Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive

Joe Weisenthal (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Tracy Alloway (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:22)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

Joe, I am going to send you a link.

Joe Weisenthal (0:25)

Okay.

Tracy Alloway (0:26)

You're gonna open it on your laptop, which we have expressly for this purpose, and tell me what you see.

Joe Weisenthal (0:31)

Okay.

Tracy Alloway (0:32)

Okay, I'm putting it.

Joe Weisenthal (0:32)

This is a fun experiment. We've never done anything like this before.

Tracy Alloway (0:35)

I know, we've never been so prepared for a podcast as to have a link ready to go.

Joe Weisenthal (0:39)

It's a map of undersea, it's actually the Encyclopedia Britannica page of undersea cables, and there's a really old-fashioned looking map here. Looks pretty cool.

Tracy Alloway (0:50)

What does that remind you of?

Joe Weisenthal (0:53)

Now I lost the link.

Tracy Alloway (0:55)

I knew this wouldn't work.

Joe Weisenthal (0:56)

Shipping lanes?

Tracy Alloway (0:57)

Yes.

Joe Weisenthal (0:57)

Okay, good. That's the right answer. I got the right answer.

Tracy Alloway (0:59)

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

Joe Weisenthal (1:50)

Undersea cables is one of the most fascinating things to me because there's been a cable right between London and New York for over 100 years. And that blows, that's actually why the UK pound sterling rate is called cable. That's why it's nicknamed that. It blows my mind that like over 100 years ago, whenever it was when they first had the telegraph that they were able to string a continuous line from London to New York. Like that blows my mind that they could do that whenever that was, like a century ago or whenever. But it blows my mind that they can still do it today. Like it actually, I still find it hard to believe that they can actually have one length of cord that goes undersea this far. Even with all the technologies, I still can't wrap my head around how they do that.

Tracy Alloway (2:35)

Yeah. And some of those cable lines I think are armored in various ways to protect them. They're talking about doing 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.

Joe Weisenthal (2:59)

Totally. You hear about it taxing them from time to time, and I guess there's probably some redundancies and other ways to route around. But it is weird to think that in theory, you could just cut off some part of the world from the internet by clipping all the cables. At least I get that impression.

Tracy Alloway (3:14)

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

Joe Weisenthal (3:20)

That's probably literally happening.

Tracy Alloway (3:21)

Okay. We should actually speak to someone who knows about this. We do in fact have the perfect guest. Again, someone we wanted to speak to for a very long time. We're going to be speaking with Samanth Subramanian. He is 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 Odd Lots.

Samanth Subramanian (3:46)

Thank you for having me.

Tracy Alloway (3:47)

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.