Joe Weisenthal

So the other thing I really want to ask you is who actually makes these decisions about what gets laid and where and who's financing it?

I know you mentioned that big tech nowadays pays for most of it, but I imagine that must have changed throughout time, right?

If we're thinking back to that first transatlantic cable, maybe it was wealthy industrialists trying to do something nice for the world.

I don't know.

Maybe it was governments pressing forward with it.

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The role of who's funding and planning these things must have changed throughout time.

Wait, let me just say as a regular Amtrak commuter, I do wish there were multiple tracks.

One can dream.

Actually, this reminds me, the other thing I wanted to ask you is how much does geography play into these decisions?

Because again, going back to that chart, they very much resemble shipping lanes.

So getting from point A to point B, presumably as fast and efficiently as possible.

But also one thing I learned in researching for this episode is that

Egypt apparently is a big, I don't want to say choke point, but like a major center for fiber optic cables in much the same way that it's a major center for container shipping through the Suez Canal.

So how much does just pure basic geography actually inform the decisions of where these cables get laid?

Wait, can I just ask on that?

So when I look at the map of subsea cables going across the Strait of Hormuz, it's like Saudi Arabia connecting to, I guess, Iran.

Can they cripple the global internet by snapping those cables in particular?

Or would it just cripple the connectivity between the countries that are clustered around there?

So we know that cables can be cut mostly by accident, but occasionally by bad actors.