Joe Weisenthal

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.

I should have said in the intro that you're actually the author of numerous books on kind of, I would say, disparate subjects.

So I'm very curious why you decided to cover something like subsea cables.

I think the confusion comes with wireless, right, where you're holding your cell phone and it's like, well, my cell phone isn't actually attached to anything at the moment.

So it's hard for people to wrap their heads around.

Sorry, I realized we kind of skipped ahead.

But for people who who do like to malign Senator Stevens on his tubes comment, why is it that we can't just send data all through cellular means?

Why do we need fiber optic cables at all?

Okay, that makes sense.