Inside Taiwan’s ‘Sacred Mountain’ of Chip-Making (2024)

If you're reading this, you can thank a semiconductor. Phones, tablets, computers—really any device more digital than pen and paper—all depend on the tiny chips inside them to function. The semiconductor industry is massive, and at the center of it all is one massive firm that makes the bulk of the chips we all rely on: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Known widely as just TSMC, the company is not only the most important entity in the chip industry, but also a powerful and stabilizing force in the geopolitical standoff between Taiwan and China that, if ignited, would affect the whole world. TSMC’s untouchable status has earned it an amusing nickname: the Sacred Mountain of Protection.

This week onGadget Lab, WIRED contributor Virginia Heffernan talks about her trip to the TSMC facility in Taiwan. She tells us how chips are made and explains how the semiconductor industry—TSMC in particular—drives innovation while remaining largely invisible.

Show Notes

Read Virginia’s story abouther trip to the TSMC factory in Taiwan.

Recommendations

Virginia recommends the showSeven Seconds on Netflix. Mike recommends the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s podcastHow to Fix the Internet, specifically the episode “So You Think You’re a Critical Thinker.” Lauren recommends the Apple TV showBad Sisters.

Virginia Heffernan can be found on Twitter @page88. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is bySolar Keys.

How to Listen

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Transcript

Lauren Goode: Mike.

Michael Calore: Lauren.

Lauren Goode: Have you ever taken a tour of a chip fab?

Michael Calore: A chip fab?

Lauren Goode: A chip fab.

Michael Calore: You mean like a place where they make tortilla chips?

Lauren Goode: Not exactly. This is a place where the tiny, tiny pieces of silicon inside of our phones are stamped. Everything that we are doing right now, zooming and taping this podcast would cease to exist without this.

Michael Calore: Oh, I see.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. Have you ever toured one of those fabs?

Michael Calore: I have not. I understand they are very difficult to get inside of.

Lauren Goode: They are. But one of our WIRED colleagues was able to get inside one recently.

Michael Calore: Please say more.

Lauren Goode: We're going to talk to her about it right now.

Michael Calore: Awesome.

[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]

Lauren

Goode: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab, I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.

Michael Calore: And I am Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.

Lauren Goode: And we're joined by longtime WIRED contributor, Virginia Heffernan. Hey, Virginia, it's great to have you on the show.

Virginia Heffernan: Hi, to both of you.

Lauren Goode: Virginia, we brought you onto the podcast this week because you recently got a look inside. One of the most important and most secretive tech manufacturers on the planet, that's TSMC or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Now, TSMC is a big deal in the tech world, even if they don't have the name recognition of companies like Apple or Google. And that is somewhat intentional, right? Because TSMC has struck deals with some of these giant tech companies precisely because it emphasizes discretion and trust. TSMC makes semiconductors, the little chips that power everything from phones to computers to cars, to weapons. The company is also under a lot of pressure, both in the business world and geopolitically. China, which is just to the mortheast, has long claimed Taiwan its territory, partly because it wants to fold Taiwan's successful industries like semiconductors into its own economy. So tensions between Taiwan and China are high, and TSMC is right in the middle of all of that. Now, Virginia, you saw inside TSMC and you titled your story in WIRED, "I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory." It sounds like an interesting experience, to say the least. So why was this something of a religious experience for you?

Virginia Heffernan: Well, first off, the idea for the story came when I was listening to a podcast by Adam Tooze, Ones and Tooze, one of my favorite podcasts. And in passing, he was talking about the geopolitical importance that you alluded to of the fabricators, which everyone just calls the fabs. But he also wanted to add that there's something even more astonishing about these places and the fact that we do these things, he said at nanoscale, means we are up against the face of God. Up against the face of God. He's got the best ever Oxford accent. And the word “fabs” was the one that alluded me, because if we're going to be up against the face of God, I thought I would hear Angkor Wat or the Mona Lisa or whatever before it, but no, it's this word “fabs.” I called a chip manufacturer buddy of mine, and he said, "Yes, that's where they make these things." And he conveyed that the atomic constructions where they quite literally etch on atoms are in fact an almost divine religious experience. And that if there were any chance that I could get into a TSMC fab in particular, that I would find my mind blown, and I did.

