YouSaid · the spoken record

Evan McMorris-Santoro

lines on the record: 86
first: 2025-03-17
most recent: 2025-03-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Mexico's a lot better. We're terrible. And I think some interesting experiments were begun with junior colleges and community colleges and some of those initiatives, but like we're nowhere close to having the skilled labor necessary to execute on the industrialization objectives of either the Biden administration or the Trump administration. So it's a massive gap in both of those worldviews and approaches.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Chinese government also made a huge investment in labor, right? When Obama asked Steve Jobs why can't you make the iPhone here? His answer was there's just not enough manufacturing engineers. Like, something happened. Do you see that labor pool existing in the United States or Canada or Mexico? Do you have to create it? Is that the Mexican government's going to be better at that than we are?”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would go long on North American demand for advanced electronics components in everything from automotives to aerospace to defense to the whole picture. And I would try to build a Shenzhen of North America. One big integrated and co located value chain where you could really do mass scale drones manufacturing optics, the whole thing.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Geographically or in terms of industries? Tariffs, notwithstanding, I guess the last couple weeks of Mexico drama, if I were starting from scratch. And not doing Altana, the thing I'd be most excited about is building a software enabled and sort of AI-driven manufacturing value chain for advanced electronics in North America. And so I'd be focused on producing in Mexico, sourcing most of my components from North America, and serving U.S. and Canadian markets. And taking advantage of the free trade agreement that exists. And again, the way that the terrorists just played out is anything that wasn't certified under the USMCA as North American origin got hit with tariffs. But everything that's certified is still sort of free trade. Would go long on the Mexican demographics. I would go long on the Mexican economy generally.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's enormous production capacity at basically every stage of the value chain. So I don't think there's any kind of fundamental limit that we're bumping up against either in terms of Labor price, labor skill, raw material availability, manufacturing sophistication. And I'm also reasonably optimistic. I'm not sort of maximally optimistic on automation and software defined manufacturing and where a lot of this is going. So I think. There's an enormous amount of capital out there. Chasing good returns and there's an enormous wave of productivity gains that are already underway and it's going to keep scaling with AI and robotics. Those things add up to the means to refactor.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like some people will take issue with your characterization of Taiwan as an island, but I get it. Is there enough world? I'll send here. This is like kind of the biggest question that I have for you, right? Your software builds you a picture of the value chains across the world. I don't know that there's enough capacity. I mean, it's a big world. I'm not saying all of it has been industrialized. We're producing everything everywhere, but it does seem like the past 25 years of globalization and maybe the next wave of globalization that you're helping bring about. Has reached an equilibrium and destabilized in equilibrium. My view of the Trump administration is they kind of want it to stop, right? And that still feels like the tension.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually think it's more likely to go to war. I think there's a higher probability that escalation occurs, tensions fray, there's more popular support for conflict. And so in a world where we're more and more de-risked, where you don't need to go to war over an island, where you don't need to defend a specific supply chain, or you don't need to react to a vulnerability that your adversary exploited and shut down all the critical infrastructure in the country, that's a world that's to me less likely to actually go to war.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I've been in a war game with US military leadership where one of their assumptions is that GPS goes off and all of the critical water and electricity facilities in America are shut down and our cars can no longer navigate because of all the logic in our cars. And those are all through supply chain exploits that have been built into the systems by China over the last two decades. Known vulnerabilities, known state sponsored cyber attacks that create those exploits. In that scenario, is America more or less likely to go to war”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then you can envision a world where business in the West, business in the East, continues to be transnational and you have these miracles of productivity and you have the economic ties that bind. At the same time that you de-risk the Most critical infrastructure, the most critical supply chains through that de risking, you prevent accidents happening and you prevent the worst from happening. You know, paint a picture like, let's say China moves on Taiwan by the end of the decade.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we're making it possible to be resilient and to navigate this change for both the public and private sector. I mean, we work with governments of the West and allies to enforce this stuff, to navigate it, to find some of the dependencies and vulnerabilities in these networks and mitigate them. We also help them to actually simulate policies and see how they might play out, what are the direct impacts for the second, third, fourth order impacts so that better decisions get made. And then we work with the private sector to navigate all that stuff. And so if we succeed at the scale that we're trying to, our mission is to fix globalization.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You managed both Trump won and the Biden administration through COVID. That's a remarkable fact of American industrial policy, right? Apple exists and it held the world together for a minute. Do you think that there are still those kinds of products or those kinds of companies that will keep this thing going even as everything else gets destabilized? Because that is the success. There has not been a great power conflict or a hot war between the United States and China in all of this time, even as things frayed, even as both sides felt taken advantage of or felt hostile towards each other or sent fighter jets flying at each other for no reason just to have a good time.