Pod Insights Decoder How Trump's tariff chaos is already changing global trade About this episode I'm talking to Evan Smith, who started Altana in 2019 because he predicted the first wave of globalized manufacturing and trade would end, and that companies would want new powerful tools to adapt their supply chains as the world grew more complex. Here in 2025, that looks like a pretty good bet — even if the way it's playing out is more stressful and chaotic than anyone really wants it to be.
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 to understand the endless on-again, off-again news cycle on tariffs and trade.
Links:
Globalization 2.0 Manifesto | Altana
The ‘giant sucking sound’ of NAFTA | The Conversation
‘Offensive Realism’: The never-ending struggle for power | American Diplomacy (2002)
Foreign Affairs Big Mac I | NYT (1996)
The end of the Golden Arches Doctrine | Financial Times
Trump could scale back tariffs, Lutnick says | CNBC
China joined rule-based trading system — then broke the rules | Politico
Open Source and China: Inverting Copyright? | Wisconsin International Law Journal
How the US lost out on iPhone work | NYT
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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Transcript 11,969 words · 11 speakers
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1:25 Speaker 04 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 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, 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.
2:08 Speaker 04 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 and isolationist trade policies are playing out in real time. So we talked about Altana 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 Altana's map of
2:51 Speaker 04 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
3:34 Speaker 04 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, Altana CEO Evan Smith, here we go.
4:14 Speaker 04 Evan Smith, you're the co-founder and CEO of Altana. Welcome to Decoder.
4:17 Speaker 05 Yeah, thank you for having me.
4:18 Speaker 04 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 Altana could build some software. They 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.
4:55 Speaker 05 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 into 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 physical, 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
5:39 Speaker 05 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,
6:24 Speaker 05 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.
6:33 Speaker 04 I'm the editor in chief of Verge. I often just think about things in terms of the iPhone. So I'm a kid of the eighties and nineties. 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 and 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 look at it and say, oh, the iPhone has actually prevented the great power conflict. Right? Everyone wants an iPhone.
7:18 Speaker 04 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 predicted, which is a big book that predicted the United States and China go to war. And like the next day was September 11th, and then that whole thing got shut to the side. Now, maybe we're back to it. But I just look at all 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
8:03 Speaker 04 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?
8:11 Speaker 05 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 with, without it resulting in a hot war. But the version that you described of, you know, the, the economic ties that bind, I too kind of had that economic worldview. You know, I got a, 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, he, his famous thing was the, the golden
8:56 Speaker 05 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, I've actually kind of come to the exact opposite view. Meaning peace gives rise to free trade and not the other way around.
9:29 Speaker 05 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, you know, 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.
10:11 Speaker 05 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, that big geopolitical circumstance.
10:32 Speaker 04 When you think about the thesis of Altana, which is, okay, you had identified globalization is, is running one version of its course, and there's going to be a next version. You know, I'm, I'm reading your manifesto. Your idea here is we're, 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 I, what I see is, oh, we should make globalization better, right? It's changing, there's some great power dynamics, but we, 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.
11:17 Speaker 04 Right? Like, the, 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, United States, from America. And they seem correct. I, 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?
11:52 Speaker 05 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 across, starting in southern Mexico and kind of going north, you have that stratification of low cost, relatively low skilled labor going to, you know, higher skilled, higher cost labor. And you have the ability to manufacture most of everything that the United States consumes
12:35 Speaker 05 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?
12:51 Speaker 05 I'm not in the Trump administration, so I won't, 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.
13:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, which now might be yet again replaced by the annexation of Canada. Like even that doesn't seem like a stable foundation, but okay, continue. We'll, we'll take it that some people in the Trump administration would like that to happen.
13:29 Speaker 05 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 a similar objective, but they did that through very large scale subsidies and industrial policy initiatives to direct capital toward those, those industries they wanted to see in America. So that's thing one. Thing two is.
14:03 Speaker 05 There's a very clear objective which he's given to his, 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, but you know, the, the, 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
14:43 Speaker 05 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.
15:05 Speaker 04 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.
15:26 Speaker 05 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, you know, 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 you how, 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
16:11 Speaker 05 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. 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, 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
16:56 Speaker 05 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, you know, comparative advantage, we should only do the most, you know, specialized version of, 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
17:41 Speaker 05 weapon 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, right? And, and now they just do the final assembly. So that's the point. Like, like Boeing doesn't own its own value chains anymore, they can't even make an airplane. Ford is, you know, in, in the final assembly business.
18:23 Speaker 05 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, 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.
18:57 Speaker 04 So you collect a bunch of data from across these value chains from different suppliers. Why do these companies give you that data?
19:04 Speaker 05 They 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 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
19:49 Speaker 05 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. 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.
20:21 Speaker 04 Put that in the practice for me, let's just use LL Bean. LL Bean wants to manufacture some more hats for the stores, ski season. What does Altana help them do?
