(bass noise)
- The US and China are fighting a war.
It's not a war that you can really see
and it's not a traditional battlefield war with soldiers,
at least not yet.
This is a war that's being fought in government offices
and company boardrooms.
It's a war that's being fought with rules and regulations
and it's meant to stop rivals from getting their hands
on the most important technology in the world, microchips.
You might hear them called semiconductors,
microchips, or integrated circuits.
These are all the same thing.
We're just gonna call them chips, microchips,
tiny pieces of metal that are magic and that run our world.
(upbeat music)
This is a big thing that's happening
in geopolitics right now
and I wanna help you understand the stakes
of this new conflict between the US and China.
It's gonna be the center of global attention
for years to come.
What we're seeing right now is how boring trade regulations
and business rules can escalate to something
that can impact your everyday life
because your life depends on chips,
whether you know it or not.
In fact, let me show you.
- Everything has silicon in it.
Anything that has any technological smartness
to it is a product of silicon.
(upbeat music)
- Sorry, Tom.
(upbeat music)
- Oh, and it's not just like the usual suspects,
techie things, yep, microchip.
- My refrigerator, silicon, my microwave, silicon.
Nah, I'm just playing with you.
This doesn't have silicon in it.
(upbeat music)
This is just a few little things I found around the office,
but like silicon is in your refrigerator, your microwave,
like it is in your digital clock.
It is what makes our world go round.
I mean, we are speaking through silicon right now.
Like you are watching this on the internet
that is made possible because of silicon on a screen
that is being fired by a silicon chip,
like everything is silicon in our world,
besides like the forest or something, or analog cameras.
So microchips make our economy possible,
but it's not just tech, it's not just the consumer tech.
It's also military, the military needs microchips.
(upbeat music)
They need microchips for weapons systems.
They need microchips for intelligence.
They need microchips for AI.
They need microchips to stay ahead of their rivals.
Microchips represent geopolitical power
because they represent military power.
That's something to just keep in mind as we go
through this story.
- House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi
is in Taiwan tonight, China is already responding.
- [Speaker] Lead the world in future industries,
protect our national security.
- We're in the middle of one
of the most fundamental changes
in the character of war, in the history of mankind.
- Hey, pause.
I feel really strongly that the internet is a place
where you can learn to level up your professional skills.
I learned all my skills on the internet.
That is how I know how to animate and edit and film
and do all of these things.
The sponsor of today's video also believes this.
Thank you Scaler for sponsoring today's video.
Scaler is a place where you can go and level up your skills
as a programmer or engineer.
Scaler is a short term accelerator program.
It's like eight to 11 months and it's meant
to enhance the coding skills of software professionals,
basically make you way better at your job and then
to help you get a better job.
A big part of the Scaler program is
to hack the job recruitment process,
to make you better interviews,
to get you in the right doors
so that you can get better skills
and then a better job in this industry.
In addition to their curated computer science course,
they offer one-on-one mentorships
with software professionals who are like on the front lines
of this industry, they give you referrals.
It really is just like a one-stop shop
if you want to level up as a software professional.
If you like me,
have a career in a very quickly changing,
technology-based field, you know that things
are always leveling up.
And the best way to stay on the front lines is a program
like Scaler that will accelerate you,
that will help you get in the right doors
and that will give you the skills that you need
to stay on the cutting edge of all of this stuff.
I am a giant proponent, like philosophically,
of the idea that you can bypass big institutions
where education is usually done and learn
to level up your skills on the internet,
like a giant fan, it's like a principle for me.
And that's what Scaler is doing here.
They're giving you access to level up your skills
to become a better equipped software professional
and then to go get the job that you want in this industry.
So if you are a software professional who's ready
to grow their skills, Scaler is the place for you.
There is a link in my description.
Clicking that link gets you in on a free live webinar
where you can go get a flavor for this.
Trust me, your career will thank you.
Thank you Scaler for sponsoring today's video.
Let's dive back into microchips.
(robotic noise)
- In 1959, the US was about to get very lucky.
Computers at the time were becoming a thing,
but they kind of looked like this.
Tons of wires connecting everything,
all of them sending little precise electronic signals
to each other to solve tedious, complex math problems.
It was clunky, it was inefficient,
it wasn't very special yet.
But then two American engineers that were working separately
at two totally different companies had a very similar idea.
And the idea was to get rid of this, all these wires.
There was this new technology that had cropped up
called a transistor.
It was like a really precise, reliable on and off switch,
allows you to control pulses of electricity super precisely.
But at first transistors looked like this.
They were big and clunky, lots of parts.
So the idea was what if we start carving these little on
and off switches onto a material called silicon.
It's like a super abundant metal like material inside
of Earth's crust,
but it's actually a horrible conductor of electricity.
If you mix silicon with other elements,
it conducts electricity really well.
It is a semiconductor of electricity,
exactly what they needed to precisely control the flow
of electricity very accurately, no more clunky long wires.
Let's just carve our little transistor switches
onto this silicon chip, a single circuit,
that way we can fit a lot more into one place,
all close together, so that's what they did.
And then the world changed forever.
- [Narrator] With the transistor, man has gone far
toward matching some of the capacity of the human brain.
- Okay, real quick aside here,
we're gonna get to the geopolitics and stuff,
but I was so curious about one thing.
Why does being able to precisely control the on
and off switch or like the flow of electricity,
do anything to change the world?
Well, it turns out,
this is where my mind bends a little bit.
Just stick with me here.
So transistors can turn on and off and they send a signal
that results in one of two things, a one or a zero
when it gets to the other side,
super boring and useless if you
just have one little transistor sending a one or a zero.
But if you have a thousand of these switches,
all sending little signals in the right order,
suddenly you have something that kind
of resembles a little brain,
firing signals in a coordinated system
that can actually solve logical mathematical problems
and literally remember things.
This is kind of how our brain works.
It's pulses, lots of pulses.
And now we're talking about computing.
This is how computers work.
(upbeat music)
- [Speaker] The first light.
- The more pulses of electricity you can control,
the more you can do with technology.
And suddenly there's a new gold rush in the United States,
but the gold is now silicon.
And the rush is to put as many of these little switches
onto that silicon chip as possible
so that we can make our technology do more
and more sophisticated stuff.
And now people have smarter clocks and TVs and radios
and video games and calculators,
things that you can hold in your hand and press a bunch
of buttons and suddenly the silicon chip
is solving math problems for you instantaneously.
What is happening?
This is magic.
Oh, and it's not just tech bros in the sixties
who are loving this,
the US military and NASA are first in line
to get their hands on these new chips.
They dream of using them for more sophisticated weapons
or going to the moon.
Chips were becoming a currency for national power.
We gotta protect them, thanks to the USA,
luckily the USA didn't really have to do much
to protect them at first, they were killing it.
They were the global leaders of this chip making stuff.
Every year US companies crammed more and more transistors
onto this little piece of silicon,
more calculations per second.
More and more companies are now cropping up
to make dreams come true with their new magical microchips.
Lots of this action was happening right here
in central California in a valley that would soon take
on the name of the material
that enabled all this magic to happen.
By the mid 1980s,
they were carving nearly 300,000 little on and off switches
onto a piece of silicon.
Oh, and look, it's Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
- Yes. - They're using these
more sophisticated silicon chips to change the course
of history, home computing, color televisions,
more advanced satellites, and smaller
and smaller electronic devices of all kinds.
There's a revolution happening.
And over the next 30 years,
the number of transistors that they can fit onto a piece
of silicon starts to become ridiculous.
And it's like the nineties
and these things are getting faster and smaller.
And now humans have computers in their homes
that are more advanced than the ones that were used
to land on the moon.
- Not only do they play the typical computer games
that all the kids enjoy,
but their curiosity for learning has skyrocketed.
- And look, it's even smaller now, it fits in your pocket.
And we are calling it iPhone.
(crows cheers)
- None of this is possible
without these little magical brains made of silicon.
Okay, but then a problem arises and it has to do with these,
these look like just factories
where they make microchips, right?
No, these are not just factories.
We have a special name for these.
They're called FABS and they're a central part of this story
because listen,
cramming tens of millions of transistors onto a piece
of metal-like substance from the earth is hard
to begin with.
But as the number of transistors continues
to double and double and double,
making them becomes incredibly complicated.
I mean, look at these operations.
This is inside of a FAB.
And the reason why it looks
like they're doing open heart surgery here is
because even a single speck of dust that gets into this FAB
and onto one of these chips can totally ruin it.
So yeah,
it was American companies who are designing
and making chips,
but every year they have to spend more and more
on these tedious FABS, these factories on steroids.
They're getting really spendy,
like billions of dollars spendy.
Meanwhile an ocean away,
you've got a couple of economic miracles happening in all
of these countries in East Asia that are rapidly developing
and they want in on this microchip gold rush.
(upbeat music)
One of these countries is Japan,
where a bunch of new tech companies were getting really good
at making chips and they could make them and sell them
for way cheaper than the US.
Oh, and by the way,
this was with the help of the Japanese government
who's like subsidizing this, governments love microchips.
That's gonna be a theme in this video.
(upbeat music)
The US is hating this.
They're kind of freaking out that Japan is getting in
on all the chip gold rush, they gotta do something about it.
So it's 1987 and the US government basically says,
no more Japanese chips.
They put a 100% tax on Japanese chips coming into the US,
which not surprisingly just crushes Japan's chip industry.
Too bad, so sad, Japan, said the President at the time
who was, wait, what the hell, Ronald Reagan?
The profit of free markets and free trade?
Well, what's going on here?
- Our aim is to increase our national wealth
so all will have more.
- Well, turns out that chips are really important,
so important in fact that Mr. free market economics
abandoned his principles to protect American chips.
This is a theme, we're gonna see a lot more of it.
Okay, so let's move on.
Meanwhile,
another Asian economic miracle country is growing super fast
and wants to get in on this, but they also are looking
over at Japan and they're like,
we don't want the US to squash us for trying
to compete with them.
So if we can't beat 'em, let's join 'em.
(upbeat music)
Oh, and this is an really important foreshadow here.
Taiwan is looking over here at their neighbor China,
who's also getting really rich and more serious
about making good on their lifelong promise
to eventually invade Taiwan and quote,
"Reunite it with China."
Kind of scary.
So in the back of Taiwan's mind,
they're also kind of looking for a way to get the West
to protect them, so they made a bet,
a freaking brilliant bet
that solved all their problems at once.
At the time,
a bunch of engineers in Taiwan were actually leaving Taiwan
to go to the US to go to a university there and then
to actually work for US companies
in the cutting edge microchip economy,
Texas Instruments, Intel.
So the first thing the Taiwanese government does
is lure them back, they guarantee them jobs.
They pay for their travel costs,
they give them tax breaks to create companies.
Their goal is to create a Silicon Valley in Taiwan
and it totally works, it's like a reverse brain drain.
Thousands of engineers returned to Taiwan to start companies
and to help build the microchip industry in Taiwan.
And one of those engineers is the one
who actually changed the game, this guy named Morris Chang,
he had the best idea of all of them.
He had seen that American chip makers were hating
how much money they had to invest in these FABS,
these really complicated factories to make microchips.
His idea was instead of trying to compete
with the United States in the chip industry
and get crushed like Japan did, let's become their friend.
Let's solve their problem.
We won't design chips, we won't make devices,
we won't make the software.
We will just make the chips themselves.
We will become the masters of FABS,
the tedious expensive job of getting more
and more transistors onto a piece of silicon.
So he starts a company called
Taiwan's Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, TSMC,
super promising and creative name, Morris.
And the government of Taiwan is super into it
because now they can get in on the chip gold rush
and instead of pissing off the United States,
they actually will solve the US' problem and crucially,
make the US reliant on them, so now they have protection,
a silicon shield to protect them
from their big aggressive neighbor.
The government gave nearly half of the startup cost
to Morris Chang to start this new venture.
They connected him to venture capital
and according to Chang himself,
the Prime Minister of Taiwan even called
a super rich Taiwanese investor to force him
to invest in TSMC.
Whoa, okay, yeah, wow.
Like you can see just how vital chips are,
a little piece of silicon with a bunch
of on and off switches.
TSMC was basically a state-owned company from the beginning.
So yeah,
Taiwan's now in the game and semiconductors
are now becoming a geopolitical bargaining chip, chip,
a geopolitical bargaining chip.
I kind of regret it, sorry.
(upbeat music)
- Go in here.
- I believe I'm going to be the nominee.
- So it's like the early 2000s
and semiconductors are now squarely a part of geopolitics.
But meanwhile, in business world in Silicon Valley,
they're loving this Taiwan situation because now instead
of having to do all of this expensive, tedious FAB stuff,
they can just do the design and the software
and the business side of it and they can just ship it off
to TSMC and they do the rest, taking on the expensive,
tedious work of maintaining their FABS and keeping them up
to the cutting edge,
which requires billions of dollars every year.
Like to keep some perspective, look at this graph.
This is the number of transistors on a piece of silicon.
By 2010,
they're now getting a billion transistors onto a piece
of silicon the size of your fingernail.
And the only way to do that is to make each one
of these insanely small.
So let's just take a moment to blow our own minds here.
Each transistor is becoming smaller than a width
of a human hair, wait, no, sorry,
that's actually way too big of a scale.
A human hair is like 90,000 nanometers thick.
We need to go smaller like a red blood cell.
Wait, no, that's still too big.
7,000 nanometers, okay, a virus,
something that's not even totally alive, it's so small.
Wait, that's 14 nanometers, still too big.
I mean we are getting into insane scales here.
IBM recently revealed the chip
with transistors that are two nanometers thick,
making them literally smaller than a strand of DNA.
So in these FABS,
the reason it looks like this is because they have
to figure out how to do this and to keep doing it
and keep making it smaller and smaller,
providing the world with the most advanced chips.
And this is why we have nice things.
Your entire world revolves around what is happening
on these little strips of silicon.
(upbeat music)
- But more and more US chip companies
don't actually have FABS.
They design them,
they do all the software and the machinery and the selling
and the business,
but the actual making of the chip happened in Taiwan.
But as 92% of all advanced chips are now made in Taiwan,
what this means is that the US is completely reliant
on TSMC basically.
And finally, we're getting to the conflict.
This is where China becomes really important because China,
the most populous country is suddenly very rich
and they want new tech too.
So they become actually a giant customer of all these chips,
buying 40% of all the chips in the world,
meaning that they are now reliant on the US,
who is reliant on Taiwan to design and make their chips.
So let's look at the modern chip industry
as it all comes together, which is gonna set the stage
for how this conflict is playing out today.
Here's a very simplified version of the supply chain.
Again, very simplified, it's just insane.
I'm not gonna go into the full thing.
The US is the one that manufactures the machines,
the software, and the designs.
Japan makes metals and chemicals for chips.
The Netherlands makes this crazy UV laser machine
that is used to carve the chips.
And Taiwan crucially does the expensive tedious job
of actually making the chips.
Almost all of the most advanced chips in the world are made
in Taiwan.
And then you have China,
who is the giant customer in all of this.
They're the ones who are buying more and more chips
to grow their economy.
I mean, look at this beautiful supply chain.
You've got a bunch of countries that are involved now,
everyone has a part to play and everyone depends
on each other for chips.
Globalization is great.
Economic interdependence is a recipe
for peace and mutual prosperity, right?
I mean it used to be.
But there's something else happening with the supply chain
that might be hard to see in this diagram,
which is that the US is still the kingpin of this system.
They're the most important player.
They have the most important ingredients, the best designs,
the best software, and the most machines to make chips.
Taiwan, their bestie,
has the second most important ingredients in all of this,
the FABS that actually make the chips.
China on the other hand is in a position of weakness.
Their role is basically the big hungry chip consumer,
totally reliant on their frenemy,
the United States and their annoying neighbor, Taiwan,
who they want to invade,
but now they're reliant on for cutting edge chips.
And what's at stake here for China?
Well, it's not just their economy.
They don't want chips just so they can have a bunch
of cool tech.
They want it because more and more,
they need advanced chips for their military.
(upbeat music)
It's like the 2010s,
China's military is getting kind of scary,
but it's not that scary says the IS, we're not that worried.
We'll always be ahead of China when it comes
to controlling the supply chain.
And our military gets first dibs on all the best chips.
China has no chance of catching up ever.
And this is true, China was truly behind.
They did not have the tech and the designs and the companies
and the ability to make advanced chips.
They were reliant on the United States.
If China pissed off the US,
they could just take away their chips.
And now we have a rising conflict on our hands.
(upbeat music)
China, this big superpower is not gonna let this happen.
They realize that they have to do two things.
Number one, they have to start making their own chips.
They wanna break free and stop relying on the US
for anything,
make their own chips so that the US doesn't have leverage
over them.
And number two and deeply related is they want to continue
to build up their military, to modernize it,
to build more war ships and satellites
and high tech missiles and drones and eventually AI.
All of this needs advanced chips, which they don't have.
So they're like, we are gonna make them on our own.
And the US is like, good luck China, you're so far behind.
Good luck trying to figure out how to do this thing
that we've spent the past 60 years figuring out how to do,
make really expensive chips.
Experts in software and machinery and FABS like,
you have no chance.
So how is China gonna catch up?
Lucky for them, in China,
there's a blurry line between businesses and the military.
It's all kind of overseen by the state
and also lucky for them,
there are loads of US tech companies that are addicted
to making money by selling microchip technology to China.
So instead of invent it themselves,
they see an opportunity here.
Need software and equipment for your new chip industry?
Get it from the US.
Need fancy chip designs and software?
US companies have you covered.
Need those high-tech chips produced
for your military projects?
American companies will sell them to you.
And yes, TSMC in Taiwan will make them for you.
Wait, China's using US technology to get ahead
of US technology, what?
In 2021, the Washington Post reported
that China was building super advanced laboratories
to test scary new weapons including nukes.
And guess what?
They were using American semiconductor tech to do this.
It started to become clear that American companies
were selling tech and chips and software
to Chinese tech companies that were actually just a front
for the military.
Wow, yikes.
The US chip industry is now allowing China to get ahead.
This was starting to happen,
but I think what really woke up the US
is when this happened.
- [Narrator] Huge step forward in China's military.
China conducted two tests
of a hypersonic missile system,
technology that would allow it
to fire a nuclear warhead faster than anyone else.
- The US does not currently have the ability
to even track this weapon, much less defeat it.
- US military generals wake up one morning
to discover that China has just tested a new weapon,
a missile that flew around the entire world,
going five times the speed of sound, a mile a second.
Oh, and it's really hard to see
because it flies below radar range.
It's super nimble, maneuverable,
and has the ability to carry nukes.
The US had been working on something similar,
but China beat them to it by years
and it was American microchip technology
that helped them build it.
Oh shit.
Yikes.
This totally caught them off guard.
- [Narrator] Says that US intelligence services had no idea
that China was so far ahead.
- So turns out that while the US government thought
that they were running faster and that they were fine,
they were actually fueling the rise of their biggest rival
by giving them the technology that they need to get ahead.
So the US decides that they've gotta do something.
China is ahead on these missiles and they might get ahead
on things like AI and they're doing it with our tech.
No more free trade, no more free markets.
The government is jumping back into the chip game
to sort this out.
- Fundamental change is taking place today,
politically, economically, and technologically.
- All right, Joe Biden's like rolling up his sleeves.
He's like, what do we do here?
Step one, cut 'em off, no more chips for China.
- The Biden administration published a large set
of export controls on Friday in order
to slow Beijing's technological and military advances.
- [Speaker] Restrictions will limit Chinese companies access
to advanced computer chip.
- And here we are, back in the fun, bureaucratic paperwork,
Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security,
docket number 220930-0204RIN0674...
"Certain advanced computing
and semiconductor manufacturing items, supercomputers,
and semiconductor end use, entity list modification."
We're not gonna go through this.
This is just a bunch of rules
that says no more chips to China.
All those cutting edge chips that China was buying
from US companies, blocked.
- [Speaker] The restrictions will limit Chinese companies
access to advanced computer chips.
- [Speaker] Manufacturing equipment they need
to make their own chips?
Blocked.
All that US made vital software that Chinese companies need
to design their own chips?
Blocked, blocked, blocked.
- We will bring these jobs back to our shores
and end our dependence on foreign chips.
- All right.
- In fact,
the Biden administration went super far to say
that any company globally that uses US tech
to produce chips is now blocked from doing business
with Chinese firms.
- [Speaker] To cut China off from
certain semiconductor chips made
anywhere in the world with US equipment.
- Why stop there?
Americans are now forbidden from working
for Chinese chip companies, this is huge news.
Like this is huge news, this is happening.
This is like we're in the middle of this right now.
But let's go back to that visual of the whole supply chain.
If you cut off this, then yeah, you hurt China,
but you also hurt the other side of this line,
US chip makers.
Like one example, this US chipmaker, Nvidia,
they went from selling tons of chips to China
to suddenly being banned from doing so.
This has led to a $400 million loss in revenue
in just one quarter.
Poof, up in smoke.
One of the biggest chip makers now totally cut off
from their big customer because Joe Biden is afraid
of the Chinese military and for good reason,
which leads to step two of this policy.
The Biden administration wasn't gonna leave
these tech companies out dry.
So they gave billions of dollars to American chip makers
to say, "Hey, yes, sorry we cut you off
from your main customer because we're kind of getting scared
of their military,
but we have to protect our chips, here's a bunch of money."
Congress passed the CHIPS Act,
which gives billions of dollars to these companies
to create FABS back in the United States.
- This time it wasn't Russia but China, another rival power
would get way ahead of us
if we didn't pull out all the stops.
And this legislation is the first large step
in pulling out all of those stops.
- Government wants the FABS to come home to ensure
that this most valuable technology isn't solely reliant
on outside countries and we're talking giant payouts.
50 billion taxpayer dollars go to companies like Intel,
which is now opening a new FAB in Ohio.
- We are gonna build the most advanced stuff in the world,
right here in Ohio.
- Or even TSMC themselves, which is based in Taiwan,
but is now opening a new FAB in Arizona.
Keep it in the family.
Okay, so this is economic war and the Biden administration
just did a huge move.
Reminder that the reason why this is important is
because it's not just about like business or even missiles.
This is about chips.
Chips are not just chips, chips are the future.
Chips are power.
Yes, chips mean economic growth and new cool technology,
but chips also mean new weapons.
Chips are the currency of geopolitical power,
kind of like what oil used to be,
but now it's freaking silicon with a bunch
of on and off switches on it.
The US is taking control of its valuable resource
and cutting China off.
So the US makes this big move, cuts China off,
and this is geopolitical conflict.
They just made the move, the ball's in China's court now.
How will they respond?
And this is where Taiwan comes back into the picture.
(upbeat music)
Taiwan is this small country that finds itself
in the crossfires of this conflict.
92% of all advanced chips are made here mostly by TSMC.
The US is totally reliant on them.
A few months before the Biden administration was doing all
of this, making it illegal to sell chips to China,
Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan,
not just to like shake hands with political leaders, no,
she was there to visit TSMC, the chip FAB.
What Pelosi was really doing here was signaling to Taiwan
that they are vital to American security.
US relies on this and will protect it.
- Came to Taiwan to make unequivocally clear,
we'll not abandon our commitment to Taiwan and we are proud
of our enduring friendship.
- And in doing so,
she shows us what China's counter move might be
in all of this, it might be Taiwan.
- Are you willing to get involved militarily
to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?
- Yes, that's a commitment we made.
- Okay, but wait,
what this doesn't mean is like China's gonna invade Taiwan
and like take all the chips or like take over the FAB
or something, that that scenario doesn't make any sense.
If China invaded Taiwan,
all they would find is a bunch of empty FABS
if they weren't bombed already.
They wouldn't know how to operate them.
They wouldn't have all of the engineers and the software
and all of the supply chain stuff that they would need
to actually make chips.
They would likely be fighting a war
and the US would probably get involved.
I made a whole video about it, you can go check it out.
Anyway,
the effective counter move here for China would be
to operate right on the edge of active warfare
to strike back at the US
without provoking a military response.
This is how big nuclear powers do it.
They don't actually clash.
They want to just sort of poke at each other.
One scenario would be China sending a bunch
of its navy ships to set up in the ocean right around here,
creating a kind of partial blockade.
They could stop cargo ships that are coming
to and from the island,
kind of just slowing everything down,
but really holding the silicon hostage,
making it hard for the supply chain to actually work.
I mean just remember like the Covid 19 chip shortage
or like supply chain shortage
or even like the Suez Canal blockage
from a couple years ago.
Imagine those supply chain issues, but like on steroids,
totally debilitating and being used for a hostile purpose
to strike back at the US.
Like Biden forbidding American companies
to sell chips to China,
the blockade would be a way to strike
at your nuclear armed rival without going too far,
without risking too much escalation or a miscalculation.
- [Speaker] It's incumbent upon us to stay number one.
- [Speaker] To lead the world in future industries,
protect our national security.
- [Speaker] We are gonna build the most
advanced stuff in the world.
- That's where we're at.
We're in the middle of another economic war
between big nuclear powers.
We don't know what happens next,
but one thing that feels clear to me is that Cold War vibes
are back as these two great powers with different ideologies
about the world compete with each other.
This fight over chips will continue.
And this idea in international relations that I kind of took
for granted,
which is that like globalization and interdependence is good
and will lead to less conflict,
it's being seriously challenged.
Economic interdependence is being used as a weapon.
That's what we're seeing here and not just here.
I made a video a couple months ago
about how Vladimir Putin is cutting off natural gas
to Europe, frankly,
it's not that much different than Joe Biden cutting
off microchips to China.
I mean it is different in a lot of ways, blah, blah, blah,
we get it.
But like the the big mechanics
of how this conflict is playing out,
it's peculiar and and is becoming a part
of how conflict looks today.
So even as this old school style war continues
to rage in Ukraine,
we're seeing an evolution of how conflict works
in our world.
Where once a lot of conflict revolved
around natural resources like oil, most recently,
the currency of power.
We've moved to an era where a magical piece
of metal-like substance called silicon,
pulsing ones and zeros,
is kind of the new oil, the new currency of power,
the new thing that we should protect
to protect our military supremacy.
So in a big shift of the trend of globalization,
countries are now turning inward to protect their stuff,
leading to a new era of distrust, severed connection,
and rising tensions.
Okay.
Okay, okay, semiconductors is over.
That's it, I'm now going to eat a Reese's peanut buttercup
from Trader Joe's.
Mm, wow that's good.
I love this thing.
Okay, that's the end of the video.
Thanks to Scaler one more time for sponsoring this video.
There's link in the description that gets you
on a free class if you wanna try that out.
I have a couple things I wanna tell you about.
Thanks for watching.
I like to speak into a microphone at the end
because it makes me feel like I'm a podcaster.
Should I start a podcast?
People are asking me to start a podcast.
What should I talk about on my podcast?
Anyway, thanks for watching everyone.
So we should probably talk about the Newsroom.
So we make a video, an extra video every month.
It's a behind the scenes vlog where we like capture
how all of this is made, there's a big team of people,
lots of cool fun personalities,
lots of very skilled people who touch these videos.
I'm just like one cog in the machine.
That video goes live every month and it's available
to people who are members of the Newsroom,
which is what we call our Patreon.
I just like to call it the Newsroom 'cause it's like cooler.
On the Newsroom, you also get access to my scripts,
which are like big things that if maybe
if you're like a journalist or a video storyteller,
could be useful for you.
You also get access to Tom Fox tracks.
Tom Fox is our composer.
You get royalty free music that you can use in your videos
if you are a member of the Newsroom
and you get the warm fuzzy feeling
of supporting independent journalism.
So the newsroom is over on patreon.com/JohnnyHarris.
Another thing that I should mention is that we have LUTs
and presets, which are like a thing that you can buy
and then you can color your video or your photos
in the way that we color it.
We worked with the professional colorist
to develop these things.
They're basically presets and they are for photo and video
and they look really nice because I like things
to look nice.
And welcome to all the new subscribers here.
There's been a lot of new people around the channel lately,
and it's fun to have this community grow.
So I'm gonna keep telling stories and being curious
and learning and looking for evidence and data
and questioning my assumptions
and I appreciate you all being here.
So I'll see you in the next one, bye.
(upbeat music)