How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade
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Arm believes the future isn't about technology. It's about people and the possibilities technology can offer us all. The future is built on Arm. You can discover more at arm.com slash discover. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay 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 Altona, a company that makes software to track and manage the global supply chain.

Evans started Altona 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, and tensions 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 Altona'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 and isolationist trade policies are playing out in real time. So we talked about Altona as a company a little bit in this conversation. What we really spent our time talking about is where things like the iPhone are made, 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. Evan has a lot of insight here, and he's very even keeled about what Altona'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 2000s. 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 2001, 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 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.

There's a lot in this one. I'm very eager to hear what you all think about it. Okay. Altona CEO, Evan Smith. Here we go. Evan Smith, you're the co-founder and CEO of Altona. Welcome to Decoder. Yeah, thank you for having me. I am excited to talk to you. Altona 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 you 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 Altona 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. The 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. 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. The 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. 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.

I'm the editor-in-chief of The 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 that 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. And then you can look at the Tim Cook era and you can say from one perspective, yep, he increased Apple's stock price. But from another perspective, you can look at it and say, oh, the iPhone has actually prevented the great power conflict.

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 shunned to the side. Now maybe we're back to it. But I just look at all 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 like 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? 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 Friedman's daughter, right? And I read all of his books and it was just the, 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 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 books,

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. 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, at least on a relative basis, as a declining power, 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, all following as a result. So it's all sort of nested within that big geopolitical circumstance. When you think about the thesis of Altona, which is, okay, you had identified globalization is running...

one version of its course and there's going to be a next version. You know, 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. Right. Like the response from basically every member of the Trump administration to our 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? So I think it's certainly possible to bring some manufacturing back to the United States.

I also 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 going

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 what's the policy objective of the Trump administration? I'm 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 US-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement that replaced NAFTA under the first Trump administration. Yeah, which now might be, again, replaced by...

The annexation of Canada, even that doesn't seem like a stable foundation. But OK, continue. We'll take it that some people in the Trump administration would like that to happen. 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 the things that we couldn't do without. 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. So that's 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. So I want to hold on China for one 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 China in real time. 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 everybody six degrees of Kevin Bacon 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. That's the foundation. The way that our customers use that primarily is to understand and manage what are called value chains. This actually matters in the context of the globalization discussion we were just having. What's a value chain? A value chain is for any product. Let's take the iPhone. It's the whole network of production,

all the way back to the soil. You know, the silicon comes out of the ground, it turns into chips, it turns into, you know, all the logic in your phone. The graphite comes out of the ground, right? The aluminum comes out of the ground. So that whole raw materials through the intermediate goods, 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.

And it sits on top of that map of the world that we've built. So 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.

And everything else got outsourced and outsourced and outsourced and outsourced and outsourced. So it became impossible to really know your supplier's supplier or your supplier's supplier's supplier and even in the other direction. Right. So you have Western electronics companies that keep seeing their stuff get into Russian weapons systems. Well, they're mostly not selling to Russia. Right. So it's that it's that customer's customer's customer that's 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. Boeing doesn't own its own value chains anymore. They can't even make an airplane anymore.

Ford is 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.

In our case, you don't have to own the whole network. 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. You collect a bunch of data from across these value chains from different suppliers. Why do these companies give you that data? They don't share it in the broadest sense. 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 the 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 you know there's a maersk spoke there's a ll bean 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 pull it all centrally 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 learn from that. We build 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. Put that into practice for me. Let's just use Ellabean. Ellabean wants to manufacture some more hats for the stores, ski season. What does Altona help them do?

L.L. Bean 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? So 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. So speaking of trade barriers, that was a big one that happened in 2022 was the U.S. 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. Like you literally can't import to the United States and they've had detentions. Everybody in the industry has had detentions. And so navigating through that, making sure the value chains are healthy and compliant and that you don't have these big multimillion 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 Altona to understand your carbon footprint? How do you understand 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. 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 Maersk 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? 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, whether 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.

