August 19, 2025 • 33 mins
A world changing industry that kind of happened by coincidence.
'Chip War' by Chris Miller is a detailed history of the semiconductor industry from its origins in the 1950's to the present day. Important individuals/companies rise and fall as it goes from a new emerging technology created by theorists/tinkers to the global powerhouse companies influenced by countries. It's split into 8 parts with 52 chapters in total.
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Timeline:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:38) Themes/Questions
(00:21:57) Author & Extras
(00:26:10) Summary
(00:28:18) Value 4 Value
(00:29:28) Coming Up/Join Live!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kyrin Down (00:00):
A world changing industry that kind of happened by coincidence.
Welcome,
Mere Mortalites,
to another round of the book reviews. I'm your host here, Kyrin, live on the 08/20/2025.
(00:20):
And as you might surmise, this is the book review podcast where I declare war on all other book review channels, and there are unfavorable business practices.
Okay. No. We're not going to be doing that today, but we did see some of that in this book here. Chip war by Chris Miller, a fight for the world's most critical
technology.
(00:41):
And now this book was published in 2022. So a recent book, you might be asking, Kyron, why are you doing that? But it's more of a historical book than I think. 350
pages in length. I'd say it took me eight hours of reading and it's pretty much all text apart from this little insert here which has, some like what they call it, plates, which has, some cool handy little photos in it which are quite enjoyable. I do enjoy when books do that. So this is a detailed history of the semiconductor
(01:09):
industry from its origins in the,
I would say like the 1945
part or after 1945,
more nineteen fifties,
to the present day or to the present day of 2022.
So
goes over important individuals and companies
that were starting their rise and then, you know, subsequent falls and then rises again for some of them,
(01:32):
as it as the semiconductors
chips become a
emerging technology and then almost a vital critical industry.
And we see how it goes from this kind of, like, very small scale of just small individual people doing things
to it getting to companies big companies serious money and to eventually nation states really playing around and thinking about these things in terms of geopolitical
(01:57):
terms and and stuff like this so the book itself is split into eight parts with, 52 chapters in total.
And he goes over some of the, as I mentioned, important people. So Morris Chang, Annie Grove, Jack Kilby,
Cover Meade, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Akia Morita.
These are some of the names that you'll hear from this,
(02:19):
as well as the actual chapters themselves, which are titled things like all the parts, cold war chips, the circuitry of the American world, leadership lost, American resurgent, integrated circuits, integrated world, offshoring innovation, China's challenge, and then the chip choke
chip choking. So,
let's jump into some of the themes and questions that we have arising from this. So
(02:44):
how did the semiconductor
industry come about? Why is Asia so important?
Why do Americans focus on war so much? All of these questions will be answered very shortly. So I'm gonna give you a brief history using the eight parts of the book,
before we can analyze this history as a whole
and kind of answer these thematic questions. So,
(03:04):
the actual chapters, the pop sorry. Not the chapters. There's 52 of them. I'm not gonna go over every single one of them. The parts, the eight parts that I just read out are roughly split into the time dates that I've got mentioned here, but they are also
relatively fluid as well. Because he'll he'll talk about some things that happened or a person that happened in a previous part
(03:26):
later in the book, etcetera. So,
the first part, nineteen forty five to 1969.
This is when semiconductors become an actual thing. So it's right after World War two.
Innovate innovation is emerging for war applications as people are realizing,
especially the Americans, like, oh, you know, we're dropping bombs in Vietnam,
and we're doing a fucking terrible job of it because we're missing
(03:49):
75, 80% of our targets, if not more.
And we see slight hints hints of consumer
applications of what,
semiconductors
could do. So this is really the time period where people are going like,
oh, you know, if I have silicon,
and I can use a a transistor to do an off on switch instead of like these big,
(04:11):
they call them vacuum tubes at the time, which could do the equivalent thing.
If we can do it, make it much smaller, we could, you know, create all of these applications. And so this era was really dominated by brilliant individuals who knew physics, like the deep physics of how electrons work and and silicon and the properties and what could, perhaps be possible
(04:32):
and were relatively practical as well. They were tinkering in their houses. They were creating,
you know, semiconductors
by inverting,
like a telescope and shining light through it, stuff like this. So Shockley, Noyce, Moore from the famous,
Moore's law of that,
semiconductors
would,
double in the amount of,
(04:53):
size sorry, double in the
quantity that you could fit on the same size of a transistor or chip,
every two years was or even a little bit less than that. And, Fairchild was the, company that some of these people joined. So then from 1917
to 1980,
American really solidifies
(05:14):
itself as the chip manufacturer.
The Soviets are faltering in the, in the Cold War race. They're trying to use chips for their technology, but they're they're kind of just copying what the Americans do, and there's always this lag of five to ten years. So they're really far behind and Asia starts to emerge. So we see these monolithic companies starting to gain real revenue from offshoring in particular. So Texas Instruments is building in Taiwan.
(05:39):
Sony,
gets created in Japan, and Intel is in Silicon Valley. This is the rise of Silicon Valley as well.
From 1980 to 1990,
strategic decisions in lithography,
which is the,
I guess, the practice, the technique of creating
these silicon chips and getting transistors onto it. And it's using,
(06:02):
you know, very specialized equipment of shining lights through, you know, prisms and stuff to be able to
imprint on these wafer, you know, ultra thin wafer chips. And we're getting into like
transistors in the kind of nanometers
section now. So probably at this stage it was still in like the hundreds, if not thousands of nanometers in scale.
(06:24):
And,
in this era of the 1980 and 1990,
Japan
really dominates as the consumer market dwarfs the military. So before that, the military applications were very important.
After that, consumer applications. So we're talking about the very basics of, you know, Nintendo games, of calc handheld calculators, of Sony Walkmans and things like this. This is where the chips are really starting to gain use and where the money is coming from, and it's not purely the military as it was before.
(06:56):
So,
the DRAM chips, d r a m,
Nikon,
Marita, who was Sony's founder.
These were all kind of prominent names, and we saw the demise of, a company called GCA, which was very big in America. And it was on lithography and creating these chips and the technology to create them, not just the fabrication, but the the techniques to to make them,
(07:21):
it it fell apart. So this was really the era of Japan, and this also coincided with, just a very dominant economic,
period for Japan as well,
which played into it, but wasn't the sole cause of it. After that, we get into the nineteen ninety to two thousand period. So this is where, America resurgent, USA professional managers are stepping in. They're creating product,
(07:45):
product and predict, product production,
efficiencies,
by focusing on microprocessors
for computers.
