September 20, 2023 • 64 mins
How does the internet get information from across the planet to your house? While many people might guess it's a matter of satellites and synchronous orbits, they'd only be partially correct -- the vast majority of data zipping around online moves through a network of undersea cables. In tonight's episode, Ben and Matt explore how these cables work... and why more people should know about them.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
A production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Our colleague Noel is on an adventure, but will be
returning shortly.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer, all mission controlled decad Most importantly, you are you.
You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't
want you to know. All praise to the codes, all
praise to the cables. The world is full of hidden things,
you know, Matt. This is something you and I have
(00:50):
been talking about and for a while off air, and
I think a hazard. We're both pretty fascinated. We're both
pretty excited maybe to explore this today. It's spooky stuff.
We've talked before in the past. We did a number
of live shows a few years back where we talked
(01:12):
about hidden things all around you, right, like hidden languages
of the city, facade, buildings, all that stuff. But we
never really talked about how some of the biggest hidden
things in the world today concern information, not even just
like I know when we say information, we all think like, oh,
top secret stuff, Oh the aliens are real. But it's
(01:34):
more like it's equally important to learn how information is transported,
the physical structure that gets it from point A to
point Z and beyond. You know, I don't know about you,
but for a long time I didn't put much thought
into this. I was just like, oh, the modem works
or oh the cables out.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
I think maybe it has to do with the way
our individual apartments and homes are connected to the information hub,
like you're talking about ben Uh. For us, it is
a cable that is run into a into our house, right,
and usually a single cable, whether that's you know, a
fiber optic from like AT and T or for a
(02:20):
time Google, or you know an exfinity literal like coaxial
cable that runs into your house. Like, that's the way
we get information, and that's that's the hub. But where
does what's that cable connected to? And what what where's
the server that has all the information that makes up Reddit?
Speaker 2 (02:41):
What what is that that tiny tendril that goes into
your house? Where does that come from?
Speaker 4 (02:48):
Right? Capillary?
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Yeah, that capillary, that's a great word for it. Most
people who are not in industries related to this don't
put too much thought into it. Just make sure it works,
call someone if it doesn't. And we all know that
if a few things go wrong, people discover this during
the pandemic with just your little cable, your life will
(03:11):
change for a few days, it will become more complicated.
And it turns out that is true on a macro scale.
If just a ludicrously cartoonishly small number of things go
wrong in the world, the house of communicative cards may
collapse entirely. And so tonight's question, how easy would it
(03:32):
be to collapse some or all of the global communication network?
Here are the facts. I guess before we talk about that,
we need to just set up a quick background on
communication and codes. In fact, Matt, you and I, when
we were working together on this episode, we were thinking
(03:53):
we can do codes and code breaking and undersea cables
as one thing, and that turned out not to be
the case. This isn't even everything about undersea cables, but
it's crazy.
Speaker 4 (04:07):
Yeah, oh for sure.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
And as we tried to get on here, we attempted
to use the system that we generally used to record remotely.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
I'm at my.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
House bends at his house, Michig controls in his house,
and we get together through our cables and we can
see each other and talk to each other and we record.
But that system was down when we got on.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
Guys. Just point that out. Just point that out.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
We're doing it a different way today. Actually, this is
kind of an old school way that we used to
do every time. Yeah, but just for a little peek
behind the curtain. When something goes down, as you said, Ben,
it can really affect things. So a company located somewhere
in Israel, their stuff goes down, and now we can't
record way over here in Atlanta and New York, sorry, Paul.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Yes, or anywhere, because we have used this same platform
internationally fairly often in the past, you know, and we
are of course immensely astounded and grateful to do something
that is essentially is like a high level spell at
(05:16):
any other time in history. Right.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
Oh, yeah, you don't need anything.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Just connect to your internet thing and your camera and
your microphone and everybody's good to go.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
That's magic, man.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
But yeah, but let's let you're right, Ben, let's jump
into codes cryptography, sending information way far away, and how
do you make sure only your intended person understands what
that message is.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, cryptography proper the discipline the systematic study of codes
and how codes can be created or broken. Weirdly enough,
it's a very new science. It only started around one
hundred years ago. But it turns out since the dawn
(06:02):
of recorded history, people have been trying to communicate with
other specific people in a way that doesn't allow outsiders
to participate. The first known evidence of cryptography in some
kind of form goes all the way back to nineteen
hundred BC or BCE, your mileage may vary. There's this
(06:26):
chamber in the tomb of a nobleman in Egypt named
Nunhotep the Second, and at some point in the creation
of this chamber, this burial structure, an unknown scribe whose
name is lost to history, started styling on the hieroglyphs.
They started writing weird things, just weird insertions of stuff
(06:51):
that usually wouldn't go in your funereal writing.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Yeah, it's interesting. So when we're thinking about codes and
attempting to hide something in plain sight like that, because again,
any code could potentially be read or received by anyone.
