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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Canada, you, the large upstream manufacturer, have to disclose all this information about your goods and your production practices. So that's always been a little bit true in the context of moving goods across borders. There's what are called certificates of origin and customs classifications that depend on the nature of the goods, and that's how you pay your tariffs and duties and you give the food and drug administration, the certificates and permits. That all is kind of business as usual. What's so different over the last few years is they've created so many new and more stringent requirements on that whole upstream value chain. So you have to share this information with us. You have to make these declarations. And it's a matter of market access. So you literally can't, like your customers and your customers, customers can't get their goods into the biggest markets in the world without it.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure they do in all cases. But what's interesting is they now have to in more and more cases. So the big arc of policy here. It's tariffs, whether it's forced labor bans, whether it's a carbon border adjustment in Europe. I can paint a big picture. But in the last two years alone, there's been 1,200 net new trade barriers added. And basically what it says is if you want the downtown. Clothes to make their way into the UK, the US, Europe, Australia”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess I'm still just thinking about the incentives to actually expose any data to your network. I get it at the top level, right? A car company or Maresk or a shipping company. At the top level wants to see all this data. But then you need information from the lowest levels of the network, from the soil, right? Why does the big industrial producer in China want anyone to know where its products are coming from”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the workers' rights and ecological impacts of production all the way through the chain and on and on and on. So we've become that sort of foundational network that they use to not just see the whole global value chain network, but then engage it and then make it better over time.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, speaking of trade barriers, that was a big one that happened in 2022, was the US banned all imports of goods into the United States that have any of that upstream value chain content coming from Xinjiang, China. So it's a rebuttable presumption that the Uyghur forced labor issue was sort of infecting all those goods. That's a big one. You literally can't import to the United States and they've had detentions. Everybody in the industries had detentions. And so navigating through that, you know, making sure the value chains are healthy and compliant and that you don't have these big multi-million dollar tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of border interruptions and delays. That's one. And now they're expanding that to look at all things sustainability in their value chain. So how do you use Autana to understand your carbon footprint? How do you understand?”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“LLB tends to know not just the garment manufacturer it buys from and has the direct relationship. They'll sometimes know the textile manufacturers that feed into those garment facilities. What they don't know is everything upstream of that. It's like, where's the cotton come from? Where's the polyester come from? Where's the zipper come from? We at the base layer, we just help them answer that question. What's that whole network of the value chain for every one of my goods all the way back to the soil? They're motivated by a few things. One is ensuring that their goods are compliant and free of forced labor”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what they are doing is they're subjecting their data to the network, they're connecting their own data to our platform, and they're seeing how they fit within the broader network. We learned from that. We built out the network connections. We train AI systems. And that all adds up to a model where every customer that joins the platform adds to the visibility and the connectivity and the intelligence for all the other parties”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't share it in the broadest sense. So, what they're doing is they're connecting to a network that we provide. And the thing we built the company around, like the core invention of Altana, was that everybody could kind of keep their data sovereign siloed, private, and connect to the network. And we'd sort of solve for both at the same time. So what that means practically, it's like a hub and spoke federated data model. So we provide this shared map of the world and all the software and AI systems in the hub. And our customers keep their data in a spoke. And we bring the platform down to their data and not the other way around. So there's a Maersk spoke. There's a LL being spoke. There's a general atomic spoke. None of those customers are sharing all their raw data with each other. They're not allowing us to pool it all centrally.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In our case, you don't have to own the whole network, right? So you can light it up, you can illuminate it, you can see the compliance, the security, the resilience dimensions of it. And we can actually give our customers the ability to map and manage and collaborate across that whole network.