They begin undercutting Japan,
with cheaper labor in Korea, for example.
And this is where America's
showing their military might as well with, their their technology,
with using all of these chips and missiles and jets are kind of the king. So
(08:09):
names like IBM, HPs, which stands for Hewlett Packard, Intel, Samsung. These are all of the kind of dominant names in in this era.
Also coinciding with a,
a big bust cycle in the,
Japan's kind of economics
as a as a country, which allows,
The USA to kind of step back in.
(08:30):
From 2000 to 2010, it's globalization and governments,
subsidizing semiconductor chips
and lithography for economic reasons, which become highly technical and difficult. So we see the rise of TSMC in Taiwan. It was already a very big thing. The I think that's Thai Taiwanese semi conducting something company,
(08:52):
Huawei in China, ASML in The Netherlands, which was the
tech
Dutch company that became ultra, ultra specialized in creating
the machines
that would then be able to be used for,
production in in fabrication and things like this. So
we really see that the the chip industry is going global and the consumer applications
(09:16):
in particularly computers
as just going going gangbusters.
These chips are everywhere. They're getting put in everything. They're getting put in cars. They're getting put in, you know, fridges, and everything is starting to use, chips.
From 2010 to 2015
is where we see fabrication
becoming the relentless pursuit of the smallest transistors
(09:39):
through EUV, which is, extreme ultraviolet light. So the transistors at this stage were in the kind of hundreds of nanometers
stage. And now they're talking about getting it into the, like, tens of nanometers. And ultimate, I think the the physical
barrier was somewhere like seven nanometers.
And,
this is really,
(10:01):
just a race to the bottom, and Asia wins this race. We see that fabrication
essentially leaves The US entirely,
very close to entirely,
and that Asia has, you know, 90% of the chip manufacturing
and,
the complexity of all of this goes just crazy. So TSMC,
(10:21):
which I mentioned before, Eats AMD, which was the American,
fabrication foundry plant.
But with this separation
of chip design and manufacturing, so
the at at one point,
these people who were creating them manufacturing the chips in these in these factories,
they were also
(10:42):
choosing the design of the chips, how it would be created, and it created this weird balance where they could be competing.
People would be sending in designs to them like, hey, I want a chip that's designed like this.
And because they are also creating their own designs and also producing them creates this weird tension where it's like, oh, we could just steal their designs and use it for ourselves and not have to pay them,
(11:05):
or or use their business or anything like that. So,
this is why TSMC,
which
focused full focused solely on creating the chips, the production, the fabrication,
wins.
But this allows the royal a rise of fabless
companies, so who would just focus solely on the actual design of chips, and in particular, NVIDIA
(11:28):
with the GPUs.
Apple flips Intel at this stage where the,
Apple creates its own chips as well, which it uses in its, electronic devices across its broad suite of,
of applications and,
hardware.
And this was, yeah, just a really, kind of chaotic period for for many companies. So this they're realizing, like, oh, shit. We have made some bad decisions, in particular, Intel, which
(11:58):
could have provided chips to Apple back in the day, and it said, nah. We don't really think we're going to.
That was a bad decision.
The final, two chapters, seven and eight, on combining them were in or parts were from 2015 to 2022.
And this is where China begins a strategic push to learn to produce advanced technology,
export cheaply and invest in R and D. So this was really the realization that chips are a geopolitical
(12:23):
issue. They were always a kind of economical issues where
governments were giving out subsidies, trying to attract
talent and companies or,
of of actual work to their to their countries.
And we saw this with all of the Asian countries.
But at this stage, it's like, oh, crap. These chips are in everywhere,
(12:46):
and for everything. So, obviously, war applications,
drones, AI, etcetera, but also just for basic consumer goods, cars, phones,
telephone networks, all of these sorts of things. So
this was the era of COVID supply chain disruptions,
the Huawei controversies
where
countries much like mine Australia were saying, oh, we're not going to allow Huawei to operate in Australia for
(13:12):
concerns
of them dominating our network and, you know, security concerns, things like this,
as well as the Taiwan US protection. The book fairy starts off with a a little story about a,
American
trawler, I think it is, or, what is it? The destroyer, USS Mustin, slipped into the northern end of the Taiwan Strait on 08/18/2020,
(13:35):
protecting
their Taiwanese interests. So if you see on the the screen that I've got here,
this isn't from the book, but it was just a a handy little infographic. So if you're listening via the audio as well, check out the chapters. And it just shows, like, if you want to create a chip, this is, like an Argentinian,
smartphone.
Someone's buying a smartphone in Argentina.
(13:57):
You just see, like, it goes from Europe then to America, then it goes to, like, Asia, then it goes to somewhere else, then it goes back to America, then it comes back to Asia, and then it's produced
here. And then it's just like this huge complex design of of
of supply chain just to be able to produce a
consumer application. So
(14:19):
deeply into interconnected
and extremely
difficult industry to really get your head of ground as a as a whole. So, okay, that's the history section of the book, which most of it covers. But we're also getting into the other questions, which is,
you know, it's called chip war, for example.
And,
I'm gonna focus on, I guess, the coincidence coincidence
(14:43):
aspect of of Asia and why the war aspect,
I don't think could really be foreseen. So
The US started this all off. For example, they were the ones who,
had those, you know, founders,
the more the the noises, those sorts of people.
Why did production go to Asia? Why was it shipped out there? Why is Asia so dominant in terms of the semiconductor industry?
(15:09):
Because The US had it all. They invented the integrated circuit. They're the early forms of lithography.
They've got the biggest consumer market in the world. And semiconductors
only really need silicon,
as far as I'm aware. So it's not really a resource constraint as well. It's not like Asia had particular minerals or things like that. It was just no. Why did Asia take over?
(15:32):
And from what I can tell from this book, I would say there was two reasons.
And The US gradually lost dominance
to these these two, what I would say, simple factors, which is straight up economics, labor costs, and vision. So
the Japanese, Singaporeans, Taiwanese, Koreans and Chinese
could just put vast amount of workers on the production lines. And as I mentioned, it's not really a resource constraint, so it's not really big on the actual resources.