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wrote my law review article in law school on China's use of open source software to get itself in the WTO. And their approach to intellectual property was, oh, we'll do copyright law because that is a foundation for open source, and now we have Linux. And that was a fascinating rhetorical move. I don't know if my law review article is any good. And I don't know if anybody understood what I was talking about at the time. But I was like, pay attention to red flag Linux. The other end of that, the positive end of that is one where we start is the iPhone. The iPhone exists at scale, at massive scale. The idea that we manufacture as many iPhones as we do with three nanometer TSMC chips in them is mind-boggling. Again, there are many criticisms of Tim Cook one could issue. Did you try the vision pro before you shipped it? I don't know. Doesn't seem like it. But did you maintain the rules-based world trade order for as long as you did because the iPhone is such a successful product and you manage all of those supply chains?”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are where we are. And so it was sort of bigger thy neighbor at an unprecedented scale. And I think the system is responding to that fact, right? Like that was the catalyst. It wasn't that somebody here or there was elected and did some policy actions. I view things on sort of this multi-decade lens and the policy environment, the political environment right now is sort of a consequence of that as opposed to the primary driver of it, if that makes sense.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So to some extent, how did we get here? We had a rules-based free trade order that the United States architected and everything made a lot of sense economically, middle class impacts aside The admission of China to the World Trade Organization in 2001, I think that was the end. That was the beginning of the end. And you had a very large and growing economy that was exploiting the free trade system systematically. Stealing trillions of dollars of intellectual property to feed their industrial engine and subsidizing their exports at the expense of everybody else's markets. And so 25 years later,”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I see it mostly going there, at least for the more sensitive critical value chains. I don't see it playing out any other way. And this isn't just a sort of US doing its thing. China publishes their economic intentions every five years. And then they reify them, and the national addresses, this is their explicit strategy, is to create economic resilience and dominance in the technologies that they believe will be the commanding heights of the 21st century, and to ensure that the value chains associated with them, either as imports that are critical or as exports where they know they need to deploy their production capacity because they're an export-driven economy. They are explicitly trying to secure both. They write it down and they do what they say.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you look at your map and you see China in the center of it and almost all these value chains end up flowing through or around China. Can that be reallocated? Can you shift things around to end up in a world where you have a United States and its allies value chain in China and its allies value chain?”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You kind of add all these mega trends up, the rise of China, the relative decline of the United States, the global debt burden and how that's playing out in economic policy and wealth inequality is these asset bubbles get inflated and reflated and reflated. All these things to me signal breakdown of the system.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the beginning of the conversation, I mean, we bet our careers on it. So I just see it as an inevitability. I'm a macro guy. I like these big systems problems. And I've seen for a long time now the kind of gears of history cranking. And it's like, it's pretty obvious to me that the system as I grew up in, and I think the orthodoxies of our time have kind of come to an end. And so yeah, like it's destabilizing. The moment in time is one of instability and destabilization, I see these trends playing out almost irrespective of who's in office here or there. Look at Brexit, look at what's happening in the EU, look at all the climate dislocation and the waves of immigration across borders that then result in nationalism and populism.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is what feels destabilized right now. The tariffs are on the tariffs are off. We're going to export Bourbon to Canada. We're not going to do that anymore. Trump is going to say we're going to cut our own lumber in the United States, but all the trees are in Canada. That seems totally destabilizing. We're going to decouple from China in four years, inherently destabilizing. Apple is going to announce $500 billion worth of investment that they already planned for. And somehow that's going to make it okay. Like all of that seems new in destabilizing in a way that maybe even in Trump 1 didn't exist do you see that? Is that reflected? Do you worry about that?”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of what you're talking about with the comparative advantage of the United States historically being risk-taking innovation, I agree with that. The foundation of that has been the relative stability of the United States after World War II, say. I'm not saying it's been totally stable. It hasn't. No one listening to the show looks back across the last 20 years and like, that's been stable. Fundamentally, politically we're stable economically. There is a sense of stability data-wise. We have not until recently had the United States government deciding that it will redefine how GDP is calculated. Like there's sort of an essential policy and economic stability to how the United States works. Your company, I think, relies on some amount of stability in the system to just look at a system and say, we can see how things are moving implies that all the actors in the system are rational or predictable in some set of ways, or at least participating.