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Receiving the electronics, right? So that's the value chain. We make it possible to know that and to map it and to manage it and actually collaborate with those value chain partners. And the story I like to tell is in the 1950s, Ford Motor used to own the entire value chain of its cars. They owned rubber plantations in Brazil in order to make tires. And now they just do the final assembly. So that's the point. Like Boeing doesn't own its own value chains anymore. They can't even make an airplane. Ford is, you know, in the final assembly business, Apple doesn't even manufacture anything, right? They just create the software and the designs and everybody else manufactures it. So what we're doing at our core is we're kind of making it possible to do what industry used to do, which is to see and connect and have some control over that whole network.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And everything else got outsourced and outsourced and outsourced and outsourced and outsourced. So it became impossible to really know your supplier-supplier or your supplier-supplier supplier, and even in the other direction, right? So you have Western electronics companies that keep seeing their stuff get into Russian weapon systems. While they're mostly not selling to Russia, right? So it's that customers, customer's customer.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The graphite comes out of the ground, right? The aluminum comes out of the ground. So that whole raw materials through the intermediate goods, through the final assembly, through the sale and end use of the product, that's called the product value chain. We make it possible to know and manage that whole network for all the products in the world. It sits on top of that map of the world that we've built. Why is that novel? Because of globalization Because of outsourcing, there was a deliberate move to actually outsource that whole value chain, right? So the whole theory was we should only do our comparative advantage. We should only do the most specialized version of that within our borders.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And LinkedIn is our professional relationship graph, which shows how you're connected to all your colleagues and counterparties. We're doing the exact same thing, but at the scale of the whole global supply chain network. So that's the foundation. And the way that our customers use that primarily is to understand and manage what are called value chains. And this actually matters in the context of the globalization discussion we were just having. So what's a value chain? A value chain is for any product, let's take the iPhone, right? It's the whole network of production all the way back to the soil. The silicon comes out of the ground, it turns into chips, it turns into all the logic in your phone.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, look, the whole world's a supply chain. So at the base level, what we do is we model that whole physical world of companies making things and buying and selling them from other companies. So it's like a bottoms-up Google Maps style view of all the companies, where they operate, what they make and sell and what those connections between them are. So in the same way that Facebook built that social graph that connects”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I'm going to hold on to China for a second because I want to come back to it and talk about it in depth. Altana builds software that helps people see these supply chains. Describe how you build the software and what it does for your customers because I think understanding your viewpoint and your visibility into these supply chains will kind of help me understand how you can see the shift from Shin in real time.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone's less concerned about toys and apparel, right? But the things that are critical to our economic and national security. And so he's told his team, you know, within four years, we need to bend the supply chain such that the United States no longer has these fundamental dependencies on China. Going to impact everything from critical minerals to chips to everything downstream of those, right? To pharmaceuticals. So it's a huge, huge economic policy objective with sweeping consequences for the private sector.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So theatrics aside policy objective number one is we want to bring industry back generally and we want to rebuild the middle class. So it's an industrialization initiative. And they want to do that through creating trade barriers, right? So the Biden administration was more, they had that similar objective, but they did that through very large scale subsidies and industrial policy initiatives to direct capital toward those industries they wanted to see in America. So that's thing one. Thing two is... There's a very clear objective which he's given to his policy team to be strategically decoupled from China on critical industries by the end of his term. Critical industries, it's kind of policy speak for things that matter a lot, like food, telecom, aerospace, defense, advanced electronics. So they're things that we couldn't do without.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which now might be yet again replaced by the annexation of Canada. Even that doesn't seem like a stable foundation, but okay, continue. We'll take it that some people in the Trump administration would like that to happen.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not in the Trump administration, so I won't speak to it with total authority, but I have spoken with people that are in the Trump administration. And two key themes. So one is, yes, absolutely, there's a motivation to bring manufacturing back to the United States and back within the USMCA, which is the U.S.