(16:01):
It's more it was more capital labor,
especially at the start way
before robots where these chips were having to be, like, created
or placed or use a lot of hands. And,
they were saying that perhaps the type of labor was
a small factor in this and that the
Asian countries seem to thrive on the monotonous perfection of doing the same task over and over
(16:28):
and doing it so well that it's you get it to perfection.
Maybe that was part of the reason.
Also, potentially, that there was already this kind of Japanese US connection,
due to occupation after World War two.
But I put those down as like simple quirks
of of, you know, history of coincidence.
From what I could tell, there was nothing stopping the Africans, the Latin Americans, the Europeans,
(16:55):
from becoming the powerhouse, from attracting the semiconductor industry,
everywhere was in turmoil after World War Two. It's not like the Asian countries were relative was more stable than any of the other
continents.
Asia isn't exactly close to The US in terms of logistics of shipping or anything like that. So, you know, you would have thought Latin America would probably be a better bet
(17:19):
in terms of of that. So,
logistics, logistical
language, cultural regions, there's not that much indications
showing that Asia
should have been the right place for it. And so I pretty much put it down to just coincidence,
for for one factor. The other factor was the vision and the Asians could predict the future better, I think. So
(17:43):
Taiwan, why did it get TSMC? Why is TSMC such a,
to this day, globally
dominant
manufacturer of semiconductors
to the point that it's now become a kind of geopolitical issue of Taiwan,
of China's closeness to it and America trying to protect its invest,
(18:03):
interests in sending fucking
destroyers through through the Taiwanese Strait and stuff.
Well, it was because,
Taiwanese,
Taiwan's big breakthrough was just given a guy with a grand idea a shit ton of money. And,
you know, the government now,
saw I believe his name was Morris Chang.
He was just like, this is going to be like a huge industry. I need money to create these productions,
(18:29):
you know, back me up. And they they believed in them and, created it there, and then they just kept rolling and rolling with it.
I'm reading a book by Lee Kuan Yew at the moment, who was the, prime minister of Singapore.
Very similar thing. You know, Singapore was this brand new country,
and
he had like this single visionary
(18:51):
and at the helm
who made a lot of right political decisions and economic decisions, but also was just like, hey, we need to attract
industries and talent to Singapore. And he saw the opportunity in semiconductors and, like, he ran with it. So,
you know, Morris. Yeah. It was Morris Chang.
He had this idea of creating the the fabulous,
(19:14):
of
focusing solely on the production of the fabrication. And the and this would then allow these, chip firm design firms to create products who didn't have to do and focus on all of the extremely difficult things in the actual fabrication and manufacturing of chips,
which in the book they called a Gutenberg moment in chip making.
(19:38):
Obviously relating this to that anyone could create pamphlets
and
newspapers and things like that after the Gutenberg machine got made. But not many people know how to make a machine
from scratch.
So very risky, but very powerful. And it wasn't just the individuals who had this vision. It was it was kind of whole governments. So there was these hilarious accusations
(20:02):
from the author at some point, and I'll I'll talk about more about him in the extra details shortly.
That
oh, it wasn't exactly him, but other people. He was he was kind of relating it and then also agreeing with it,
that there was these unfair business practices. The the Japanese would,
for example,
subsidize these semiconductors
(20:24):
so that, industry so that it wasn't even a money making investment,
but they were doing it just solely to gain as much of it as they could and put Americans out of business, for example,
with the kind of vision and hope that this would then pay dividends
many years later.
Same thing with the the Chinese. And the funny thing is just governments were just subsidizing everywhere. The Japanese just did it better. They realized and were able to throw more money at it and bring the production to to Japan or
(20:58):
as Singapore did it, as Taiwan did it, as China did it.
So, you know, GCA, for example,
a company in in America which had its demise and it was like one of the last big,
fabrication places in The US,
It had its opportunities. It could have cozied up to the government. It could have,
(21:18):
done all the things that Sony did and Samsung did and TSMC
did, but they just didn't do it well. And so this is where it's going like, okay.
The the visionaries in in in these Asian countries
are what brought the industry to them. They they hustled harder. They worked harder. And that is why they are now and still dominant in the
(21:40):
semiconducting
industry.
So you'd later see the same accusations against China about the kind of government interference, but,
the it was happening everywhere in the world, and there's no high and mighty government that can say, oh, no. We we did it or didn't do it. So let's jump on to the author, some extra details. Chris Miller is an academic specializing in economic history and international relations.
(22:05):
He's written a couple of books in his last ten years,
mostly focusing on The USSR,
apart from this one. So that's probably his speciality.
And he is an American, which touches upon my last point related to the book name and the final sections. Chip War, why are Americans always viewing things through the
aspect of war and violence and things like this? And,
(22:27):
I did notice that I enjoyed the first three quarters of the book and that the politics section as we got nearer to the end. So, like, this is the 2015,
the 2022
or even the,
you know, 20,
twenty ten to twenty fifteen secondtion.
I was just getting bored and I think it was because it was started become more about the author's opinion,
(22:50):
and what he thought
rather than the neutral storytelling
tone, which was in the earlier sections of the book. And whilst I think he's a very good history and storyteller,
there wasn't that much to offer. Perhaps he is good in terms of geopolitical
war centered around Taiwan, for example,
(23:12):
but I'm not interested in it. And so these sections, I was just going like, like, why why are you telling me these things or why are you putting your own into interjection than this? I'd rather just know what happened to the semiconductor industry. So
this is kind of getting to the the point of a very unfortunate trend I've noticed of Americans viewing these things in terms of violence and war.
(23:33):
Whilst there was indeed competition in this book,
we're talking about companies, we're talking about industries, we're talking about money. Yes. There's gonna be competition.
The whole book, I think, could have been framed in terms of mutual cooperation,
humanity's
aspiration for greater knowledge,
the ingenuity of individuals.
(23:54):
I don't necessarily see why it needed to become chip war.
There is an aspect of war to this for sure. The Americans
and
and Chinese are, you know, eyeing up Taiwan and there's some tensions there. I get it. But
in terms of the amount of money, the
ways that it has absolutely changed the world, the semiconductor industry,
(24:18):
I think that's a small blip in terms of the the grand scale of things. So
on page,
300,
which is right in this kind of section of,
where we're talking about, like,
the
politics and personal observations and things like that, there was
this quote here, which is,
(24:39):
the new tiers the new NSC, which I believe stood for and this was, in America. I think it was like the National Security Council or something like that in in America. It was one of their government bodies.