20:31 Speaker 05 LL 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 are 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.
21:12 Speaker 05 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, you know, the the Uyghur forced labor issue was sort of infecting all those goods. That's a big one, like you, you literally can't import to the United States and they've had detentions, everybody in the industry's had detentions. And so navigating through that, you know, making sure the the value chains are are healthy and compliant and that you don't have these big, you know, multimillion dollar, tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of border interruptions
21:57 Speaker 05 and and 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 Altana 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 the whole global value chain network, but then engage it and then make it better over time.
22:24 Speaker 04 I guess I'm still just thinking about the incentives to actually expose any data to 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 from the soil, right? Why does the big industrial producer in China want anyone to know where it's where its products are coming from?
22:50 Speaker 05 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. And basically what it says is if you want the downstream goods, you know, the the car, the iPhone, the clothes to make their way into the UK, the US, Europe, Australia.
23:31 Speaker 05 Canada, you, the, you know, the, 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, 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. 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. Said, "You have to share this information with us. You have to make these declarations."
24:15 Speaker 05 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.
24:23 Speaker 04 When you look at what Altana provides in that, right? That's a problem to be solved. 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 like a enterprise data provisioning problem, but then you also, you know, 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?
24:54 Speaker 05 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, 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
25:39 Speaker 05 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, that lead keeps compounding.
25:49 Speaker 05 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 Neelai 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.
26:34 Speaker 05 Then you need AI to like 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. So 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? 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 like look at the whole network and say, here are upstream suppliers that are at risk of failing financially
27:18 Speaker 05 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 AI, we have an agentic AI system that's doing all of that. You know, you can put the customs broker in the loop and give them ultimate control, but that's become wildly performant.
28:01 Speaker 05 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.
28:17 Speaker 04 We have to take a short break. We'll be back in just a minute.
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29:57 Speaker 04 Welcome back. I'm talking with Altana CEO Evan Smith. Just before the break, he was telling me how AI fits into the Altana picture. And it's a great opportunity to ask, what is the Altana picture?
30:09 Speaker 04 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 Altano right now? And how have you structured the company?
30:17 Speaker 05 We're about 240 people. And we operate where, you know, 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.
30:43 Speaker 04 How do you make decisions? What's your framework?
30:45 Speaker 05 Me personally?
30:46 Speaker 04 Yeah.
30:47 Speaker 05 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 try to speak last and ask questions, and then decide when I need to, you know, break ties or, you know, 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
31:26 Speaker 05 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, you know, 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, you know, groups along with me.
31:50 Speaker 04 Do you think that's reflective of the fact that the the foundation of the entire global economy seems to be changing very quickly?
31:57 Speaker 05 It's 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, these things we kind of expected would be relevant products that would, 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 Ultana is like, how do we, 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, I'm finding myself in wartime mode and, and calling a lot of shots in order to get through that stuff with velocity.
32:41 Speaker 04 How real time is the insight you get? You mentioned being able to detect when a 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?
32:55 Speaker 05 It's, 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, you know, a thing that will happen five weeks from now. Right? But then we get the shipment itself, and then we get the customs entry associated with the shipments. You kind of 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. And then you see some things that kind of develop over time and that, you know, you need more pieces of data, pieces of signal
33:37 Speaker 05 to kind of build up a broader picture you feel good about. So it's really a spectrum. There, 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?
33:56 Speaker 04 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 Buttnick, 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?
34:18 Speaker 05 Do we see the disturbance of the network through the tariffs or non-tariffs?
34:24 Speaker 04 Right. The Canada is not going to import Kentucky bourbon anymore. Does that show up in your data?
34:28 Speaker 05 Yeah, that does.
34:30 Speaker 04 What does that look like? How do you, do you see the aftershocks of it? Do you see the supply chain reconfigure?
34:35 Speaker 05 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 tariffed 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, the nature of the value chains.
35:20 Speaker 05 So what happened in Trump won, when there was a bunch of Chinese, you know, economic policy and trade barriers that were put up, was 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, you know, refrigerator parts to Mexico, turn it into a refrigerator and then import it into the United States under, you know, USMCA and not pay the tariffs. The other version of it was through what's called the e-commerce de minimis threshold,
36:00 Speaker 05 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.
36:16 Speaker 05 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 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 too.
36:56 Speaker 05 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.
37:12 Speaker 04 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?
37:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, and 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 gonna 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 that actually is pretty consequential.
38:00 Speaker 05 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.
38:25 Speaker 05 That's roughly forty percent of Mexican and Canadian trade with the US. So the sixty percent that's not done the work to say, you know, the 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 sixty percent of goods are still subject to the twenty five percent tariffs. And at the same time, they hit China with the extra tariffs. So they've now done two, you know, a ten percent and another ten percent on all China. So the dotted line through all those things is the Trump administration is trying to bring Mexico
39:05 Speaker 05 and Canada into tighter alignment with the United States and its trade policy vis a vis China.
