Welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of March. I'm John Dickerson, one of the hosts of Slate's

Political GabFest. This episode, I spoke with Chris Miller, the author of Chip War, the fight

for the world's most critical technology. It's a book about the history of Chip War, the fight for the world's most critical technology.

It's a book about the history of the semiconductor, the wondrous process of how they are made,

and it's a book that gave me a totally new view of global politics and economics.

Oh, it's so wonderful, Chris, there's so much to do.

You know, like a good student, I have lots of, lots of notes.

What to you is the best description of what a semiconductor does. I mean, so people will say it's ones and zeros.

Like, what is it at its most basic that we can then just imagine, okay, multiply that by 15 million? Yeah, it's just a circuit turning out and off. It's like a

light switch. And when it's on, you get the one. When it's off, you get the zero. And it's just

lots of light switches, except rather than being the size of your finger, flipping them up and down,

they're measured in billionths of a meter. And silicon was, as I recall from reading this,

and you'll correct me, was important because it could be both a conduit and opaque. It could have

different properties. That's right. Yeah, semiconductor refers not only to the devices instead of our phones, but also to a class of

materials.

So most materials are either a conductor like copper wire or an insulator like glass.

And semiconductors can conduct when you apply an electric field on top of them.

And so the way the devices work inside chips is they apply in electric field,

the current is opened, the switch is turned on, and that's how you get the circuits flowing

that produce the ones and the zeros. And we'll hop around here. One of the things I love just

from the very start is you open up the book and of course there's a glossary that's helpful

for people like me. but what I love was

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