The new NSC adopted a much more combative zero sum approach to technology
policy. From the officials in the Treasury Department's investment screening unit to the managing,
(25:02):
to managing the Pentagon supply chains for military systems,
key elements of the government began focusing on semiconductors
as part of the as part of their strategy for dealing with China.
And
I don't
this is pretty much sums up a lot of, I guess, like, Americans thoughts. And I experienced this when I was in in America recently
(25:23):
where someone made the point. Yeah, we we always talk about war. It's a war on poverty. It's a war on drugs. It's a war on violence. It's a war on whatever.
It's always a war, very warlike people.
And so,
you know, they were super worried, for example, that China would, use this new technology to implement backdoors and spy on them and things like this,
(25:45):
which they had been themselves doing for decades. And,
we saw this with Edward Snowden and and things which gets also gets mentioned in the book,
the n NSA,
spying and stuff like that. So,
it's an unfortunate thing,
but it's just a common thing as well,
that Americans like to frame things in terms of war,
(26:06):
which seemed unnecessary for me, but whatever.
So
books like this as a whole go into the summary.
Remind me why the medium of
a book is so valuable.
To write all of this in order to
have all of this, like, highly
detailed
research historical
perspective
(26:26):
of being able to jump from one person to the other, like the 52 chapters in total,
was,
I think, very, very difficult, if not impossible to do via any other medium, you know, doing it via video
or via via audio. I just don't think really works. I think books are immensely valuable for,
(26:47):
topics like this. So
the chip industry is incredibly complex. You know, I got a tiny I
didn't convey a lot of the things which was such as individual
companies decisions on focusing on, you know, memory chips or flash chips or
how they were,
you know, manufacturing
(27:08):
certain types of things and why
they had to, you know, balance between governments. Oh, there was so much complexities in here,
which
I didn't even touch upon, like the technological
physical
aspects, the physics of how these things actually work. So,
you know, I'm glad I spent the time researching this, I guess, in a sense, because these chips are everywhere.
(27:31):
Just in front of me, there's probably like
a thousand chips
in my laptop, in the
camera here, in my phone here, in the microphone here, in the other camera here, like in the,
you know, devices I have to connect my mouse to the to the laptop. There's just so much stuff
all around me that has chips and, you know, it is so critical and so important. So glad I spent the time of it. The only qualms I had with the book were, as I mentioned, the war aspect, but nevertheless, I learned a lot and really enjoyed this. So overall, I'm giving Chip War by Chris Miller a very solid seven and a half out of 10. Highly recommended if you want to know more about the semiconductors and chips and the history of it.
(28:14):
Very much worth, getting into. So,
that's it for today. Thank you very much, everyone, for joining in. This is a value for value podcast. There's never gonna be any advertisers, sponsorships,
or nothing like that on here. All I ask is that if you have received some value, you give it back to me in some shape, shape, or form.
Liking, subscribing, commenting obviously is is, easy and, handy way of doing that. I want to hear your book reviews or your recommendations of books that I should read or that you want me to cover on this channel,
(28:46):
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(29:14):
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Last section here, I am live and I did get a couple of live comments here from Juan, which was asking like, does it read like a spy novel kind of? Absolutely not. It is much drier than that. It's it's interesting, but it's certainly not a spy novel.
(29:42):
Yeah.
Does the book overstate The US decline?
I don't think so. He had,
some sections in here where he was talking about, you know, the actual percentages.
This point here, East Asia produces
90% of all memory chips, 75%
of all processor logic chips and 80% of all silicon wafers.
(30:04):
So I don't think it really overstates The US decline. They had the stranglehold on this industry for,
you know, the early part of it,
but they lost it. And the actual design of all of this is going elsewhere. So
I don't think it overstates it. I thought it did a pretty good job.
You know, AKA, maybe the design aspect
(30:24):
of it is still heavy in The USA. That could potentially be true. You know, in video, for example, is a massive, massive company.
So is Apple, so is Intel,
and they all design chips.
So
yes, in that aspect. But it's also,
you know, when push comes to shove, we live in the real world and,
(30:47):
where fabrication is
is
very, very important as well. So,
yeah, that's
a good point. Thank you for bringing it up. But also,
you know, a lot of the money and, you know, The US,
China is not sending its destroyers to Cuba to protect its interests. For example,
(31:08):
in in the semiconductor
industry, the Americans are having to,
spend a lot of time and energy focusing on Asia now. So I think just by that alone, you could say, yeah. Yeah. They they probably
lost control of an industry which was very important to them. And right at the end, it started talking about how China's
really ramping up
and trying to gain more of the actual production facilities
(31:31):
within China as well. So,
yeah, very important.
I think he had a little percentage here. China produces 15% of all chips, mostly low tech through, though, with government help, China's chip industry is growing rapidly. So, yeah, interesting. Very, very interesting.
I am live here. I was a little bit late today with some camera issues, so I will be, fixing the camera up and getting the the better one, next week.
(31:57):
What is coming up? And you could join me Wednesdays, 11AM, Australian Eastern Standard Time, and I would very much appreciate it. What is coming up? So I mentioned Lee Kuan Yew before. There's a book called Lee Kuan Yew,
which is kind of his, ideas and thoughts on very similar topic to this, which is, I guess, geopolitical issues.
I don't really care about it. One of the reasons I'm actually reading it is to kind of have something more to discuss with my dad because he's interested in it. So it's more of
(32:26):
a doing something for someone else sort of deal. But
I am interested in Lee Kuan Yew and these kind of people who change Singapore, for example. I'm I'm interested in in why
the historical aspect of of why Singapore and why Asia,
managed to,
become such a powerhouse, I guess, in in terms of this industry. So I'm reading that. Rating Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. And then from Third World of First, also by Lee Kuan Yew, which is more focusing just on the Singapore aspect and how he is a leader,
(32:59):
helps run that country and turn it from a
new completely new brand new place with no history
and
a ridiculous
intermingling of cultures,
conflicting cultures
and how he turned it from a third world to a first world. So,
that's also what is coming up. And I imagine Juan is also doing some book reviews coming up shortly as well. So that's it. I know he's reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, so expect those in the near future.