As we said, it's only supposed to be deciphered by
(07:16):
you know, the intended recipients.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
Right. So in this case, the.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Way that these hieroglyphics were changed, it's almost as if
it was it wasn't necessarily hiding a message or something.
It was to change the message a little bit, right.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Yeah, it was to make it pop. And the more
I've thought about this since researching it, Matt, the more
it reminds me of that halcyon period of the Internet
in the early two thousands, where people would write stuff
in message boards and they would start putting in random
lowercase x's, you know, especially to indicate they were like
(07:52):
hardcore or something that would change this message or you know,
it could remind you in earlier analog days of notes
that children would pass in grade school and they would
want their penmanship to have a pop to it. So
instead of the dots atop the eye, you get the hearts,
you know, and the little smiley face. So maybe this
(08:14):
guy was just jusing it up because he loved this
Egyptian nobles so much. But to your point, and this
is an open question in Egyptology, people are not sure
whether this was to again just make the thing seem
more formal and fancy and beautiful and intricate, or whether
(08:35):
the placement of those symbols, just like the placement of
fnord in Illuminatus trilogy, they weren't sure whether it was
meant to change the context of what was being written
or carved. I guess. And this because it indicates some
transformation of the original text, it is the oldest known
(08:58):
predecessor of cryptography today. So the other interesting thing here
is if you look at most major early civilizations, there
is some form of encoding and transmitting information. And we
found a great example from ancient Indian civilization, something called
(09:22):
the arth Shastra.
Speaker 4 (09:24):
WHOA, this sounds really interesting.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
So this is like, this is some kind of secret
language that we was used specifically for a spy service.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Yeah, this is uh. And we got this from a
great security blog called RedHat dot com. This is this
appears to be I should say, some Kissinger level MI
I six James bod stuff because the guy who writes
it at the time this is three point fifty to
two seventy five PCE. He's a prime minister of his state.
(09:58):
His name's called Teli, so shades a Kissinger, and he
talks about how his civilization has a well established sophisticated
espionage service, and he talks about giving assignments to spies
and operators in what translates to secret writing codes. And
(10:22):
you know, I guess this is back in the day
man where they could have done. They could have done
the BCE version of two Sketchy guys in Fedora's at
a park asking weird questions as codes. You know, I
always thought that was so silly, but people really did
it anyway. So that's history of cryptography, ancient past. It's
(10:43):
so in Baga Badgers. It's worth exploring when we're talking
about this off air in a future episode or a
future series of episodes. And you know, when you think
of cryptography and code breaking today in the West, at least,
you probably think about the heroic story of Touring breaking
the Enigma machine. But the weirdest thing about code breakers
(11:05):
right now that we need to know is a lot
outside of touring, a lot of the historically world changing
heroic acts of code breaking they probably remain classified today.
And that's because what they did was so important and
we're part of it. We are all part of it.
(11:26):
It doesn't matter if you are a civilian, doesn't matter
if you're military, doesn't matter if you're on your merry
way and some other pursuit. If you have an Internet connection,
you are involved with using codes in your day to
day life. And you may not realize it, but all
that streaming video mad, the stream video you and Paul
and I are using now, all those articles you might read,
(11:48):
the podcast, the audio books, they originate from somewhere else,
before they reach that little cable that reaches a modem,
or before they reach the little before they fly out
from their server to reach your phone. They come from somewhere.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Yeah, and they're also encrypted. All of that data is encrypted,
and to end, encryption is the thing now. And even
if you go to a website or use an app,
it doesn't matter. There's a reason it says HTTPS now
rather than HTTP, because everything is secured and all those communications.
It's a must because so many people have access and
(12:25):
so many people have an understanding of how the system works,
it's all got to be basically secret.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
And being unable to code, to write some in some
degree of a computer language, make no mistake, folks. In
the near future, not being able to do that is
going to be a lot like being illiterate in the
eighteen hundreds. It's a big deal. And when we talk
about this great communications web, which you've heard I'm sure
(12:56):
in countless ted talks folks, it naturally can these images
of satellite links, you know, Starlink orbital systems. You got
an eye in the sky that is making sure you
can watch Eurovision in real time. The truth of the
matter is not that that does exist. People do use
(13:16):
that that is on the way, but the vast majority
of communication on this planet is much more terrestrial. As
we have foreshadowed here right now, the bulk of global
communication does not occur in space. It occurs under the ocean.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Oh yeah, I wonder if anyone out there has the
experience I had where a long time ago, I had
a wealthy family member, you know, like kind of distant
family member, visited their house. They had this thing that
I had never seen before as a kid. It was
satellite television, and it's what you're describing there. Early there
(13:56):
have been where.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
They had a satellite dish on their.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Somewhere and it connected up to a literal satellite and
that's how they were getting the television signal.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
But it happened to be a stormy day that day.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
So this brand new, awesome satellite TV thing they had
was all scrambled and crappy. You know, I just remember thinking, well,
that's weird, that doesn't make sense, that's expensive. But you know,
I think that's one of the major reasons what we're
talking about today. These undersea cables are so primary, so absolute,
(14:30):
the absolute backbone to any internet communication, any telecommunication.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Absolutely. Yeah, that's a that's a fun memory to men
because I had I had experience with that sort of
stuff too, and had the same disconnect on multiple levels,
like we're paying this much and the weather is the
weather is our arbiter, the weather basically holds our remote control.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Yeah, well it was like the first time having a
car and on an AM radio station in a thunderstorm
and going, what the heck is going on?