39:11 Speaker 04 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 this, 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? That 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.
39:39 Speaker 05 What I believe is, 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.
40:12 Speaker 04 Actually, here's another question. Do we even have the capital to do it?
40:16 Speaker 05 There's a lot of capital sloshing around the world.
40:18 Speaker 04 Yeah.
40:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, so should the US government invest in that and will they? Certainly not in this administration. They will not do that, right?
40:28 Speaker 04 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.
40:40 Speaker 05 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 deploy 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.
41:23 Speaker 05 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.
41:36 Speaker 04 On what timeframe do you think capitalism figures that out? Again, I'm just looking at Altana'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?
41:50 Speaker 05 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, you know, 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, I think for those examples where you just have, you know, massive CapEx in China. It's really hard. And I think the most intractable one, honestly, is what are called critical minerals. Have you heard that term before?
42:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, here and there.
42:36 Speaker 05 Yeah. So it's, it's basically rare earths, which we all have heard of. And then the other metals that go into all of our, you know, most important electronics. So think like nickel. It's not, nickel's not rare, but, 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, 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? You have, these are typically like big, open pit mines where
43:21 Speaker 05 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,
44:04 Speaker 05 depresses the price, puts that, that company out of business. They either go away or the Chinese company buys them.
44:12 Speaker 05 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. Like I don't, I don't see that happening.
44:47 Speaker 04 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 struggle hold on the market and that will create peace, create prosperity, some set of goals that that industrial policy will, will deliver. We look at Taiwan, for example, we've, 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.
45:30 Speaker 04 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, United States. To the extent that the Biden administration was 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.
45:55 Speaker 04 You can, 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. Like you can see how that played out for them.
46:05 Speaker 05 Totally.
46:05 Speaker 04 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, 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 still, it's negative incentives instead of positive incentives. And you still might game 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 trade, they haven't said that out loud. They've said, here's a bunch of structural impediments.
46:45 Speaker 05 Right.
46:46 Speaker 04 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 the momentum for the market to deliver the result.
47:05 Speaker 05 So I would add one thing to the picture you painted, though, just to be fair about it.
47:10 Speaker 04 Sure.
47:10 Speaker 05 The other thing the 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 it permitted. It'll never happen, right? So.
47:23 Speaker 04 But again, that's a trade off, right? I mean, there's a reason we don't want nickel refining.
47:27 Speaker 05 I'm not, I'm not making a normative judgment. I'm just describing the landscape I see. So, um, so that's, that's kind of the, 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 like in general, I, my, my perspective is the United States can't possibly out centralize China and can't possibly out execute top down economic control better than China does that, right?
48:10 Speaker 05 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, and that has been our comparative advantage. So I'm more sympathetic to an economic security framework that plays to our right to win.
48:43 Speaker 05 Then doesn't. So I think the Biden kind of freak economic thing you described was very much like, okay, let's let's sort of take other examples of central planning and industrial policy and make these big, you know, billion dollar, 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 and kind of the academic and think
49:26 Speaker 05 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.
49:35 Speaker 04 We have to take on a short break. We'll be right back.
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51:15 Speaker 04 Welcome back. I'm talking with Altana 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 US trade policy is China, which brings us to the next somewhat unsettling question. What happens when the US economy and US trade policy are this unstable? A lot of what you're talking about with the comparative advantage in 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 is like, looks back across the last 20 years and like, that's been stable.
51:59 Speaker 04 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. Like, there's a, 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? To 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 gonna export bourbon to Canada. We're not gonna do that anymore. Trump is gonna say, we're gonna cut our own lumber in the United States, but all the trees are in Canada.
52:44 Speaker 04 That seems totally destabilizing. We're gonna decouple from China in four years. Inherently destabilizing. Apple is gonna announce $500 billion worth of investment that they already planned for. And somehow that's gonna make it okay. Like, all of that seems new and destabilizing in a way that maybe even in Trump I didn't exist. And do you see that? Is that reflected? Do you worry about that?
53:07 Speaker 05 Back to the beginning of the conversation. I mean, we bet our careers on it.
53:11 Speaker 04 Yeah.
53:12 Speaker 05 So I just see it as an inevitability. Like, I'm a macro guy. Like, 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 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.
53:56 Speaker 05 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 re-flated and re-flated. All these things, to me, signal breakdown of the system.
54:25 Speaker 04 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?
54:45 Speaker 05 I see it mostly going there, at least for, you know, 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 US doing its thing. China publishes their economic intentions every five years.
55:04 Speaker 05 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 like 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. So I, it'd be, and to some extent, like, how did we get here? We had a rules based free trade order that, you know, the United States architected.
