More Book Reviews (plus my favorite books of 2022)
Hi everyone,
Sorry that there was no post last week, I was away on vacation. I did have time to get through a couple more books and I figured I would do a review of them.
I also figured it would be fun to go through all the books I read this year and highlight my favorites. I fully recognize that I gave a bunch of books the same score (e.g. 9/10) but ties are boring and giving more “precise” scores (like 9.1/10) is too much work. So for books with the same score, I just qualitatively ranked the books up or down.
So without further ado, here are my two book reviews plus my favorite books of this year.
Title: Chip Wars – The Fight For The World’s Most Critical Technology
Author: Chris Miller
Release Date: October 4th, 2022
Rating: 9/10
Recommended: Yes
Thoughts: Overall, I really enjoyed this recently released book. The book is extremely relevant and topical. Unfortunately, it was released just before the newest round of sanctions and export controls that the US announced but this is a very fluid situation so it would be impossible to “time” the release of the book to avoid such a situation.
One aspect of the book that I really enjoyed was that the author, Chris Miller, focused more on the individuals behind the companies instead of focusing on the details (like CPUs, NAND memory, etc.). This made the book much more interesting and accessible. The book is also broken up into many small 4-6 page chapters focusing on one or two individuals which makes it a great book to pick up and put down.
My two big criticisms would be the lack of mention of current leaders in the industry. Visionary leaders like Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Andry Grove, Morris Chiang, etc. are all well covered. But the current leaders are hardly mentioned (except for Huawei’s Ren Zhengfei). There was also no mention of how India fits into the picture. It’s still behind China broadly but catching up fast and will be a force to reckon with eventually.
I also felt like the author understated the extent of the Chinese industrial espionage and theft of intellectual property. He compared it to the industrial espionage that the Japanese undertook in the 70s and 80s. But from the little that I know and have read, the Chinese efforts are orders of magnitude greater than anything the Japanese did. It has become such a problem that many trade conventions outright ban most (if not all) Chinese firms and employees from attending and now many Chinese students who graduate from US universities struggle to find employment in Silicon Valley, especially in cutting-edge research areas.
Big Takeaway: As the world pushes ever forward to computerization, whether that’s cloud computing, AI, the “internet of things”, etc. Chips are going to become ever more important (they are already the most traded item/commodity globally in dollar value). And the friction between companies and countries will likely only worsen with time.
Also completely unrelated, but I found this quote by Andy Grove very applicable to investing as well as to technology: “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive”.
Title: Volt Rush – The Winners And Losers In The Race To Go Green
Author: Henry Sanderson
Release Date: September 19th, 2022
Rating: 3/10
Recommended: No
Thoughts: Straight to the point, this was my least favorite book of the year. Normally I wouldn’t finish books I disliked so much but I had already made up my mind that I’d write a review so I forced myself to finish the book. Although the middle of the book (Chapters 6 through 11) were decent, I was extremely turned off by the start of the book and that soured the entire thing.
The book starts in September 2020 with the now (in)famous Elon Musk / Tesla “Battery Day”. Anyone who knows me knows that I despise Elon and Tesla so it didn’t help. But then the author uncritically repeats the baseless promises Elon made that day.
Even at the time, the “promises” were ridiculous and now 2 years later we can easily say they were outright lies. On that fateful day, Elon “promised” to cut battery costs by half (nowhere close to it; in fact costs are now rising), launch a $25k mass-market electric vehicle (so baseless that Tesla hasn’t even produced sketches or a “prototype”) and would extract lithium from table salt (many involved in the industry immediately called this out for the bullshit that it was).
Later on, he makes the broad generalization (which I hate) that electric vehicles = good and ICE (internal combustion engines) = bad. There are so many nuances to the whole EV vs ICE debate that these kinds of broad generalizations that it makes my blood boil (and largely explains why energy policy in the West such a mess is right now).
In the next two chapters, he marvels in awe at the Chinese for their ability to grab big chunks of the EV supply chain in such a short period of time. He starts with battery assembly with a particular focus on CATL followed by the large processor Gangfeng Lithium. No critical questions are asked. No “awkward” topics are discussed, it all was completely whitewashed.
This is ironic because in the following chapters, he delves into the environmental, social, and governance problems of almost everyone else. The environmental damage of mining lithium in Australia (bad). The long and sordid corruption of Chile’s SQM (bad). The mining of cobalt in the DRC with child and slave labor (very bad). The environmental devastation of mining nickel in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia (very bad). And yet he never asks or discusses how the Chinese were able to become so dominant in the processing of these metals and chemicals as well as the manufacturing of batteries.
I can fill the readers in, with massive amounts of corruption (this is China after all), a complete disregard for the local environment (as there is essentially no environmental enforcement which is a huge cost advantage), and many very credible accusations of forced / slave labor in China’s Western region of Xinjiang.
Anyways, I’ve got lots more thoughts on the subject but this is already running for too long so I’ve decided to write a two or three-part series on this starting next week.
My Top Books of 2022
#1 - The World For Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter The Earth’s Resources
Authors: Javier Blas & Jack Farchy
Summary: As a long-time investor in commodity companies, this was a fantastic book. Commodity trading firms (Vitol, Trafigura, etc.) play an outsized role in the industry (and global economy) but are highly secretive and in this book, Javier and Jack pull back the curtain (a little bit). Easy to read and full of fascinating stories and individuals.
#2 - Investing Amid Low Expected Returns: Making the Most When Markets Offer the Least
Author: Antti Ilmanen
Summary: I reviewed this book back in October, which can be found here for my thoughts. Overall an excellent book but not the easiest read if you aren’t familiar with quant finance.
#3 - Chip Wars - The Fight For The World’s Most Critical Technology
Author: Chris Miller
Summary: I just reviewed this book above so there’s not much to add. But it’s a really fascinating and timely subject. And overall I found the book pretty easy to read and follow along.
#4 - Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation
Author: Edward Chancellor
Summary: I reviewed this book back in October as well and can be found here. It’s a fun and easy read and with the latest blow-up in crypto, the parallels between the past and now only become more damning.