Michael Calore: Well, let's talk a little bit about TSMC. It stands for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and I think that's probably—it does exactly what it says on the tin. How big is the company? Where are they? What do they do exactly?

Virginia Heffernan: Obviously market cap varies, but at last glance, it was something like the 10th most valuable company in the world. It is a giant, incredibly powerful company. It's richer than Meta, it's richer than Exxon. They are based in Hsinchu, which is to the south of Taipei in Taiwan. And well, not only are they a factory that makes these chips and they supply 92 percent, which is market share to beat the band. Nobody has that kind of market share of anything else. 92 percent—

Lauren Goode: 92 percent of all chips around the globe?

Virginia Heffernan: The most sophisticated chips around the globe come from TSMC. So 92 percent, and more than 50 percent of all the chips. And they supply chips to Apple, which means if TSMC chips vanish from the face of the earth, your iPad, your iPhone, your MacBook, this conversation would be bricked. And that's part of the reason that America and Taiwan have such a close alliance. When Nancy Pelosi controversially went to Taiwan, she met with the president and the CEO of TSMC, the chairman Mark Liu. These things almost speak as one, the Taiwanese government and the semiconductor industry, in particular TSMC.

Lauren Goode: Now, TSMC is semi-jokingly referred to in Taiwanese media as the Sacred Mountain of Protection. There are a lot of religious themes going on here. Why is it called that? Tell us about this.

Virginia Heffernan: So you alluded to in the beginning that China's interest in the fabs and in TSMC in particular, is integral to how it sits in the region and integral to its safety, the so-called Silicon Shield that makes the island, it's like an artifact of realpolitik that if you sacked the island, you would be slaying the world's golden nest goose and it would be useless to you. So if Ukraine had some extremely sophisticated technology that Russia depended on that couldn't be seized, then it might have stopped Putin from invading Ukraine. And that bet has been made in Taiwan for several decades. That this thing cannot—no one will seize Taiwan, this incredibly vulnerable island, because it has this precious thing that cannot operate without Taiwanese supervision and supervision of these highly trained engineers. That's called the Silicon Shield. On the island, there's especially, among the people Mark Liu calls “common people,” there's an idea that TSMC is—first of all, the engineering is so sophisticated there, and it is such a masterpiece of civilization. It's monumental what happens there. It's like having any kind of enormous resource or the Italian Renaissance or something. So they like to believe that the fabs themselves represent something so sublime and also so powerful geopolitically and commercially, that it means the island could never be hurt. It's like having a blessing of a great deity that protects you. Now at TSMC, they don't like this expression. They say, think it puts a target on their back. They think that's way too much for one company to do for a whole island, but they also respect—Mark Liu told me that this is something that common Taiwanese who feel vulnerable may like to tell themselves. It's a kind of American exceptionalism.

Lauren Goode: So the existence of this theoretically keeps China from invading.

Virginia Heffernan: It theoretically keeps China from invading, but it also keeps them at a crux in the supply chain that is so important. Every country likes to say that the world can't live without them. It's like Italian craftwork or something. And just as a case of national pride and confidence, the idea that they have this Sacred Mountain of Protection—which is I think only a few characters in Chinese, so it's a very short phrase—that they have this makes them unique among nations and singularly indispensable.

Michael Calore: Something else that I thought was interesting about your story is that there is this vast supply chain that basically wraps around the earth, to supply the raw materials and the resources that TSMC and the other fabs in Taiwan need in order to make these chips, right?

Virginia Heffernan: That's right. And what's incredibly, when I asked Mark Liu, the CEO, in passing about this, I was going to ask him about his hopes and fears, just a simple question. I said, "What are your hopes?" And the first thing he said was, "I love this, that the bad guys will get their penalty." I don't know exactly what he is talking about. I think he means autocratic states. I think he really means autocratic states, including—up to and including Russia. I mean their contempt for Xi is rivaled by their contempt for Putin. They hate autocrats, they love democracy. But his other hope, he said, was that, quote, "human collaboration will continue." And that means—so much is packed into that, because as you say, the supply chain is incredibly complex. TSMC is one of the only places I've ever seen people talk fondly about globalization. It's just the height of still thinking that the best thing we could do is have global commerce. So the fact that they trade with New Zealand, Japan, all the way up to places like the Emirates, who are not, strictly speaking, democracies. Dominican Republic, South American states—of course, the US—of course, all the countries in the EU—that they form the “rules-based world order,” as the Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, invariably calls that—this is a source of just the most complex collaboration among countries around the world. I love this, “wrapped around the world.” That's exactly right. And Mark Liu's enthusiasm about human collaboration on a small level, just the three of us talking right now and working together, and on a global level, where countries with the rule of law, with a sense of fairness, with ideally a sense of justice, and certainly human rights, trade with each other, trust each other. There's a glasnost among those nations, and countries that use slave labor like the Uyghurs or use coal-fired factories are exiled or sidelined from it because they're cheaters, they're not trustworthy. And what's great about that is it doesn't put this in a moral framework. It puts it in the original enlightenment framework of democracy and global commerce and pluralism working together. What I love is, it's so pragmatic, but it's such a calling at TSMC that they use this religious language to express their enthusiasm for it.

Lauren Goode: One thing that we learned from reading your story, and by the way, I have it printed out here because I took it in the bathtub with me last night.

Virginia Heffernan: I love that.

Lauren Goode: It is 43 pages printed out, and I enjoyed every second of it. And one thing I learned from reading your story is the importance of photolithography and the process of making semiconductors. Can you quickly talk us through how that works? And also, I'm very curious, how much is a quintillion? Seriously, I want to know. I saw that word and I thought to myself, "I'm not going to google it, I'm just going to ask Virginia tomorrow."

Virginia Heffernan: I think it is maybe one with 18 zeros. I think it's what it is.

Lauren Goode: 18 zeros. Quintillion. Wow.

Michael Calore: It's a billion billion.

Virginia Heffernan: It's a billion billion.

Lauren Goode: So this is in reference to the sentence, "Every six months, just one of TSMC's 13 foundries, the redoubtable Fab 18 in Tainan, carves and etches a quintillion transistors for Apple." And I read that and thought, "What is quintillion?" So now we know. OK, but back to the photolithography. Why is this so important? How does this process work?

Virginia Heffernan: All right. When chips—people first started making chips in this semiconductor industry in the US, they could fit four transistors on them. So first, you had these switches basically that have a bunch of wires around them, and they're connected to another switch with a bunch of wires, and it conducts electricity among them. Then someone has the bright idea—someone whose name is known, but we'll skip that—to put silicon, a little bit of silicon underneath it and make all those switches talk to each other by way of the semiconductivity of the silicon underneath them, and it's four. OK? Then they start to realize, "Oh, you can shrink those transistors down a little bit here and there." And it starts to—at some point it doubles. Then Gordon Moore says, "From what I've experienced, this is going to double about every year, possibly every two years." That becomes Moore's law. And ever since then we've been shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, as you all know from chessboard—the chessboard double the grain of rice. This goes fast. So you went from four transistors in the early '60s to now trillions on the same size, thumbnail chip. So you have trillions of transistors on something the size of your thumbnail. How in the world do you do that? Well, you're no longer using wax, which they used in the beginning, or a knife or a carving tool to do lithography like you'd do with Batik. You'd put the ink and it would lay down and it would—there'd be opaque places that it wouldn't pass through. The knife gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it becomes light and a laser beam, and then the light gets more and more precise as it moves up the spectrum. So you remember it's down here, there's slow, low, loping wavelengths. There's radio, radio waves all the way up to past the visible spectrum to gamma rays. On the far right, X-rays are in there, microwaves are in there. But at ultraviolet, which is where they are now, they use extreme ultraviolet little knives with very small wavelengths, not the smallest but very small precise wavelengths. That's the knife now, and that is what they do lithography with. So you picture Batik or some other kind of art lithography, done smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller until you are dealing with electrons and lasers and light waves and atoms, and that's how you get a trillion objects on your thumbnail. They're smaller than the coronavirus. These transistors—when I started writing by the way, it was like they could fit 11.7 billion on. I took that figure actually from a book that came out a couple years ago. By the time I was done writing, they had one with a trillion. That's what frequent doubling will do for you. And you can begin to taste the mind-blowingness of this, just … Lauren, you're smiling right now. It's a very particular smile that a person gets when you just start to think about atoms, I don't know what it is. It's like so trippy. There's atoms in everything, all mass. It's just so cool and—

Lauren Goode: I was going to say it's rather stony, but trippy is the right word, I think.

Virginia Heffernan: And that someone could come in and put art on something four atoms thick. I say in the piece, it's like being in outer space. If you thought you drill down and look at an atom and there's a little signature on it or a tattoo on it, that you know a human made, it's like being in outer space and coming on the David or so just floating in space like a human. The kind of people that we love and cherish are here in a space that humans and the human intelligence doesn't penetrate usually. So that's why I wanted to go into the fabs. I wanted to see who does this and how.

Lauren Goode: I hate to be the one to bring us right back down to earth right now, but we do have to take a break, and it seems like it would be a falsehood for me to say, "And when we come back, we're going to talk about what Virginia saw." Since you can't actually see these things. But when we come back, we're going to talk about what you, quote, unquote, "saw."

[Break]

Lauren Goode: All right, we've built it up enough. Now, it's time to go inside the fab. Virginia, back in October of 2022, you were finally let inside the TSMC fab. I'm curious, how did you finally convince them to let you in, and why do you think they granted you access?

Virginia Heffernan: The PR person at TSMC, because, as we said, TSMC likes to keep itself indispensable to the world, but invisible. So the fact that listeners don't know the name TSMC is by design. They remember when Intel had “Intel Inside” stamped on Apple boxes. They think that was the signature disaster in the whole sector. The worst thing—

Lauren Goode: Very tacky.

Virginia Heffernan: Right, very tacky. So we are the brain of everything, but all of the reflective glory and all the marketing budget has to be spent by Apple. We don't do any consumer facing stuff. So most people who go to the press office at TSMC are potentially, I mean, the thing that they're looking out for is some Edward Snowden type, someone who wants to steal secrets for China or reveal this and that. I mean, this is going and looking at someone's nuclear program, or they're looking for someone who wants to steal trade secrets for intel. Those are the two outside things. But most people who ask to look are interested in either global commerce or geopolitics, national security. I was interested in neither of those because as I said earlier, I just wanted to behold the face of God and I very—

Lauren Goode: Did you say it like that to them, when you were making your plea?

Virginia Heffernan: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I did many Adam Tooze impressions, but what was amazing is that I thought sometimes, gonzo reporter like me, it's an impediment, right? Celebrities don't readily lease out their buttoned-up people to someone who might spend a long time describing their eyebrows. But to my surprise, Michael Kramer, the head of PR, who is quite a religious person himself, and what he said was, "We have a lot of Christians here who—and religious people and deists who haven't been able to talk about their faith, including the chairman." So he rarely gives interviews, but he wants to talk to you about God. So in a weird way, the strangeness of my angle was exactly what it made it possible for them to talk to me. Also, the fact that I don't have any spy chops and clearly was not going to be able to steal any secrets.

Lauren Goode: So, basically you're saying, is because you were not crafty enough.

Virginia Heffernan: I was not crafty enough.

Lauren Goode: You were just religious enough and not crafty enough, and they let you in.

Virginia Heffernan: They were just like, "Let in this flake. Come on, what harm could she do?"

Lauren Goode: I love it. I mean, but they must have also found your voracious curiosity also pretty appealing.

Virginia Heffernan: Yes. And also a source of humor, at least to some of them, that they, because it's interesting, because I've since learned that lots of engineering schools will talk about something like transubstantiation or alchemy that happens in the fabs, but they tell that to engineers, and I think engineers take it in, but they can never translate it to anyone. And so they stop talking about it, but they sometimes talk it about it among themselves. It was really interesting to hear some of these photolithography people talking about being on drugs, a religious experience once you get to a new generation of smallness in the transistors. There is a vocabulary like this, which is for other kinds of atomic technology like the Manhattan Project. I mean, those guys, forget about Einstein, like Oppenheimer, “I am become death.” These were not workaday mechanical engineers saying, “Oh, that's great. I got the engine to be more efficient.” These are people who do think that with atoms, they're up against something so elemental that it becomes a kind of high for them. So they were mixed. A few people said, “You're not going to see anything in the fabs.” And at some point I said, “Even I know that much about nanos. I'm not going to go in and see …” It's not going to be a Broadway show. It's not in the visible spectrum. I totally get it.

Michael Calore: So when you went in to confront God and mortality and all of those things, did you have to wear the bunny suit?

Virginia Heffernan: I did have to wear the bunny suit, yes. The gowning room is itself incredibly clean. So I had a COVID mask, glasses, something covering my hair, something covering my whole body, my shoes, my hands. And that also contributed to this kind of disassociation that happens in the fabs. There's a very clear saying and thought that time flies in the fabs, and it was the cleanest air I've ever breathed. It's a clean room, more than one clean room, 100-better-than-clean room, 100 meaning a hundred particles per cubic foot. We're sitting here in with it, in millions of particles per cubic foot there. So it's the cleanest air you've ever breathed it. I was saying to someone, "It's like a decongestant sort of." It's, you can breathe suddenly much better than you can, and that's what Adderall does. There's partly a decongestant factor in speedy things. So maybe that's part of the reason for the time flying factor, but it was physically altering, sort of the second I got inside.

Michael Calore: So in your story, you take us through the experience of stepping into the fab and standing inside among all the machines, and the first thing you notice is that it feels like a hospital. From the overhead surgical style lights to the way that the giant litho machines sort of seem like incubators with delicate transistor babies inside. What was it about the space that made your mind go to that environment?

Virginia Heffernan: Well, first off, it was true I couldn't see much, and part of the reason I wasn't allowed to see much and no one's allowed to see much, is that we contaminate whatever the thing is, and it's so small that it is dangerous to be near it. Our clumsiness or whatever, out of scale of it. So I was walking around with these white machines with very, very thick, three-times-bulletproof glass on them where you could see little things. And I just suddenly had the impression that I was in an NICU among immunocompromised prematurely newborns. And I think you can imagine and know maybe what the feeling is like, when you just think of a little human, a little tiny, tiny, tiny soul that's flickering between existence and non-existence. I don't think anyone can be blasé or cynical about the idea of life in the flicker like that. Just it's—the cosmic potential and the littleness and the possibility of what this thing might be is there all the time. And also, our human inadequacy as adult-sized humans to take care of something so precious like that without hurting it. So it was that kind of—I thought it would be more explicitly religious in some way, but it was this experience of being in a hospital. You kind of wanted to hold your breath.

Lauren Goode: And you wrote about the experience of visiting TSMC in general, that you were expecting something a little more aptly or Google-y on the inside, right? And that was not the vibe at all. And you had the one experience with the incredibly sterile and hygienic fab. But then around the offices, you wrote that the executives and engineers there had some choice words about American engineers and American tech culture. Talk about that a little bit too, and how that played into your visit to the fab.

Virginia Heffernan: Yeah. There's this really funny sort of almost inversion of how American tech culture works, where the engineering can be sort of subpar, but the way the perks, the Google flex, the style, the Patek Philippes, the overbuilt Jeff Bezos bodies. I looked up what they were serving in the free Google cafeteria the day that I went in there, and it was pecan—pecan-crusted, what was it? Rockfish and rose lassi. That was one of the things at the Google cafeteria the day that I went in there. And yet the engineers, as you say, are widely considered—well, people in Taiwan, at TSMC, off the record will say, "They're babies. They can't stay in these fabs late enough. They don't work hard enough. They're not curious enough to see the face of God or the face of nature. They don't have enough, they can't make a crystal that each one takes 30 days in perfect conditions to make these lenses. They just get tired and they just want to go to the gym or do their dumb nap room or whatever."

Lauren Goode: Yeah. This is what Kara Swisher calls, assisted living for millennials. Here—

Virginia Heffernan: Assisted living for millennials.

Lauren Goode: —at the San Francisco tech companies. Yeah.

Virginia Heffernan: It's perfect. But I did say, I said, “So wait, do they get any perks here?” to one of the people in HR. And they said, “Oh yeah. They get, let's see, 10 percent discount at 7-Eleven and 10 percent at Burger King.” That's another one they get, 10 percent at Burger King. I just love 10 percent. 10 percent!

Lauren Goode: At good old BK. And you drank the 7-Eleven coffee, and it was perfectly, you wrote, perfectly potable.

Virginia Heffernan: It was perfectly potable, and especially when you know that the guy's gotten it for 10 percent off. I mean, it was a dollar and it was 90 cents, and I tasted every cent.

Michael Calore: Nice.

Virginia Heffernan: So the culture of absolute precision and obsession inside the fabs, and then this aesthetic that I heard called “chabuduo”—it's good enough, whatever outside the fabs. No one talked about the food. No one said where we should get anything, go to eat. No one swept me off my feet for some farm-to-table thing. It was just mediocre, weird flatbreads from Starbucks or this thing at 7-Eleven. I just got so used to it. I mean, my luggage had been lost anyway, so I had to wear these clothes I got in a mall and it was kind of maybe an Old Navy-ish, seconds—the stitches were kind of wrong and I just gave into it. I was like, "Right, save your energy for the heavy thinking and the heavy lifting and trying to understand this engineering and drop off the lifestyle part of things."

Lauren Goode: Meanwhile, American engineers would say that, that culture is more like a sweatshop.

Virginia Heffernan: That's it. They have said that. We just opened, you probably know, TSMC opened a subsidiary fab, great fanfare, but Joe Biden was there in Phoenix, Arizona, and it goes into production next year and in Taiwan, again, off the record, I'm just like, "They'll never handle it. They're babies." And as it's happening, some of the training engineers are already saying, "This is a sweatshop. We can't do it." And there's an element of racism in the description of like, "Oh, this work is so monotonous." Well, it's monotonous the way that it's something's monotone if you don't have good-enough hearing to hear the variety, the symphony in the note. And I feel like it's a failure.

Lauren Goode: What do you mean by that?

Virginia Heffernan: Well, just as we can't see the electrons and the atoms that are the work of lithography, we can't hear the rich variety and imaginative possibilities. I know I can't. I have to have them explained to me in doing atomic constructions. Apparently, it looks just like making an umbrella on a line to American engineers, when to them it's no greater privilege, no greater privilege. I mean, they were talking about their work, I've never heard people talk about their work this way. I mean, maybe like a poet or a painter who somehow makes a living off it. No resentment. These are billionaires. I said, "Where do they live?" And someone was like, "Oh, I don't know. A condo over there." No lifestyle. One of the heads of the company works in his church. One guy, another billionaire who developed this particular photolithography, had just fixed his own roof. He's 80. They play tennis. They wear pretty much the same clothes every day, very light on their—just light, flexible, imaginative, fun, not rushed. I mean, I left and I went there thinking about Elon Musk like we all are. And I just came away thinking, "He's just not an engineer. It's not a tech company." I cannot imagine one of these guys who's like, "Here's my day. Be with my wife, check in on my children, go to my church and do some volunteer work. Go and study the face of God under an electron-scanning microscope with someone else equally interested in it, and know that I'm doing the right thing. Play a couple of rounds of tennis with a graduate student and go home and fix the roof, and then make a nice meal." In a fairly modest setting, and then there are people with 10 wives who marry Grimes and are on Twitter, and we think—

Lauren Goode: No offense to Grimes.

Virginia Heffernan: No offense to Grimes, who got out of that, so good on Grimes. But that we think that Elon Musk, who doesn't actually have a semi-monopoly on 92 percent of the world's most advanced chips, it's like, "What do we think a tech God is supposed to be?" I mean, Mark Liu is as aspirational a person as I've ever confronted, for someone that you would want your son to be because he's just—or your daughter—he's just got an absolute passion for something, absolute passion, I've never heard someone with a passion like this before. I mean, I'm trying to think. Maybe you meet, maybe a great athlete or a spectacular musician like a Glenn Gould or something. But short of that, I don't know anyone with this kind of passion for their work. And I don't know the last time Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg spoke, I don't think they ever have spoke about the absolute elegance of a laser beam or why its silicon—that is the beautiful element on which so much of our lives are now predicated. I mean, them singing the glories of water and the refractive indexes of water and silicon just blew my mind.

Lauren Goode: Well, Virginia, your passion for this story is certainly bleeding through this podcast, and we're so glad you joined us to talk about it. We're going to take another quick break, and when we come back, we're going to do our recommendations.

[Break]

Lauren Goode: Virginia, what is your fab recommendation this week? And by fab, I mean fabulous.

Virginia Heffernan: Yeah. Let's restore it to its real meaning. Seven Seconds is a show you can find on Netflix. It's from 2018. Veena Sud made it, and so few people saw it. She also did The Killing. It's just an extraordinary detective show set in Jersey City, but in a context of Black Lives Matter. So it stars Regina King. It really is, just it—I don't know how it got missed. If you told me something interesting had happened in the production that made no one see it, but I really think it's one of the best things I've seen on TV, and I'm watching it for a third time, and then I realized I never recommend it to anyone. I just keep watching it. And so someone else should share the magic. Seven Seconds is what it's called.

Lauren Goode: What's the premise of Seven Seconds?

Virginia Heffernan: So it starts with a kid killed on—it's actually based on a Russian movie. A kid is riding his bike and he's run over by someone, and then a coverup begins because the driver is an off-duty cop. The kid hit is Black. But then there are all kinds of other dramas involving the families, involving what Blackness is. But it foregrounds Black Lives Matter in a detective story. So it's just extremely compelling plot with an entirely open place to find, not a morality tale, but just an incredibly complex acknowledgement of the realities of Black Lives Matter and police violence.

Lauren Goode: Thank you for that recommendation. I'm definitely going to check that out.

Michael Calore: So good.

Lauren Goode: Mike, what's your recommendation this week?

Michael Calore: I would like to recommend a podcast.

Lauren Goode: On a podcast. So meta.

Michael Calore: Yeah. It's called How to Fix the Internet, and it's a podcast that is produced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the EFF.org podcast. Particularly the episode that just came out, it's the most recent one, it's called, "So You Think You're A Critical Thinker." And the guest on the show is Alice Marwick, who is a professor at UNC Chapel Hill, and she studies disinformation and conspiracy theories. And she goes very deep on conspiracy theories on the internet, how they originate, how they spin out into the real world, and particularly what the relationship is between a person who believes in conspiracy theories and their ideas of self-identification and self-worth and disenfranchisem*nt. So it's a really interesting and very thought-provoking conversation. It's also just fun because you get to hear about lizard people living under the Denver airport, which I didn't know about until Boone told me about it, our producer, he was like, "Yeah, don't you know that there's lizard people living under the Denver airport?"

Lauren Goode: What does that mean exactly?

Michael Calore: That there are conspiracy theories. That there are actually a subterranean—

Lauren Goode: List of … OK.

Michael Calore: —society of lizard people underneath it.

Lauren Goode: Got it. Got it. OK.

Virginia Heffernan: And thus we have now spread it.

Michael Calore: Yes.

Lauren Goode: This is how misinformation happens.

Michael Calore: Yes. So that was the shot, and the chaser.

Virginia Heffernan: I just downloaded it while you were describing it. That sounds fantastic.

Michael Calore: Nice. It's a great show. There are all kinds of great guests, it's a different guest every episode, but this last episode was the one that made it sort of jump out of my mind is something that I have to tell people about. So yeah, it's the EFF's podcast, How to Fix the Internet.

Lauren Goode: Cool. Congrats to the EFF. They did it.

Michael Calore: They did it. They can cancel the show. No need for any more episodes. Lauren, what's your recommendation?

Lauren Goode: Like Virginia, I have a streaming series recommendation. I'm catching up a little bit on my 2022 watching and I just watched and completed Bad Sisters. Bad Sisters is on Apple TV+, it is an Irish series, it's 10 episodes. The series is about five sisters who are living outside of Dublin, and one of them is married to a particularly bad egg. He's just this infuriatingly mean character, and you find out very early on in the series that he is dead, right? It's the first episode. And the whole show is basically about whether or not the other four sisters who were trying to save their sister from an abusive relationship are implicated in the murder of this man. And it's fantastic, it's darkly funny. It's also touching at times. The characters are really well developed. It's—I think it's really well shot. I mean, I really, really enjoyed this series. I'm probably going to go back and rewatch it.

Michael Calore: Nice.

Lauren Goode: And I highly recommend, and now I really want to go to Dublin, by the way. All I want to do is go take a dip in the 40-foot, which those who watch the show will understand as a person who sometimes goes swimming in cold water, albeit with wetsuit. It's just a really wonderful show. Bad Sisters on Apple TV+. Virginia, have you seen it?

Virginia Heffernan: I have seen it, and I loved it too. And I mean, can we just go for a dip in that water? If it's possible to just do it? Not—you don't have to be one of those sisters to do it. We should do it together because I can't imagine not doing it with a woman that I'm close to, because all you're supposed to do is be one of those sisters, sit in that water and slog everybody off and gossip.

Lauren Goode: Exactly. Yes. The cold water at the 40-foot is definitely a metaphor. Just you have to dive in. Let's do it.

Virginia Heffernan: I mean—

Lauren Goode: We could probably tape an episode from there. We'll just bring our little podcast recorders in the water with us and hold it.

Virginia Heffernan: With a baggy over it.

Lauren Goode: We're really cold. No, I can't feel my fingers anymore.

Virginia Heffernan: I'm completely in.

Lauren Goode: Mike, maybe you can join too.

Michael Calore: Oh, thank you. I appreciate you thinking of me in this time.

Lauren Goode: Virginia, thank you so much for joining us and telling us all about your experience inside the TSMC fab. Everyone should go read your story titled, "I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory," and that's on WIRED.com right now.

Virginia Heffernan: Thank you so much for having me.

Lauren Goode: And Mike, thanks as always for being a great cohost.

Michael Calore: Of course, right back at you.

Lauren Goode: And thanks to all of you for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter, just check the show notes and feel free to leave us a review in your podcast app of choice. Our producer is the excellent Boone Ashworth, and we'll be back next week.

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