Basically, what it says is if you want the downstream goods, the car, the iPhone, the clothes to make their way into the UK, the US, Europe, Australia, Canada, you, the large upstream manufacturer, have to disclose all this information about your goods and your production practices. Right.

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, you know, 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. Like that all is kind of business as usual for...

What's so different over the last few years is they've created, you know, 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. When you look at,

what Altona provides in that, right? That's a problem to be solved. You can say, OK, 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 like 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?

We 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?

So 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. So we've exhausted what you can do in the public domain. And we've now about doubled that. And that lead keeps compounding.

So what's the role of AI? We use AI to actually connect all that data together, right? So it's billions and billions of data points. It's really messy stuff. It's in Chinese and Cyrillic and Spanish. So it's different languages, right? You don't have the benefit of unique IDs like you do in personal data where, you know, an email address or a telephone can help you join all the records to like Nilay or Evan.

In the 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. 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 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?

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 and all the logic associated with that. That's $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 tariffs and duties and certificates and permits."

So we have an agentic AI system that's doing all of that. You can put the customer's broker in the loop and give 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 generate insight and actually automate entire workflows. We have to take a short break. We'll be back in just a minute. ♪

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Welcome back. I'm talking with Altona CEO Evan Smith. Just before the break, he was telling me how AI fits into the Altona picture. That's a great opportunity to ask, what is the Altona picture? Let me ask the two decoder questions, and I want to put all this into practice with what's happening in trade right now. How big is Altona right now, and how have you structured the company? 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.

How do you make decisions? What's your framework? Me personally? Yeah. This has actually evolved pretty meaningfully in the last few months. Where I have little depth or relatively little depth, depending on the team around me, I try 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 of months is...

Giving myself permission to be very decisive when I'm actually deep in the details and driving the company forward that way. So I've actually leaned in pretty aggressively on 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 bring groups along with me. Do you think that's reflective of the fact that the foundation of the entire global economy seems to be changing very quickly? It's a big part of it. 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 experience is like these things we kind of expected would be relevant products that could exist on top of our platform. Over time, you know, 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 Altona 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. How real-time is the insight you get? You mentioned being able to detect when an upstream provider might be failing, right? Is that in real-time? Is that you wake up and there's a map and there's a blinking red light or is it on a trailing basis? It's actually a spectrum. 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. But then we get the shipment itself and then we get the customs entry associated with the shipments. You see this lifecycle 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.

Then you see some things that develop over time and that you need more pieces of data, pieces of signal to build up a broader picture you feel good about. 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, you know, there's something sort of taking shape in the network. And then some of it is sort of post facto. What happened? All right. Let me put all this into a blender. I think I've got a sense of the company and what you can see. Trump announces tariffs.

24 hours later, he walks back the tariffs and he announces them again. Maybe they're on. Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, shows up on CNBC and says they're going to go away. Do you see that? Do you see that reflected in the data? Do you see that across the network? Do we see the disturbance of the network through the tariffs or non-tariffs? Right. Canada is not going to import Kentucky bourbon anymore. Does that show up in your data? Yeah, that does.

What does that look like? How do you do you see the aftershocks of it? Do you see the supply chain reconfigure? This goes back, you know, 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 tariffs applied, you see a redistribution of imports associated with the tariffed 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

When there was a bunch of Chinese economic policy and trade barriers that were put up, you saw a big shift in Chinese supply chains going to Mexico and Canada, where two things happened. 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. So then, unsurprisingly, you had these mega warehouses built up on the Mexican and Canadian borders where they were just drop shipping goods.

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. And 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. 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. Is that what's driving all of the posturing towards Canada and Mexico? Is it an underlying sense that China's actually taking advantage of those agreements? Yeah. I have to get a little wonky to argue the case, but so yes is the answer. And-

If you look at where the tariff thing landed, and again, by the time this airs, who knows where we are, but 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. That was fine print in the announcement that actually is pretty consequential.

