "Here's my take on Canada" (the full answer)
52:43 - Strait of Hormuz and the military dimension of trade
1:00:53 - Federated data and network architecture
1:07:11 - Closing thoughts and outro

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