(33:28):
So that's it for today. Thank you, everyone, for joining in. I really do hope you're having a fantastic
day wherever you are in the world, and chat for now. Kyra now. Bye.
A world changing industry that kind of happened by coincidence.
Welcome,
Mere Mortalites,
to another round of the book reviews. I'm your host here, Kyrin, live on the 08/20/2025.
(00:20):
And as you might surmise, this is the book review podcast where I declare war on all other book review channels, and there are unfavorable business practices.
Okay. No. We're not going to be doing that today, but we did see some of that in this book here. Chip war by Chris Miller, a fight for the world's most critical
technology.
(00:41):
And now this book was published in 2022. So a recent book, you might be asking, Kyron, why are you doing that? But it's more of a historical book than I think. 350
pages in length. I'd say it took me eight hours of reading and it's pretty much all text apart from this little insert here which has, some like what they call it, plates, which has, some cool handy little photos in it which are quite enjoyable. I do enjoy when books do that. So this is a detailed history of the semiconductor
(01:09):
industry from its origins in the,
I would say like the 1945
part or after 1945,
more nineteen fifties,
to the present day or to the present day of 2022.
So
goes over important individuals and companies
that were starting their rise and then, you know, subsequent falls and then rises again for some of them,
(01:32):
as it as the semiconductors
chips become a
emerging technology and then almost a vital critical industry.
And we see how it goes from this kind of, like, very small scale of just small individual people doing things
to it getting to companies big companies serious money and to eventually nation states really playing around and thinking about these things in terms of geopolitical
(01:57):
terms and and stuff like this so the book itself is split into eight parts with, 52 chapters in total.
And he goes over some of the, as I mentioned, important people. So Morris Chang, Annie Grove, Jack Kilby,
Cover Meade, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Akia Morita.
These are some of the names that you'll hear from this,
(02:19):
as well as the actual chapters themselves, which are titled things like all the parts, cold war chips, the circuitry of the American world, leadership lost, American resurgent, integrated circuits, integrated world, offshoring innovation, China's challenge, and then the chip choke
chip choking. So,
let's jump into some of the themes and questions that we have arising from this. So
(02:44):
how did the semiconductor
industry come about? Why is Asia so important?
Why do Americans focus on war so much? All of these questions will be answered very shortly. So I'm gonna give you a brief history using the eight parts of the book,
before we can analyze this history as a whole
and kind of answer these thematic questions. So,
(03:04):
the actual chapters, the pop sorry. Not the chapters. There's 52 of them. I'm not gonna go over every single one of them. The parts, the eight parts that I just read out are roughly split into the time dates that I've got mentioned here, but they are also
relatively fluid as well. Because he'll he'll talk about some things that happened or a person that happened in a previous part
(03:26):
later in the book, etcetera. So,
the first part, nineteen forty five to 1969.
This is when semiconductors become an actual thing. So it's right after World War two.
Innovate innovation is emerging for war applications as people are realizing,
especially the Americans, like, oh, you know, we're dropping bombs in Vietnam,
and we're doing a fucking terrible job of it because we're missing
(03:49):
75, 80% of our targets, if not more.
And we see slight hints hints of consumer
applications of what,
semiconductors
could do. So this is really the time period where people are going like,
oh, you know, if I have silicon,
and I can use a a transistor to do an off on switch instead of like these big,
(04:11):
they call them vacuum tubes at the time, which could do the equivalent thing.
If we can do it, make it much smaller, we could, you know, create all of these applications. And so this era was really dominated by brilliant individuals who knew physics, like the deep physics of how electrons work and and silicon and the properties and what could, perhaps be possible
(04:32):
and were relatively practical as well. They were tinkering in their houses. They were creating,
you know, semiconductors
by inverting,
like a telescope and shining light through it, stuff like this. So Shockley, Noyce, Moore from the famous,
Moore's law of that,
semiconductors
would,
double in the amount of,
(04:53):
size sorry, double in the
quantity that you could fit on the same size of a transistor or chip,
every two years was or even a little bit less than that. And, Fairchild was the, company that some of these people joined. So then from 1917
to 1980,
American really solidifies
(05:14):
itself as the chip manufacturer.
The Soviets are faltering in the, in the Cold War race. They're trying to use chips for their technology, but they're they're kind of just copying what the Americans do, and there's always this lag of five to ten years. So they're really far behind and Asia starts to emerge. So we see these monolithic companies starting to gain real revenue from offshoring in particular. So Texas Instruments is building in Taiwan.
(05:39):
Sony,
gets created in Japan, and Intel is in Silicon Valley. This is the rise of Silicon Valley as well.
From 1980 to 1990,
strategic decisions in lithography,
which is the,
I guess, the practice, the technique of creating
these silicon chips and getting transistors onto it. And it's using,
(06:02):
you know, very specialized equipment of shining lights through, you know, prisms and stuff to be able to
imprint on these wafer, you know, ultra thin wafer chips. And we're getting into like
transistors in the kind of nanometers
section now. So probably at this stage it was still in like the hundreds, if not thousands of nanometers in scale.
(06:24):
And,
in this era of the 1980 and 1990,
Japan
really dominates as the consumer market dwarfs the military. So before that, the military applications were very important.
After that, consumer applications. So we're talking about the very basics of, you know, Nintendo games, of calc handheld calculators, of Sony Walkmans and things like this. This is where the chips are really starting to gain use and where the money is coming from, and it's not purely the military as it was before.
(06:56):
So,
the DRAM chips, d r a m,
Nikon,
Marita, who was Sony's founder.
These were all kind of prominent names, and we saw the demise of, a company called GCA, which was very big in America. And it was on lithography and creating these chips and the technology to create them, not just the fabrication, but the the techniques to to make them,
(07:21):
it it fell apart. So this was really the era of Japan, and this also coincided with, just a very dominant economic,
period for Japan as well,
which played into it, but wasn't the sole cause of it. After that, we get into the nineteen ninety to two thousand period. So this is where, America resurgent, USA professional managers are stepping in. They're creating product,
(07:45):
product and predict, product production,
efficiencies,
by focusing on microprocessors
for computers.
They begin undercutting Japan,
with cheaper labor in Korea, for example.