What that means is 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.

That's roughly 40% of Mexican and Canadian trade with the U.S. So the 60% that's not done the work to say, you know, 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, you know, 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-a-vis China. All 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 don't know how to take those Jenga blocks and make that tower. 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? What I believe is they're going to try. And then, you know, 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.

Is that kind of CapEx possible to replicate elsewhere within a four-year timeframe? That's going to be pretty tough. Actually, here's another question. Do we even have the capital to do it? There's a lot of capital sloshing around the world. Yeah. Yeah. So...

Should the U.S. government invest in that and will they? Certainly not in this administration. They will not do that, right? Yeah, I suppose the operative part of my question there was the we. Like, do we in the United States have the ability, the will to do it, the coordination to do it? That seems up in the air. 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, those deployed a lot of capital and loan guarantees and other ways to kind of subsidize and motivate the manufacturing of those things here. What this administration is doing is saying, we're going to use trade barriers to restrict the market access of competitive products, like deemed competitive products

And I think, you know, 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, you know, supply and demand and then let capitalism figure it out from there. On what time frame do you think capitalism figures that out? Again, I'm just looking at.

El Tana's product, right? You have a view of this system and how it reacts to different kinds of shocks. On what timeframe do you think that we can figure this out? It's just a spectrum. I mean, a lot of these things are already in motion. 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, it's really hard. I think the most intractable one, honestly, is what are called critical minerals. Have you heard that term before?

Here and there. Yeah. 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 is 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. You know, it's stuff we don't actually want in our backyard.

which 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, you know, 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. The reason this really, really matters is like,

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. Like 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, you know, 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. When you describe that, the thing that I always think about is that is directed industrial policy, right? China made 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 timeframe, we will have this triangle hold 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 chip 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 trying, I think you 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 B program. You can see how that played out for them. Totally. 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 one American consumer to buy your car, you have to do a bunch of stuff to get to our market. That seems just as...

Right. It's still not directed industrial policy. It's still 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 like haven't said that out loud.

They've said, here's a bunch of structural impediments that might result in some capital directed at nickel refining 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 negative incentives in this case create problems.

The momentum for the market to deliver the result. So I would add one thing to the picture you painted though, just to be fair about it. The other thing that Trump administration is trying to do is massively deregulate. So, you know, why isn't there nickel refining in the United States? Because it's impossible to get a permanent, it'll never happen. Right. So, but again, that's a trade-off, right? I mean, there's a reason we don't want nickel refining. I'm not, I'm not making a normative judgment. I'm just describing the landscape I see. So, um,

So that's kind of, I think, the Trump thesis here is like, let's remove the barriers to building. Let's 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 and can't possibly out-execute China.

top-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. And that has been our comparative advantage. So I'm more sympathetic to an economic security framework than

that plays to our right to win than doesn't. So I think the Biden kind of free 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, you know, billion dollar, a hundred billion dollar, trillion dollar injections into sectors of the economy and specific recipients of aid. And then, you know, hope it works out. Like that's what China does. I'm 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 in 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. We have to take another short break. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back. I'm talking with Altona CEO Evan Smith about, well, the global supply chain and how it works. Right before the break, he was explaining that from where he sits, the core issue at the heart of pretty much all U.S. trade policy is China, which brings us to the next somewhat unsettling question. What happens when the U.S. economy and U.S. trade policy are this unstable? 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." But 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. 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, right? Even 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. 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. All of that seems new and destabilizing in a way that

maybe even in Trump one didn't exist. And do you see that? Is that reflected? Do you, do you worry about that? Back to the beginning of the conversation? I mean, we, we bet our careers on it. Yeah. So I, I just see it as an inevitability. Like I, I'm a macro guy. Like I, I like these big systems problems and I 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 it,

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. And so 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, you know, these asset bubbles get inflated and reflated and reflated.

