WTH Should I Read This Summer? Chip War by Chris Miller
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2023
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This August, the What the Hell crew brings you a summer reading series! Our first pick is Chip War, a book the NYT hailed as a cross between Mission Impossible and the China Syndrome. Nominally, this is the story of the semiconductor industry, but it is really a forecast of modern grand strategy, great power conflict, and the security of the global economy. It is no mistake that the book’s author, Chris Miller, set out to write a book about military strategy – and then realized that military strategy today is defined by applying advanced chips to systems. Beyond just military however, advanced chips make the world as we know it work. They are in your iPhone, your dishwasher, your car… the list goes on. The clincher? Almost all of these highly technical chips are made in Taiwan – one of the most geopolitically tense areas in the world.
Chris Miller is an Associate Professor of International History at Tufts University and a Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Fellow at AEI. He is also the co-director of the Fletcher School’s Russia and Eurasia program and the director of the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. In addition to Chip War, Miller’s books include We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to Asia from Peter the Great to Putin (Harvard University Press, 2021), Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), and The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Chris is an alumnus of Harvard College and holds an MA and PhD from Yale.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on? |
| 0:01.1 | Who in God's name knows what |
| 0:22.1 | it's all about. Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. I'm Mark Teeson. |
| 0:37.8 | Welcome to our podcast. What the hell is going on? |
| 0:41.1 | Mark, what the hell is going on this August? |
| 0:43.7 | So most of our listeners know that we normally take the month of August off. |
| 0:47.2 | Danny goes off on her wonderful adventures across the world. |
| 0:49.9 | I'm usually up in Maine or at a hockey tournament or something like that. |
| 0:53.5 | And we decided that sucks. Why should we leave you without a podcast for a month? Because we know you're all waiting with bated breath every Wednesday for this thing to come out. So we said, you know what? Let's do a summer reading series of what the hell should I read this summer. And let's find some of our friends who've written amazing books. And we're going to invite them on the podcast to talk about their books, talk about how they affect current events today, and we've got our first one. |
| 1:17.2 | And it really is a terrific one. |
| 1:19.2 | We have a colleague at AEI, Chris Miller, who's one of our Gene Kirkpatrick-Patrick scholars. |
| 1:24.6 | It's a program that we do for people in academia to expose them to the |
| 1:29.3 | policy world and to have them bring that understanding of how government works back to academia |
| 1:35.4 | where, you know, God knows they need a little bit of reality injected. Chris is not one of those |
| 1:41.1 | people who needed that kind of a hand up, but we're really happy that |
| 1:44.7 | he was part of this program, and he's written a simply terrific book called Chip Wars that |
| 1:51.0 | came out last year and really was the alarm bell that I think has gotten much of Washington |
| 1:58.1 | to stand up and smack themselves on the head and go, oh my God, |
| 2:03.5 | I actually need to understand this better. I need to care about this. So just so people know, |
| 2:10.1 | you read this litany during our interview, but this book is the FT business book of the year, |
| 2:15.0 | Economist's Best Books of 2022, the New Yorkers best books of |
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