And this is where America's
showing their military might as well with, their their technology,
with using all of these chips and missiles and jets are kind of the king. So
(08:09):
names like IBM, HPs, which stands for Hewlett Packard, Intel, Samsung. These are all of the kind of dominant names in in this era.
Also coinciding with a,
a big bust cycle in the,
Japan's kind of economics
as a as a country, which allows,
The USA to kind of step back in.
(08:30):
From 2000 to 2010, it's globalization and governments,
subsidizing semiconductor chips
and lithography for economic reasons, which become highly technical and difficult. So we see the rise of TSMC in Taiwan. It was already a very big thing. The I think that's Thai Taiwanese semi conducting something company,
(08:52):
Huawei in China, ASML in The Netherlands, which was the
tech
Dutch company that became ultra, ultra specialized in creating
the machines
that would then be able to be used for,
production in in fabrication and things like this. So
we really see that the the chip industry is going global and the consumer applications
(09:16):
in particularly computers
as just going going gangbusters.
These chips are everywhere. They're getting put in everything. They're getting put in cars. They're getting put in, you know, fridges, and everything is starting to use, chips.
From 2010 to 2015
is where we see fabrication
becoming the relentless pursuit of the smallest transistors
(09:39):
through EUV, which is, extreme ultraviolet light. So the transistors at this stage were in the kind of hundreds of nanometers
stage. And now they're talking about getting it into the, like, tens of nanometers. And ultimate, I think the the physical
barrier was somewhere like seven nanometers.
And,
this is really,
(10:01):
just a race to the bottom, and Asia wins this race. We see that fabrication
essentially leaves The US entirely,
very close to entirely,
and that Asia has, you know, 90% of the chip manufacturing
and,
the complexity of all of this goes just crazy. So TSMC,
(10:21):
which I mentioned before, Eats AMD, which was the American,
fabrication foundry plant.
But with this separation
of chip design and manufacturing, so
the at at one point,
these people who were creating them manufacturing the chips in these in these factories,
they were also
(10:42):
choosing the design of the chips, how it would be created, and it created this weird balance where they could be competing.
People would be sending in designs to them like, hey, I want a chip that's designed like this.
And because they are also creating their own designs and also producing them creates this weird tension where it's like, oh, we could just steal their designs and use it for ourselves and not have to pay them,
(11:05):
or or use their business or anything like that. So,
this is why TSMC,
which
focused full focused solely on creating the chips, the production, the fabrication,
wins.
But this allows the royal a rise of fabless
companies, so who would just focus solely on the actual design of chips, and in particular, NVIDIA
(11:28):
with the GPUs.
Apple flips Intel at this stage where the,
Apple creates its own chips as well, which it uses in its, electronic devices across its broad suite of,
of applications and,
hardware.
And this was, yeah, just a really, kind of chaotic period for for many companies. So this they're realizing, like, oh, shit. We have made some bad decisions, in particular, Intel, which
(11:58):
could have provided chips to Apple back in the day, and it said, nah. We don't really think we're going to.
That was a bad decision.
The final, two chapters, seven and eight, on combining them were in or parts were from 2015 to 2022.
And this is where China begins a strategic push to learn to produce advanced technology,
export cheaply and invest in R and D. So this was really the realization that chips are a geopolitical
(12:23):
issue. They were always a kind of economical issues where
governments were giving out subsidies, trying to attract
talent and companies or,
of of actual work to their to their countries.
And we saw this with all of the Asian countries.
But at this stage, it's like, oh, crap. These chips are in everywhere,
(12:46):
and for everything. So, obviously, war applications,
drones, AI, etcetera, but also just for basic consumer goods, cars, phones,
telephone networks, all of these sorts of things. So
this was the era of COVID supply chain disruptions,
the Huawei controversies
where
countries much like mine Australia were saying, oh, we're not going to allow Huawei to operate in Australia for
(13:12):
concerns
of them dominating our network and, you know, security concerns, things like this,
as well as the Taiwan US protection. The book fairy starts off with a a little story about a,
American
trawler, I think it is, or, what is it? The destroyer, USS Mustin, slipped into the northern end of the Taiwan Strait on 08/18/2020,
(13:35):
protecting
their Taiwanese interests. So if you see on the the screen that I've got here,
this isn't from the book, but it was just a a handy little infographic. So if you're listening via the audio as well, check out the chapters. And it just shows, like, if you want to create a chip, this is, like an Argentinian,
smartphone.
Someone's buying a smartphone in Argentina.
(13:57):
You just see, like, it goes from Europe then to America, then it goes to, like, Asia, then it goes to somewhere else, then it goes back to America, then it comes back to Asia, and then it's produced
here. And then it's just like this huge complex design of of
of supply chain just to be able to produce a
consumer application. So
(14:19):
deeply into interconnected
and extremely
difficult industry to really get your head of ground as a as a whole. So, okay, that's the history section of the book, which most of it covers. But we're also getting into the other questions, which is,
you know, it's called chip war, for example.
And,
I'm gonna focus on, I guess, the coincidence coincidence
(14:43):
aspect of of Asia and why the war aspect,
I don't think could really be foreseen. So
The US started this all off. For example, they were the ones who,
had those, you know, founders,
the more the the noises, those sorts of people.
Why did production go to Asia? Why was it shipped out there? Why is Asia so dominant in terms of the semiconductor industry?
(15:09):
Because The US had it all. They invented the integrated circuit. They're the early forms of lithography.
They've got the biggest consumer market in the world. And semiconductors
only really need silicon,
as far as I'm aware. So it's not really a resource constraint as well. It's not like Asia had particular minerals or things like that. It was just no. Why did Asia take over?
(15:32):
And from what I can tell from this book, I would say there was two reasons.
And The US gradually lost dominance
to these these two, what I would say, simple factors, which is straight up economics, labor costs, and vision. So
the Japanese, Singaporeans, Taiwanese, Koreans and Chinese
could just put vast amount of workers on the production lines. And as I mentioned, it's not really a resource constraint, so it's not really big on the actual resources.
(16:01):
It's more it was more capital labor,
especially at the start way
before robots where these chips were having to be, like, created
or placed or use a lot of hands. And,
they were saying that perhaps the type of labor was
a small factor in this and that the
Asian countries seem to thrive on the monotonous perfection of doing the same task over and over
(16:28):
and doing it so well that it's you get it to perfection.
