Samanth Subramanian

And he talks about how Alexandria is at that point kind of like a storehouse or a hub of information very similar to how it was back in the day when the Library of Alexandria was still in place.

So there's this parallel with ancient history.

But, you know, Egypt, you bring up Egypt and Egypt is a really good example.

The other good example is something that's very much in the news now, which is the Strait of Hormuz.

And just as it's very convenient for ships to take that path in, so it is for cables to take that path in.

And the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz are both choke points, as you say again, in which if a malign actor sort of wanted to really cripple the global internet,

They could go down there, use your lobster drones that you talked about, and clip every single cable that runs through the ocean floor over there.

Well, I mean, it would definitely...

impede the countries clustered around them.

But we also have to remember that the internet doesn't function like a highway in the sense that the fastest route between two points is not necessarily the shortest route.

So for example, if I'm sitting in London,

And I'm sort of pinging a server in, let's say, Portugal.

It may well be that at that particular moment, and this router is making the decision for me, the shortest route is to France and then onward to Portugal by land rather than through sea throughout.

I see.

It may also be that I live in Saudi Arabia, but I'm a Gmail user and my Gmail data is being stored somewhere else.

It's being stored maybe in Western Europe or it's being stored even in the U.S.,

You don't know which server your data lives on at all.

And so when you cut a bunch of cables that service that particular part of the world, you're also essentially forcing the rest of the Internet to reroute itself constantly until these cables are fixed.

Oh, man, it's so old school.

I mean, I was kind of shocked at this.