The Semiconductor Century with Chris Miller (Author of “Chip War”)

Speaker A: In the future, China is going to try to use every possible way to break through the barriers that the US has set up. And so my guess would be that in 5 years, China is still behind TSMC, but there is uncertainty there. And if China were to catch up with TSMC, it would have really profound implications. Speaker B: To catch up to US capabilities and TSMC's capabilities, is your expectation that China has to essentially create an alternative to ASML, like EUV? UV machine? Is it that they somehow managed to get one into the country in some way, shape, or form?

Speaker A: There's no way that smuggling is going to solve the problem. These machines are far too big to smuggle. There aren't any sitting around unused in the world. And so the question is, can China either A, replicate everything ASML has done, or B, find an alternative way of producing very small transistors on its chips? Speaker C: Hey, I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist Podcast. You've probably heard the saying, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. This podcast is my attempt to map the future by interviewing the people creating it, driven founders, prescient investors, and brilliant thinkers.

I hope my conversations with them help you identify significant changes before they go mainstream, make sense of complex developments, and find ways to participate in the upside. Today I'm speaking with Chris Miller, the historian who wrote one of the most important geopolitical books of the past few years, Chip War. It also happens to be one of my favorites. Chris is a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University who has spent nearly a decade showing us how semiconductors, the tiny chips powering our lives, have become the strategic center of gravity for global power economics, and innovation.