Maybe that was part of the reason.
Also, potentially, that there was already this kind of Japanese US connection,
due to occupation after World War two.
But I put those down as like simple quirks
of of, you know, history of coincidence.
From what I could tell, there was nothing stopping the Africans, the Latin Americans, the Europeans,
(16:55):
from becoming the powerhouse, from attracting the semiconductor industry,
everywhere was in turmoil after World War Two. It's not like the Asian countries were relative was more stable than any of the other
continents.
Asia isn't exactly close to The US in terms of logistics of shipping or anything like that. So, you know, you would have thought Latin America would probably be a better bet
(17:19):
in terms of of that. So,
logistics, logistical
language, cultural regions, there's not that much indications
showing that Asia
should have been the right place for it. And so I pretty much put it down to just coincidence,
for for one factor. The other factor was the vision and the Asians could predict the future better, I think. So
(17:43):
Taiwan, why did it get TSMC? Why is TSMC such a,
to this day, globally
dominant
manufacturer of semiconductors
to the point that it's now become a kind of geopolitical issue of Taiwan,
of China's closeness to it and America trying to protect its invest,
(18:03):
interests in sending fucking
destroyers through through the Taiwanese Strait and stuff.
Well, it was because,
Taiwanese,
Taiwan's big breakthrough was just given a guy with a grand idea a shit ton of money. And,
you know, the government now,
saw I believe his name was Morris Chang.
He was just like, this is going to be like a huge industry. I need money to create these productions,
(18:29):
you know, back me up. And they they believed in them and, created it there, and then they just kept rolling and rolling with it.
I'm reading a book by Lee Kuan Yew at the moment, who was the, prime minister of Singapore.
Very similar thing. You know, Singapore was this brand new country,
and
he had like this single visionary
(18:51):
and at the helm
who made a lot of right political decisions and economic decisions, but also was just like, hey, we need to attract
industries and talent to Singapore. And he saw the opportunity in semiconductors and, like, he ran with it. So,
you know, Morris. Yeah. It was Morris Chang.
He had this idea of creating the the fabulous,
(19:14):
of
focusing solely on the production of the fabrication. And the and this would then allow these, chip firm design firms to create products who didn't have to do and focus on all of the extremely difficult things in the actual fabrication and manufacturing of chips,
which in the book they called a Gutenberg moment in chip making.
(19:38):
Obviously relating this to that anyone could create pamphlets
and
newspapers and things like that after the Gutenberg machine got made. But not many people know how to make a machine
from scratch.
So very risky, but very powerful. And it wasn't just the individuals who had this vision. It was it was kind of whole governments. So there was these hilarious accusations
(20:02):
from the author at some point, and I'll I'll talk about more about him in the extra details shortly.
That
oh, it wasn't exactly him, but other people. He was he was kind of relating it and then also agreeing with it,
that there was these unfair business practices. The the Japanese would,
for example,
subsidize these semiconductors
(20:24):
so that, industry so that it wasn't even a money making investment,
but they were doing it just solely to gain as much of it as they could and put Americans out of business, for example,
with the kind of vision and hope that this would then pay dividends
many years later.
Same thing with the the Chinese. And the funny thing is just governments were just subsidizing everywhere. The Japanese just did it better. They realized and were able to throw more money at it and bring the production to to Japan or
(20:58):
as Singapore did it, as Taiwan did it, as China did it.
So, you know, GCA, for example,
a company in in America which had its demise and it was like one of the last big,
fabrication places in The US,
It had its opportunities. It could have cozied up to the government. It could have,
(21:18):
done all the things that Sony did and Samsung did and TSMC
did, but they just didn't do it well. And so this is where it's going like, okay.
The the visionaries in in in these Asian countries
are what brought the industry to them. They they hustled harder. They worked harder. And that is why they are now and still dominant in the
(21:40):
semiconducting
industry.
So you'd later see the same accusations against China about the kind of government interference, but,
the it was happening everywhere in the world, and there's no high and mighty government that can say, oh, no. We we did it or didn't do it. So let's jump on to the author, some extra details. Chris Miller is an academic specializing in economic history and international relations.
(22:05):
He's written a couple of books in his last ten years,
mostly focusing on The USSR,
apart from this one. So that's probably his speciality.
And he is an American, which touches upon my last point related to the book name and the final sections. Chip War, why are Americans always viewing things through the
aspect of war and violence and things like this? And,
(22:27):
I did notice that I enjoyed the first three quarters of the book and that the politics section as we got nearer to the end. So, like, this is the 2015,
the 2022
or even the,
you know, 20,
twenty ten to twenty fifteen secondtion.
I was just getting bored and I think it was because it was started become more about the author's opinion,
(22:50):
and what he thought
rather than the neutral storytelling
tone, which was in the earlier sections of the book. And whilst I think he's a very good history and storyteller,
there wasn't that much to offer. Perhaps he is good in terms of geopolitical
war centered around Taiwan, for example,
(23:12):
but I'm not interested in it. And so these sections, I was just going like, like, why why are you telling me these things or why are you putting your own into interjection than this? I'd rather just know what happened to the semiconductor industry. So
this is kind of getting to the the point of a very unfortunate trend I've noticed of Americans viewing these things in terms of violence and war.
(23:33):
Whilst there was indeed competition in this book,
we're talking about companies, we're talking about industries, we're talking about money. Yes. There's gonna be competition.
The whole book, I think, could have been framed in terms of mutual cooperation,
humanity's
aspiration for greater knowledge,
the ingenuity of individuals.
(23:54):
I don't necessarily see why it needed to become chip war.
There is an aspect of war to this for sure. The Americans
and
and Chinese are, you know, eyeing up Taiwan and there's some tensions there. I get it. But
in terms of the amount of money, the
ways that it has absolutely changed the world, the semiconductor industry,
(24:18):
I think that's a small blip in terms of the the grand scale of things. So
on page,
300,
which is right in this kind of section of,
where we're talking about, like,
the
politics and personal observations and things like that, there was
this quote here, which is,
(24:39):
the new tiers the new NSC, which I believe stood for and this was, in America. I think it was like the National Security Council or something like that in in America. It was one of their government bodies.
The new NSC adopted a much more combative zero sum approach to technology
policy. From the officials in the Treasury Department's investment screening unit to the managing,
(25:02):
to managing the Pentagon supply chains for military systems,
key elements of the government began focusing on semiconductors
as part of the as part of their strategy for dealing with China.
And
I don't
this is pretty much sums up a lot of, I guess, like, Americans thoughts. And I experienced this when I was in in America recently
(25:23):
where someone made the point. Yeah, we we always talk about war. It's a war on poverty. It's a war on drugs. It's a war on violence. It's a war on whatever.
It's always a war, very warlike people.
And so,
you know, they were super worried, for example, that China would, use this new technology to implement backdoors and spy on them and things like this,
(25:45):
which they had been themselves doing for decades. And,
we saw this with Edward Snowden and and things which gets also gets mentioned in the book,
the n NSA,
spying and stuff like that. So,
it's an unfortunate thing,
but it's just a common thing as well,
that Americans like to frame things in terms of war,
(26:06):
which seemed unnecessary for me, but whatever.
So
books like this as a whole go into the summary.
Remind me why the medium of
a book is so valuable.
To write all of this in order to
have all of this, like, highly
detailed
research historical
perspective
(26:26):
of being able to jump from one person to the other, like the 52 chapters in total,
was,
I think, very, very difficult, if not impossible to do via any other medium, you know, doing it via video
or via via audio. I just don't think really works. I think books are immensely valuable for,
(26:47):
topics like this. So
the chip industry is incredibly complex. You know, I got a tiny I
didn't convey a lot of the things which was such as individual
companies decisions on focusing on, you know, memory chips or flash chips or
how they were,
you know, manufacturing
(27:08):
certain types of things and why
they had to, you know, balance between governments. Oh, there was so much complexities in here,
which
I didn't even touch upon, like the technological
physical
aspects, the physics of how these things actually work. So,
you know, I'm glad I spent the time researching this, I guess, in a sense, because these chips are everywhere.
(27:31):
Just in front of me, there's probably like
a thousand chips
in my laptop, in the
camera here, in my phone here, in the microphone here, in the other camera here, like in the,
you know, devices I have to connect my mouse to the to the laptop. There's just so much stuff
all around me that has chips and, you know, it is so critical and so important. So glad I spent the time of it. The only qualms I had with the book were, as I mentioned, the war aspect, but nevertheless, I learned a lot and really enjoyed this. So overall, I'm giving Chip War by Chris Miller a very solid seven and a half out of 10. Highly recommended if you want to know more about the semiconductors and chips and the history of it.
(28:14):
Very much worth, getting into. So,
that's it for today. Thank you very much, everyone, for joining in. This is a value for value podcast. There's never gonna be any advertisers, sponsorships,
or nothing like that on here. All I ask is that if you have received some value, you give it back to me in some shape, shape, or form.
Liking, subscribing, commenting obviously is is, easy and, handy way of doing that. I want to hear your book reviews or your recommendations of books that I should read or that you want me to cover on this channel,
(28:46):
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(29:14):
through Bitcoin.
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Last section here, I am live and I did get a couple of live comments here from Juan, which was asking like, does it read like a spy novel kind of? Absolutely not. It is much drier than that. It's it's interesting, but it's certainly not a spy novel.
(29:42):
Yeah.
Does the book overstate The US decline?
I don't think so. He had,
some sections in here where he was talking about, you know, the actual percentages.
This point here, East Asia produces
90% of all memory chips, 75%
of all processor logic chips and 80% of all silicon wafers.
(30:04):
So I don't think it really overstates The US decline. They had the stranglehold on this industry for,
you know, the early part of it,
but they lost it. And the actual design of all of this is going elsewhere. So
I don't think it overstates it. I thought it did a pretty good job.
You know, AKA, maybe the design aspect
(30:24):
of it is still heavy in The USA. That could potentially be true. You know, in video, for example, is a massive, massive company.
So is Apple, so is Intel,
and they all design chips.
So
yes, in that aspect. But it's also,
you know, when push comes to shove, we live in the real world and,
(30:47):
where fabrication is
is
very, very important as well. So,
yeah, that's
a good point. Thank you for bringing it up. But also,
you know, a lot of the money and, you know, The US,
China is not sending its destroyers to Cuba to protect its interests. For example,
(31:08):
in in the semiconductor
industry, the Americans are having to,
spend a lot of time and energy focusing on Asia now. So I think just by that alone, you could say, yeah. Yeah. They they probably
lost control of an industry which was very important to them. And right at the end, it started talking about how China's
really ramping up
and trying to gain more of the actual production facilities
(31:31):
within China as well. So,
yeah, very important.
I think he had a little percentage here. China produces 15% of all chips, mostly low tech through, though, with government help, China's chip industry is growing rapidly. So, yeah, interesting. Very, very interesting.
I am live here. I was a little bit late today with some camera issues, so I will be, fixing the camera up and getting the the better one, next week.
(31:57):
What is coming up? And you could join me Wednesdays, 11AM, Australian Eastern Standard Time, and I would very much appreciate it. What is coming up? So I mentioned Lee Kuan Yew before. There's a book called Lee Kuan Yew,
which is kind of his, ideas and thoughts on very similar topic to this, which is, I guess, geopolitical issues.
I don't really care about it. One of the reasons I'm actually reading it is to kind of have something more to discuss with my dad because he's interested in it. So it's more of
(32:26):
a doing something for someone else sort of deal. But
I am interested in Lee Kuan Yew and these kind of people who change Singapore, for example. I'm I'm interested in in why
the historical aspect of of why Singapore and why Asia,
managed to,
become such a powerhouse, I guess, in in terms of this industry. So I'm reading that. Rating Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. And then from Third World of First, also by Lee Kuan Yew, which is more focusing just on the Singapore aspect and how he is a leader,
(32:59):
helps run that country and turn it from a
new completely new brand new place with no history
and
a ridiculous
intermingling of cultures,
conflicting cultures
and how he turned it from a third world to a first world. So,
that's also what is coming up. And I imagine Juan is also doing some book reviews coming up shortly as well. So that's it. I know he's reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, so expect those in the near future.
(33:28):
So that's it for today. Thank you, everyone, for joining in. I really do hope you're having a fantastic
day wherever you are in the world, and chat for now. Kyra now. Bye.
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