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not so optimistic about that working for us. I do think there's a big question of like, is there a third way and what should the economic security policy framework of the United States be? That's a conversation I'm getting into more and more and kind of the academic and think tank world. I don't think we have a coherent answer to that as policymakers. I don't even think like we have the language for it in a lot of cases.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that has been our comparative advantage. So I'm more sympathetic to an economic security framework. Please to our right to win. Than doesn't. So I think the Biden kind of freak economic thing you described was very much like, okay, let's sort of take other examples of central planning and industrial policy and make these big billion dollar, $100 billion, trillion dollar injections into sectors of the economy and specific recipients of aid. And then hope it works out. That's what China does.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not making a normative judgment. I'm just describing the landscape I see. So that's kind of the Trump thesis here is like let's remove the barriers to building. Create the barriers to what they view as unfair trade and economic abuses by adversaries. Let's let the market figure out the rest. You're asking, is there a third way? So in general, my perspective is the United States. Can't possibly out centralize China. It can't possibly oute-down economic control better than China does that, right? Like our comparative advantage, our right to win is through innovation. So create a rule of law and a risk capital environment and a labor environment where the best ideas can win and people can take risks and they can flush through the system.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That might result in some capital directed at nickel refining in the United States. And that, to me, seems, again, for all the criticisms of the Biden programs, it seems like you run into the same ones. You're not actually saying what you want. You're hoping that the next... The momentum for the market to deliver the result”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Trump administration is doing the exact opposite, right? They're creating a bunch of impediments and saying our market is so valuable that if you want the N plus 1 American consumer to buy your car, you have to do a bunch of stuff to get to our market. That seems just as naive, right? It's still not directed industrial policy. It's negative incentives instead of positive incentives, and you still might gain the system in some way, but it doesn't seem like that plan of we have to actually say out loud, we're going to do nickel refining in order to decouple from they haven't said that out loud. They've said, here's a bunch of structural impediments.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trying, I think he said neoliberal before, they were doing it in the most like freakonomics neoliberal way you could do it, right? They created a bunch of incentives and hoped people would not game them. You can react to that however you want, but they created a bunch of incentives and they hoped people would not game them. There still isn't high-speed broadband under the bead program. You can see how that played out for them.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You describe that, the thing that I always think about is that is directed industrial policy, right? Trying to make a decision, they made a huge trade-off against their environmental policy, the air quality that their people breathe, the labor abuses their workers might suffer. But they said it's worth it because over some time frame we will have this stranglehold on the market and that will create peace, create prosperity, some set of goals that that industrial policy will deliver. We look at Taiwan, for example. On this show, we've talked a lot about TSMC and Taiwan's massive investment in the ship industry because it saw the future and said, we're going to do that here. We're going to make industrial policy from the top down that says all the chips are going to be made in Taiwan, TSMC is our national champion. Here we go. Those things came true. Again, the trade-offs are very real, very clear. We don't do directed industrial policy in the United States to the extent that the Biden administration was”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can't make missiles, you can't make airplanes, you can't make guns, you can't make telephones, you can't make GPS, our everyday modern economy depends on all these critical minerals. And they all run through China. So can that be fixed in four years? No, not without a radical sort of World War II style change in our regulatory stance, our willingness to invest, and like a massive cross-border partnership with our allies. I don't see that happening.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is all well and good if there's like a free trade environment, but in a world of geopolitical and economic competition, China now has between 60 and 98% of the world's critical minerals on lockdown. And they use that market position now to basically kill any emergent refining in a country or a company that they don't control. So like a new one pops up and we're refining lithium and we're doing lithium oxides. Well, you're going to see, and this has happened repeatedly repeatedly, China floods the market, depresses the price, puts that company out of business. They either go away or the Chinese company buys them. Reason this really, really matters is like”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's basically rare earths, which we all have heard of. And then the other metals that go into all of our most important electronics. So think like nickel. Nickel's not rare, but it's critical. China has a virtual lock on all of the world's critical mineral processing. They don't have a lock on the raw material itself. The raw materials are pretty pervasive. They're abundant. China over the last 25 years was very deliberate about building a stranglehold on the refining of the raw ores. And this is nasty stuff, right? These are typically like big open pit mines where they're doing cyanide leaching to separate these ores from other metals and refine them. It's stuff we don't actually want in our backyard.