PJ Vogt

So I asked Shelley just to help me picture the future that right now everyone's trying to avoid.

The world where some kind of conflict shuts down Taiwan and TSMC, its big chip manufacturer, stops producing.

Where suddenly the rest of the world cannot source the chips that drive so much of our technology.

What she painted was less an apocalypse, more of a prolonged global interruption, which reminded me slightly of the pandemic, actually.

No, no.

So if the factories went dark tomorrow, a month later or six months later, you would have the world as a recognizable thing.

It's just the pace of technology would greatly slow, and the technology that we had access to would probably be much more expensive.

Right, right.

Like people talk about how the U.S.

economy is basically like a recession tied to the balloon of AI.

And that's also in many ways true globally.

And so you have this like small place with an even smaller group of people with this very particular expertise.

And they're just important in a way that would have been almost unfathomable years ago.

Like it's just the degree to which both...

the global economy is very connected, but also that the technology story is one technology story and the financial markets are that technology story.

It's just like you have a concentrated vulnerability that is just unprecedented.

Why are those things converging?

And so for Taiwan right now, the fact of interdependence, it's like temporarily the best way to understand it is that in the short term, it is making Taiwan safer.

It is not a kind of like permanent shield, especially in a world where America is run by someone who seems to kind of bulldoze through what was the status quo in some part based on people's understanding of the consequences of breaking some of these agreements.

So I think the last thing I'm hoping to get is a picture of that dynamic tension as it exists right now, like this not quite frozen status quo.