All these things to me signal breakdown of the system. 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 and a China and its allies value chain? I see it mostly going there, at least for the more sensitive critical value chains.

And I don't see it playing out any other way. And, you know, this isn't just a sort of U.S. 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, you know, 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. And they write it down and they do what they say. And 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. Now, 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, we are where we are. And so it was sort of bigger than neighbor at like an unprecedented scale. And I think the system is responding to that fact, right? Like that was the catalyst. It wasn't that like

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. 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, well, we'll do copier 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 was 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, you manage both Trump one and the Biden administration through COVID? That's a remarkable fact of like 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 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. I hope that I can look back at the whole arc of Altana and say that we are one of those companies that bent the arc of history in that way.

How's that? 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 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.

Then you can envision a world where, you know, business in the West, business in the East, you know, continues to be transnational. And, you know, 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 phase.

you prevent accidents happening and you prevent like the worst from happening. You know, paint a picture like, let's say China moves on Taiwan by the end of the decade. And I've been in a war game with U.S. 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. And known vulnerabilities, known state-sponsored cyber attacks that create those exploits. In that scenario, is America more or less likely to go to war? I actually think it's more likely to go to war. I think there's a higher probability that

The 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, you know, a specific supply chain, or you don't need to react to a vulnerability that, you know, 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. 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 kind of the biggest question that I have for you. 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, it has reached an equilibrium. Yeah.

And destabilizing equilibrium just implies there will be more capacity, that we're going to move the chips out of Taiwan and make them in India or something. And I'm not sure that there's actually enough of that capacity to reorient everything and actually maintain an equilibrium or change it without something even more destabilizing happening. And I'm just wondering if that's where you're at or you think you can actually make the shift. Because if you're like, we need to move to the next phase of globalization, my view of the Trump administration is no.

They kind of want it to stop. Right. And that still feels like the tension. 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, you know, 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. All those things add up to the means to refactor.

All right. Last question. You've got the big view. You've got the software. If you're someone listening to this, you're an entrepreneur, you're a builder. We have a lot of those listening to the show. Where would you go build? Based on your map, what seems the most stable right now? Geographically or in terms of industries? Both. Tariffs notwithstanding, I guess the last couple of weeks of Mexico drama, if I were starting from scratch and not doing Altona-

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, like the way that the tariffs just played out is...

Anything that wasn't certified under the USMCA as, you know, North American origin got hit with tariffs. But everything that's certified, you know, is still sort of free trade. I would go long on the Mexican demographics. I would go long on the Mexican economy generally. I would go long on North American demand for advanced electronics components.

in everything from automotives to aerospace to defense to the whole picture. I would try to build a Shenzhen of North America.

Like one big integrated and co-located value chain where you could really do mass scale drones manufacturing, optics, the whole thing. The Chinese government also made a huge investment in labor. When Obama asked Steve Jobs, why can't you make the iPhone here? His answer was, there's just not enough manufacturing engineers. It's not going to happen.

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? Mexico's a lot better at it. We're terrible. And, you know, 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. It's a massive gap in both of those worldviews and approaches. Do you think that can be reconciled? Partially through automation.

Not fully. Well, Evan, this has been an incredible conversation. I obviously could talk to you for another hour. You're going to have to come back. I want to know more about your law school thesis. I think China's doing the same thing on open source and AI that they did with

open source back then. But anyway, maybe that's for another one. Thank you for being the only person, including the editor of the Wisconsin International Law Journal, who has ever said, I want to know more about this thesis. I appreciate you for that. It was a good suck up to end the show. We'll have you back. Here's what we'll do. When tariffs go on, we won't have you. When tariffs go off, we'll have you. So like every few weeks, we'll have you back on the show. All right. I'm going to be a regular. Yeah, that'd be great. Evan, thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah, that was fun. Thanks for having me.

I'd like to thank Evan Smith for taking the time to join me on Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky, and we have a TikTok and an Instagram. Check them out. They're at decoderpod. They're a lot of fun.

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