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. Read the full interview transcript The Verge. Links: How Trump’s tariff chaos is already changing global trade | Decoder Skydio CEO Adam Bry on not drawing red lines for drone use | Decoder Trump imposes new global tariffs, drawing protests from trading partners | Reuters Greer: USMCA Talks Could Stretch Into Next Year | Wall Street Journal Trump hits Canada with new 50% tariffs | Associated Press Iran weaponized the Strait of Hormuz. Now neighbors are going around it | CNN The Iran war is testing Southeast Asia’s faith in the US | Politico Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder’s producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Kabir Chopra. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tariffs didn’t bring manufacturing jobs back to the US

Decoder with Nilay Patel

[SPEAKER_A] Support for this show comes from Comcast Business. Modern enterprise is a lot of moving parts. Comcast Business helps you orchestrate it all with SD-WAN working at scale to keep 150 hospital locations connected and working as one, plus SASE and zero-trust security protecting financial data across a bank's 2,000 branches, and AI-powered networking that optimizes traffic across 5 continents. No one does business like Comcast Business.

[SPEAKER_B] Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Eli Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Evan Smith, the 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 illuminating and occasionally alarming chat. Evan and I got into the existential weeds of international relations and economics almost immediately. It's among my favorite episodes of Decoder, and it's a deep introduction into what Altana does if you're interested. We'll drop a link in the show notes. But now it's a year and a half later, and global trade is somehow even more chaotic than it was the last time Evan and I talked. And as you'll hear, we jumped right back into the weeds of international relations yet again. On top of that, developments in agentic AI have changed the very nature of what it means to run a software company. It's changed what Altana can do. But like every other software company, it's also changed how Altana can do it, how it builds software.

Tariffs didn’t bring manufacturing jobs back to the US

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

Tariffs didn’t bring manufacturing jobs back to the US

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.