-Mexico, Canada free trade agreement that replaced NAFTA. Under the first Trump administration, which”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think it's certainly possible to bring some manufacturing back to the United States. Also, I think it's possible to bring a lot more manufacturing into North America. So in other words, we'll do some things more and better and you have both the labor cost environment and the natural resources starting in southern Mexico and kind of going north, you have that stratification of low cost relatively low skilled labor going to higher skilled, higher cost labor. And you have the ability to manufacture most of everything that the United States consumes in our own backyard, so to speak. So that's just sort of a fact of the market around us. Will that happen entirely? No, and will that happen immediately? No. So then like, what's the policy objective of the Trump administration?”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, like the response from basically every member of the Trump administration to Are tariffs going to cause prices to go up is, well, then you should manufacture it here. That seems wholly unworkable to me. Again, I just come back to the iPhone. I've listened to every explanation from every Apple executive, from Steve Jobs on down over the years about why the iPhone can't be built in the United States of America. And they seem correct. I take them at their word that if they could solve the problem, they would. And yet the Trump administration seems to think that just by turning the knob on costs, that they will be able to bring manufacturing back to the United States. Do you think that's possible?”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You think about the thesis of Altana, which is okay, you had identified globalization as running one version of its course and there's going to be a next version. I'm reading your manifesto. Your idea here is we're going to need a lot more data so we can build supply chains across our partners that we trust, across actual suppliers that we trust so we can see the social cost of outsourcing labor to other countries. I look at that and what I see is, oh, we should make globalization better, right? It's changing. There's some great power dynamics, but we're still going to have this. I look at the Trump administration and the imposition of tariffs and The idea that we're going to annex Canada, and what I see is we should stop it.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so my fear right now is we're in a disequilibrium. You have a rising great power. You have multipolarity with Russia and the EU asserting themselves in different ways. And the US as a, you know, at least on a relative basis, as a declining power, you know, it's no longer the single global hegemon. And so that over the last 15 years, I think if you look at the world, it's a state of disequilibrium. And I see the, you know, I see the tariff issue. I see all this trade policy volatility. I see all the economic security policies, the industrial policies Following as a result. So it's all sort of nested within that big geopolitical circumstance.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Free trade and economic interdependence results in peace between nations. As I've gotten older and I've kind of watched the world progress and I've studied more of history and I've actually read some Mearsheimer, I've actually kind of come to the exact opposite view, meaning peace gives rise to free trade and not the other way around. And so when there is an equilibrium in the whole global geopolitical great power competition, then what you see through history is that trade progresses between nations. And then in the moments of disequilibrium and like big shifts in power, those become more violent usually. And then trade collapses”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm building software and AI in order to help the public and private sectors navigate that dislocation and hopefully build resilience and some amount of decoupling without it resulting in a hot war. But the version that you described of the economic ties that bind, I too kind of had that economic worldview, I got an economics degree from Yale in 2007. So at the absolute apex of the neoliberal and kind of neoconservative worldview, and I literally went to school with Thomas Freeman's daughter, right? And I read all of his books. And it was just his famous thing was the golden arches theory, right? Countries that have McDonald's don't go to war with each other, which was true then, right? So the premise was that”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone wants an iPhone. If the Chinese government somehow makes it impossible for people to buy iPhones in China, that would be bad. If the US government makes it impossible for US customers to buy the iPhone, that would be bad. And both economies would crash. And that's actually going to keep us from being in a war. And again, kid of the 80s and 90s, when I was in college, John Mearsheimer wrote, The tragedy of great power conflict, which is a big book that predicted the United States and China would go to war, and like the next day was September 11th. And then that whole thing got shunted aside. Now, maybe we're back to it. But I just look at all of that, that your thesis, which feels correct, like it's being borne out. And I'm like, oh, this thing is actually being held together by some consumer products. And making those consumer products and making our economies interdependent is actually the thing that keeps us from going to World War III. Are you all the way there? Like, are you building software to be like, okay, I'm going to try to hold this together a little bit longer?”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you can look at the Tim Coquera, and you can say, from one perspective, yep, he increased apple stock price, but from another perspective, you can look at it and say, oh, the iPhone has actually prevented the great power conflict.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm the editor in chief of verge. I often just think about things in terms of the iPhone. I'm a kid of the 80s and 90s. I remember Ross Perot saying that NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, would lead to a giant sucking sound of labor being moved to Mexico. I think a lot of people believe it played out exactly that way. But at the same time, you also get the ability to make a product like the iPhone, which is just inherently global. It's now manufactured in several countries around the world, principally in China, but lots of parts flow back into China, so Apple can make that product. They make it at enormous scale.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And because of reasons one through three, our point of view was that the world was getting a whole lot less stable. And therefore, the supply chain itself, the fabric of the world's physical economy was going to break down. And I think that's borne out since COVID. We didn't literally predict COVID, but we did predict the fragility in the system.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other one's around climate. So you had this race to the bottom where everything was outsourced to the lowest cost just in time manufacturing locations and the world's physical production became dirtier and dirtier and dirtier. And you have these increasing climate dislocations and the policies and the sort of corporate actions and the capital market actions that are following as a result. Third one was around the destabilization of the middle class of the West. So if you have a rapid sort of outsourcing and collapse of manufacturing, then the point of view was you're going to have a populist response. And I think we've seen that play out. And then the fourth thing we said was these just-in-time supply chains are only efficient, like economically efficient under conditions of stability.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Premise was that the side effects and the unintended consequences of the globalization since World War II were creating its own demise. That breaks down in a few dimensions principally around geopolitics. So it's the US and China playing out a great power competition principally in the supply chain and economic theater.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am excited to talk to you. Altana builds software that helps people think about supply chains and logistics. There's a lot to talk about there. But I was actually reading the company's manifesto, which he wrote in 2022. You founded the company in 2019 basically on the thesis that globalization, as we knew it, would break down and change, and Atana could build some software that could help people in a new era of globalization. That bet seems very prescient right now, but also maybe a little bit destabilized given how globalization might be changing. Explain what you mean by that manifesto, by that founding statement that globalization is breaking down.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“War II World Order. You can certainly argue with that characterization, but it's worth calling out here because it was indeed a major and controversial decision to let China into the World Trade Organization. A lot in this one. I'm very eager to hear what you all think about it. Okay, Autana CEO Evan Smith. Here we go. Evan Smith, you're the co founder and CEO of Altana. Welcome to Dakota.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Evan has a lot of insight here, and he's very even keeled about what Altana's map of the world shows us about trade policy and conflict between major powers like the United States and China. There are some big, unsettling ideas here, but talking about them directly and with clarity at least made me feel like I had a framework with which to understand the endless on-again off again tariff news cycle. Soon as before we start, you'll hear us mention John Mearsheimer, who really was my international relations professor at the University of Chicago in the early two thousands. Mearsheimer is a famous proponent of what's called realism, a philosophy that says competition between great powers dominates world affairs. You'll also hear us talk about China being granted membership in the World Trade Organization in two thousand one, which I'm sure feels like a bit of trivia to some of you, but which was a major political decision at the time, a decision which you'll hear Evan characterize as the end of the first wave of globalization, the end of the post-World War.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isolationist trade policies are playing out in real time. So while we talk about Altana as a company a little bit in this conversation, what we really spend our time talking about is where things like the iPhone are made and where they might be made in the future. You'll also hear us talk a lot about China and how the Trump administration is focused on reducing our dependency on Chinese manufacturing, a goal which may or may not be possible on the kinds of timelines that matter to politicians, especially politicians like Trump.”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Patel, editor in chief of the Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today's episode is a little different, and I think it's one of the more illuminating conversations I've had in a while. I'm talking to Evan Smith, the co-founder and CEO of Altana, a company that makes software to track and manage the global supply chain. Evan started Altana in 2019 because he predicted that the era of globalized manufacturing and free trade would come to an end, and companies and governments would need powerful tools to adapt their supply chains as borders, tariffs, intentions got more complicated. Here in 2025, that looks like it was a pretty good bet, even if the way it's playing out is a lot more stressful and chaotic than anyone really wants. The easiest way to think about Altana's product is that it's a map of the global supply chain. You'll hear us call it that several times in this conversation. And what that means is that Evan has a front row seat to how things like Trump's tariffs”
2025-03-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT