Joe Weisenthal

Oh, okay, good.

Yes, that's the right answer.

Yeah, so I've been looking at these maps, and they look remarkably like shipping lanes, even though upon further reading, it turns out that subsea cables do not precisely follow actual major shipping lanes.

But since most of them are going to and from a major economic center, a city or something, they look a lot like shipping lanes.

And the reason I bring this up is because I think with everything technological nowadays, whether it's AI or the basic internet, there's a tendency to think of it as this very ephemeral digital presence in our lives.

But of course, as we've been discussing on a couple of podcasts recently, there is an incredible physical architecture, which is the source of all these things, whether it's subsea fiber optic cables that kind of look like shipping lines or

Or massive data centers that cost a lot of electricity and commodities to produce.

Yeah.

And some of those cable lines, I think, are armored in various ways to protect them.

They're talking about doing like more land fiber optic cables now as well.

There's a lot that we should discuss, not just because this topic is incredibly interesting and we've been meaning to for a long time, but also because with all the geopolitical volatility that we're seeing nowadays, you always hear subsea cables coming up as a potential source of vulnerability.

You could send out little drone lobsters and they like cut the cables on the deep sea bed with their little lobster claws.

Okay, we should actually speak to someone who knows about this.

We do, in fact, have the perfect guest.

Again, someone we've wanted to speak to for a very long time.

We're going to be speaking with Samanth Subramanian.

He's the author of The Web Beneath the Waves, The Fragile Cables That Connect Our World.

He's also the acting manager editor of Equator, which is a new magazine covering politics and culture.

Sounds very cool.

Samanth, thank you so much for coming on OddLots.