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just a spectrum. I mean, a lot of these things are already emotion. So you're just accelerating the nearshoring of advanced electronics. You're accelerating the nearshoring of automotive supply chains. The pharmaceutical CEOs I've talked to in the last six months have already been talking about creating new manufacturing locations outside of China for all their key stuff. Some of these things are going to move a lot more quickly. And some of these things are going to be pretty tough. I think for those examples where you just have massive CapEx in China. Really hard, and I think the most intractable one, honestly, is what are called critical minerals. Have you heard that term before?”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do think philosophically what this administration is evidently doing is saying rather than the Biden approach of using mostly incentives and capital to build the things that we want here, right? So the IRA, the Chips Act. To point a lot of capital and loan guarantees and other ways to kind of subsidize and motivate the manufacturing of those things here. This administration is doing is saying. Going to use trade barriers Restrict the market access of competitive products, like deemed competitive and nothing, a lot of it's aimed at China, obviously. And we're going to let the market figure out the rest. So we're going to create the barriers, we're going to distort supply and demand, and then let capitalism figure it out from there.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I believe is they're going to try. And then in some cases, you're talking about billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars of CapEx in the ground in China, like some of the biggest chemical companies in the world have manufacturing locations in China that feed into all of our pharmaceuticals and advanced manufacturing processes. That kind of CapEx possible to replicate elsewhere within a four year time frame, that's going to be pretty tough”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of that is to say we want more manufacturing here in the North American continent and get away from China. You've got a big map of the world. You see the value chains. You see where things are manufactured. If you just look at where all the puzzle pieces are today, can you actually accomplish that in four years? Can you actually decouple the United States from China at the end of Trump's term? You said that was the goal. I know how to knock the tower down. That seems very obvious to me. I don't know how to make the tower or make a new tower.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's roughly 40% of Mexican and Canadian trade with the US. So the 60% that's not done the work to say the raw materials, the intermediate goods are actually all kind of eligible as per the USMCA and they're part of our free trade world. Those 60% of goods are still subject to the 25% tariffs. And at the same time, they had China with the extra tariffs, so they've now done two, a 10% and another 10% on all China. So the dotted line through all those things is the Trump administration is trying to bring Mexico and Canada into tighter alignment with the United States and its trade policy vis- ⁇-vis China.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I have to get a little wonky to argue the case. So yes is the answer. If you look at where the tariff thing landed, and again, by the time this airs, who knows where we are. Where it landed three or four days ago was they said, okay, we're going to do the 25% Mexico and Canada tariffs for any goods coming into the United States that are not registered under the USMCA. Was fine print in the announcement that actually is pretty consequential. That means for companies who have bothered to prove that the material origin of their goods is within the value chain definitions of the USMCA. Again, this is the free trade agreement that replaced NAFTA. Those companies and those products are not subject to the tariffs.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So then, unsurprisingly, you had these mega warehouses built up on the Mexican and Canadian borders where they were just drop shipping items under $800 or even components that were sort of disassembled so that each of them were under $800 and then imported in the United States through that loophole. Both of those things are kind of coming to an end. It's obviously a little chaotic, but I see the whole USMCA tariff thing through those lenses. Oh, and the other thing I should say is it's really interesting when you see the ownership networks, because we map those two. So you're seeing all these Chinese companies open Mexican and Canadian subsidiaries in order to import goods from themselves. And then bring them into the United States subject to those exemptions I just spoke to.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where two things happen. In one case, they would just do final assembly. So they'd ship all the refrigerator parts to Mexico, turn it into a refrigerator, and then import it into the United States under USMCA and not pay the tariffs. The other version of it was through what's called the e-commerce de minimis threshold, where the premise was like if the goods are under $800, we don't need to do a whole customs entry and pay tariffs and put a whole kind of trade compliance process in place. Let's just rip it into the country and get consumers what they want.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This goes back years because the first Trump administration was the first to kind of go hard with tariffs and Biden continued it. So yeah, you do see a couple of things. So the obvious one is for the goods that have tariff supplied you see a redistribution of imports associated with the tariff goods from the tariff countries. And then this is kind of obvious, but it's either going to be manufactured locally or it's going to come from other places where the tariffs don't apply. The more interesting thing that you see is that the ownership structures associated with these big global supply chain networks change. And so do the nature of the value chains. So what happened in Trump won? Was a bunch of Chinese economic policy and trade barriers that were put up was you saw a big shift in Chinese supply chains going to Mexico and Canada?”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you see some things that kind of develop over time and that you need more pieces of data, pieces of signal to kind of build up a broader picture you feel good about. So it's really a spectrum. There are some things that you can see really far ahead of the curve. It's totally predictive. Some of it is more there's something sort of taking shape in the network and then some of it is sort of post facto what happened.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's actually a spectrum. So, some of the data we process is actually, I think of it as negative latency. So you're seeing the intent of a transaction before it occurs in real life through what are called booking requests and shipping instructions. So that could be a thing that will happen five weeks from now. And then we get the shipment itself, and then we get the customs entry associated with the shipment. So you kind of see this life cycle of the supply chain activity. We also have real-time event feeds through a partnership with Data Miner, and we can overlay that on the whole map of the world and contextualize that for our customers.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A big part of it You know, we started the conversation where you're like, hey, all these things seem to be coming true. And that's true. That's our lived experiences like these things we kind of expected would be relevant products that could exist on top of our platform. Over time, we'll do this and we'll do this and we'll do this. There's demand for most of it right now. And so the big scramble in Altana is like, how do we launch new software? How do we meet the demand? How do we get out there? And how do we do this from a unified base? And so I'm finding myself in wartime mode and calling a lot of shots in order to get through that stuff with velocity.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Product management and some big audacious product bets we're making right now. And a lot of the sort of network architecture we're building to connect the public and private sectors into this whole global value chain network. And so on those two dimensions, I'm being highly opinionated and I'm driving very, very fast decision making by doing it myself and bringing groups along with me.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Personally This has actually evolved pretty meaningfully in the last few months, where I have Little depth or relatively little depth, you know, depending on the team around me, I tried to speak last and ask questions. And then decide when I need to break ties or move the group forward. And then the net new thing over the last couple months is giving myself permission to be very decisive when I'm actually deep in the details. Driving the company forward that way. So I've actually leaned in pretty aggressively on.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're about 240 people, and we operate where our two primary lines of business are enterprise and government. And we then have financial services partners and logistics partners. Through whom we service the enterprise. So they connect to our platform to better serve their own enterprise customers and connect them to the network.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Broker in the loop and gives them ultimate control, but that's become wildly performant. So that's not the whole list, but the point is that it's AI to construct the map, it's AI to show the customers how they fit inside of the map, like what are the networks that are relevant to them. And then AI that generates insight and actually automate entire workflows.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then on top of that foundation, we have AI systems that are doing everything from detecting single points of failure and business interruption risks. We can actually look at the whole network and say, here are upstream suppliers that are at risk of failing financially just by sensing what's happening in the supply chain. It's actually been one of our kind of crazy success stories over the last year, just seeing the model perform on that. We have AI systems that automate all of the cross-border tariff and customs compliance work in all the logic associated with that. That's a $150 billion per year industry. It's just humans reading text about the nature of the goods and then assigning them the codes when they come across a border that say, here's the taros and duties and certificates and permits. So we have an agentic AI system that's doing all of that. You can put the customer.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“World of businesses and transactions and purchase orders and shipments, you just have this messy semi-structured text. And so you need AI to actually process all that data and connect it together into one clean, unified representation of the world. So we've been building our own homegrown AI systems since day one to do that. Then you need AI to map out those value chains. So that's where we've invested really, really heavily over the last few years. We can almost instantaneously illuminate the inputs and outputs of anybody's products across the whole global network with very, very high fidelity. That's like always a jaw-dropping wow moment with customers where it's like, how could you possibly know this and how could you possibly draw these connections?”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get the data across both the publicly available and commercially purchasable universe of data. I mean, we spend a lot of money bringing all the data to us that we can get our hands on. And then, you know, like I mentioned earlier, every customer that joins the platform is connecting their data to that model of the world. And then it's subjecting their data to that whole framework of visibility and shared learning, right? We're now at the place where roughly half of all that supply chain connectivity, all the supply chain visibility, is actually coming from our customer network itself. And that's another way of saying that we've doubled what you can kind of theoretically do by going out and scraping the internet and getting publicly available data and licensing data from commercial vendors.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You look at what Altana provides in that, right? That's a problem he solves. You can say, okay, we'll add some software to make that easier to share data better. You're also talking about adding AI to it. What kind of insights are you generating from collecting all this data? Because it seems like you have an enterprise data provisioning problem, but then you also generally with AI, you want to see all the data and collect an insight. And it seems like there's a tension there between wanting to see the information across the whole network and actually generating insights. So where do you get the data and what kind of insights do you generate?”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT