PJ Vogt

Because now it's not like, oh, the place that makes all the Barbies.

It's like the industrial powerhouse that is producing the thing that the entire world economy is obsessed with.

Like, how does that happen?

So they basically say, look, we were in the business of Barbies for America, Barbies for the world.

That's going to happen in China now.

What does it look like for the state to decide we're going to make, I guess what ends up being chips?

Like, how do they do it?

Because why?

What is the cultural belief underneath it?

Just like a culture that less celebrates marketing and image and more celebrates quality?

It's like there was a different model of what a kind of industrial success could look like, because that model had been proven out.

Yes, exactly.

And so, like, today, 2026, like, I'm sitting in a room right now with, like, a laptop, which has inside of it a chip by TSMC.

I have my iPhone, which has a chip by TSMC.

The chip's powering Quad, and ChessGPT, and Gemini.

Like, all these things are made by TSMC.

It is still the thing that kind of, like, I think other people understood before me.

I still feel boggled by it, that, like...

So much of the technological progress is all coming from chips made in this one tiny island.

Like, it's a very strange thing.