55:49 Speaker 05 And everything made a lot of sense economically, you know, middle class impacts aside. The admission of China to the World Trade Organization in 2001, I think, like, that was the end, that was the, 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, and so it's a, it was sort of bigger than neighbor at like an unprecedented scale.
56:34 Speaker 05 And I, I, I think the system is responding to that fact, right? Like that was the catalyst. It wasn't that like some, somebody here or there was elected and, you know, did some policy actions. I view things on sort of this multi, multi decade lens. And the policy environment, the political environment right now is, is sort of. A consequence of that as opposed to the primary driver of it, if that makes sense.
56:59 Speaker 04 I wrote my, uh, my law review article in my 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 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, I, you can, there are many criticisms of Tim Cook one could issue.
57:41 Speaker 04 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 managed 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.
58:21 Speaker 04 And 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.
58:33 Speaker 05 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.
58:43 Speaker 04 How's that?
58:46 Speaker 05 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. You know, what are the direct impacts with 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, you know, our mission is to fix globalization, then you can envision a world where, you
59:31 Speaker 05 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, 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 US military
1:00:12 Speaker 05 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, you know, supply chain exploits that have been built into the systems by China over the last two decades. And known vulnerabilities, known, you know, state-sponsored cyber attacks that create those exploits.
1:00:44 Speaker 05 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, you know, there's a, there's a, 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 derisked, 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.
1:01:21 Speaker 04 I feel like some people will take issue with your characterization of Taiwan as an island, but I get it. Is there enough world? Let's end here. This is like kind of the biggest question that I have for you. Right? You, your software builds you a picture of the value chains across the world. I don't know that there's enough capacity. It's, 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, you're helping bring about, it has reached an equilibrium. 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.
1:02:03 Speaker 04 And I, I'm not sure that there's actually enough of that capacity to, to reorient everything and actually maintain an equilibrium or change it without something even more destabilizing happening. And I'm, I'm just wondering if, 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 they kind of want it to stop, right? And that, it still feels like the tension.
1:02:26 Speaker 05 I think there's enormous production capacity at basically every stage of the value chain. So I, 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, I think.
1:03:00 Speaker 05 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, you know, the, the means to refactor.
1:03:20 Speaker 04 All right, last question, you've got the, 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? What, based on your map, what, what seems the most stable right now?
1:03:34 Speaker 05 Geographically or in terms of industries?
1:03:36 Speaker 04 Both.
1:03:37 Speaker 05 Tariffs notwithstanding, I guess the last, uh, you know, couple of 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, I'd be focused on producing in Mexico, sourcing most of my components from North America. And, um, and serving US and Canadian markets. And, um, and taking advantage of the free trade agreement that exists.
1:04:17 Speaker 05 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, is still sort of free trade.
1:04:32 Speaker 05 I would go long on the Mexican demographics. I would go long on the Mexican economy generally.
1:04:41 Speaker 05 I would go long on North American demand for advanced electronics components. In everything from automotives to aerospace, to defense, to the, the whole picture. And, um, I would try to build a Shenzhen of North America. Like one big and, and like integrated and, and co-located value chain where you could really do mass scale drones, manufacturing, optics, the whole thing.
1:05:11 Speaker 04 The Chinese government also made a huge investment in labor. Right? When, when Obama asked Steve Jobs, why can't you make the iPhone here? His answer was, there's just not enough manufacturing engineers, like it's not gonna 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?
1:05:31 Speaker 05 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. So it's a massive gap in both of those worldviews and approaches.
1:05:58 Speaker 04 Do you think that can be reconciled?
1:06:01 Speaker 05 Partially through automation, not fully.
1:06:05 Speaker 04 Well, Evan, this has been an incredible conversation. I obviously could talk to you for another hour. You're gonna have to come back.
1:06:12 Speaker 05 I want to know more about your, um, your law school thesis. I, 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.
1:06:25 Speaker 04 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. Uh, I appreciate you for that. It was a good suck up to end the show. We'll have you back. Well, here's what we'll do. When there's, when tariffs go on, uh, we won't have you. When tariffs go off, we'll have you. So like every, every few weeks, we'll have you back on the show.
1:06:43 Speaker 05 All right, I'm gonna be a regular.
1:06:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, that'll be great. Evan, thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon.
1:06:47 Speaker 05 Yeah, that was fun. Thanks for having me.
1:06:52 Speaker 04 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 [email protected] . 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. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is production The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
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1:08:27 Speaker 09 We just moved into our new house and I didn't realize just how close we were to the neighbors. That's when my friend told me about Blinds.com.
1:08:35 Speaker 10 Blinds.com isn't a medication, but it can improve how you feel about your home. Customers who shop at Blinds.com experience excellent customer service, from consultation to installation. Side effects include increased privacy and better sleep. Talk to your partner today and see if Blinds.com is right for you.
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