Evan Smith

speaker

503 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Evan Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Decoder with Nilay Patel · Tariffs didn’t bring manufacturing jobs back to the US · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

It became impossible to look at all the shipments and to look at all the goods in the shipments.

And so for decades, the whole

concept was, all right, we'll do random sampling, random targeting, and we'll let the kind of intuition of the port officers dictate what they're going to go look at.

After 9-11, that was no longer okay.

And so then a whole kind of technology and policy framework arose in the post-9-11 world where it was risk-based targeting and segmentation.

So the idea was we're going to try to pick needles out of the haystack using analytics.

And, you know, with the systems that existed at the time, those are pretty crappy.

I'm not going to name names, but one major government I know intimately well has a 0.5% targeting hit rate in their customs targeting system.

So, you know, these are like rules-based systems where it's like, if a container of frozen squid comes in, you know, search it for cocaine.

That's a real example.

That's great.

Yeah, they found cocaine one time in the box of frozen squid.

And every single shipment of frozen squid thereafter has been opened.

And guess how many times they've found cocaine in the box?

Zero.

Yeah.

So that's been the state of the art for the last 20 years.

And now our point of view is that with AI, two things are possible.

One is that you can continuously monitor and screen everything.

You don't have to selectively target.

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