Tariffs didn’t bring manufacturing jobs back to the US

Today, I’m talking with Evan Smith, who is cofounder and CEO of Altana, a company that develops software tools to manage big, messy supply chain networks around the world. We last had Evan on in early 2025 to talk about how Trump’s first few waves of tariffs were starting to affect global trade and what patterns Altana was seeing in all that macro-level data about shipping and 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. It was a great conversation. 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 both about trade and in the business world. And, as you’ll hear, we jumped right back into the weeds yet again. Developments in agentic AI have changed what Altana can do, but like every software company, they’ve also changed how Altana can do it. You’ll hear Evan describe how AI is changing how they make software for a very demanding set of clients that manage billions in international trade — which is causing some big debates about how a software company even runs in 2026. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. And of course, what they do also needs to change more or less daily. Trade policy is changing rapidly around the world but likely nowhere faster than here in the US. Between the Trump administration’s whack-a-mole tariff policies and war in Iran, it’s very hard to keep up with the current rules. That’s where Altana comes in. All that data coming from all around the world gives Evan a really high-level view of what’s actually happening. All those tariffs, for example, were supposed to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. So I asked Evan directly: Is that actually happening? Spoiler alert — you won’t be surprised to hear him say “no.” And while it’s clear the world still relies on global supply chains, the pressure placed on economic chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz is going to get higher than ever. There’s a lot going on in this one — as you can tell, Evan and I really enjoy talking to each other. Okay: Altana CEO Evan Smith. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Evan Smith, you’re the co-founder and CEO of Altana. Welcome back to Decoder. It’s good to be here again. Thanks for having me. I was looking over our last interview from about a year and a half ago, and boy, we got straight into the existential weeds of what it means to run the global economy and what was changing. People can go back and watch, read, or listen to that interview. It’s very good. I really enjoyed it.  The thing that strikes me about the past year and a half is that some of this stuff was theoretical the last time you were on the show. You founded Altana on the idea that globalization as we knew it — what you call, “globalization 1.0” — was going to come to an end, it was going to get more complicated, and the world needed software to solve it. The rubber has hit the road. It has gotten more complicated. It’s getting more complicated by the day. Even as we speak this week, it is getting more complicated. Even over the last year and a half it feels like it has gone from being a bet to being something very practical now. Is that how you see it? Completely. One of our investors described Altana as, “an index bet on global dislocation.” That’s a lot. Can I just ask you maybe a philosophical, emotional question about that? I get a lot of feedback from our audience. You have CEOs on the show and they talk about making bets in this way, and on the ground, it’s chaos. So, I get an index bet on dislocation. That sounds great on CNBC, right? I understand exactly how that plays to that audience. How do you feel about that approach to the world, especially as a software company that kind of just makes a map for people, and how it plays out for regular people? I think regular people right now are really struggling and they’re really confused. They’re very anxious. Well, trade touches virtually every part of or most of our lives. So, our mission is to fix globalization, but we’re not retreating from globalization. We’re leaning into it. But we believe that globalization needs to be fixed. It needs to be more trusted, more secure, more fair. That’s a recognition that trade will and should continue across borders. That’s the animating ethos in the company. We work with our customers who in most respects are on the front lines of all this stuff. We work with eight of the 10 biggest logistics providers. We work with the government agencies that have to scramble to enforce these laws. Then, we work with importers and their supply chains to comply with them. And the stakes are huge. Do medical devices get to the hospital? What’s the price of fuel and food? So, I couldn’t ag

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