Speaker 4 (15:04):
Why does it sound so horrible?
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Oh, it's if interference literally in the sky, that's what's happening.
This isn't great.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
And then it makes you wonder about how many signals
they're shooting through your physical body. But that's yes story
for another evening, right that. So, satellites involve some amazing
human innovation, some astonishing engineering and math, but they're still not,
as they're not as reliable nor as versatile as the
(15:37):
established infrastructure, which runs invisible throughout the world's ocean. A
small army of under sea or subse cables as they're
called the industry, crosses the world. It makes modern civilization possible,
and we'll get to it. But just so you know, folks,
if you see one of these cables, they're not super impressive.
They look like if Godzilla was a garden hose. They
(16:01):
look like Mega Godzilla. They look like an armored garden
hose with some tar leaking out.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
I've heard it described as actually this, this soda can
I'm holding up is smaller than I guess the girth
of these cables. Yeah, like a standard soda can is
basically how big this thing is. And often it's buried
right sure, like within the ground of the seafloor, at
(16:28):
least that's how it begins. But then there are portions
of it where it's going to protrude and you're actually
just gonna see this cabling running across the ocean floor.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
Yeah, I was.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
This might be helpful to paint the picture for us
or our fellow conspiracy realist. Okay, no, judgment on anyone.
But think of your entertainment center or you're you're gaming
your computer station at your house. You probably have it
on some sort of furniture maybe, and either way, you
have a mass of wire connecting things behind that shelf
(17:03):
or that desk. Now, you may be someone who's super
into cable management and organizations, so you might have the
nice little like plastic ties keeping stuff in order. But
if you're like many people, you got a weird bull
of spaghetti back there. You got the one cable, the
tendril of the great communication sphere connecting you to the world.
(17:23):
Then you got your power cords, your HDMI lines, ethernet,
et cetera. It can look pretty crazy back there, and
the ocean is kind of like that. It's definitely going
to be more like that as time continues, unless there
is an unprecedented scientific breakthrough, and it's been that way
for a while. The very first international undersea cable is
(17:49):
older than modern cryptography.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
Really.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
It was late in August of eighteen fifty eight or
that's when it became operational, and its whole purpose was
to send Morse code across the Atlantic. Just beep beep,
deep deep.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Deep, Yeah, yeah, well, and there there was a bunch
of cabling before that that didn't stretch quite that long, right,
Like they were connecting up smaller land masses across a
large ocean or sea or you know, whatever body of water.
It is crazy that in eighteen what is it, seventy one,
(18:25):
the entire planet except for a couple of small places,
was connected by this type of cable. So you could
telegraph pretty much anywhere except for Antarctica.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yeah, they know what they did anyway, so the.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
Well, and again smaller masses of land, like smaller island
systems generally were also very often not fully connected, which
is which is something that even now, there are places
that don't have one of these cables running directly to them, right,
that do have to rely on other systems.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
But like, gosh, if.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
I'm just thinking about it now, then pretty much everywhere
on the planet has one of these undersea cables, at
least pretty close to it.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Yeah, the proximity has increased, it will continue to increase
as well. And I think you make a fantastic point
about the disparity of connection. You know, there are a
lot of places that logistically are just very difficult to
connect and then, of course the dominant religion of economics
(19:30):
also gets in the way. So the two big things
that are determining how this network grows are one geography
and two the school of thought called economics or the
financial state. Right, how many coupons can we get for
doing this? And so these later generations of cable they evolve,
(19:54):
they start carrying things like telephone, telephone information or telephonic communication.
And now these humble cables carry pretty much all the information,
Like you're the vast majority of information. If you get
it online, it arrives via one of these cables scooting
(20:15):
at an incredibly fast speed along these tiny glass threads
thousands of miles long that are just out in the
open ocean. Maybe they're buried, sometimes they are buried. Sometimes.
Let's be fair, we're going to explore all kinds of
statistics regarding this network. There's so much that we're honestly
not going to get to because you know, Matt and
(20:37):
I are old school house. Stuff works, guys, So we
will easily if we're not careful, we will easily spend
hours just saying, oh, and here's how this works, and oh,
did you know we're going to get to a lot.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
We just spent twenty one minutes or however long it's
been on like a page and a half of notes
that we have on this stuff because I just want
to talk about it.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
Sorry, so it's so fat.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Hopefully you find it fascinating too. Uh. And before we
break for a word from our sponsors, I want to
set you up with one big conspiratorial question, just you know,
the heart and soul of stuff they don't want you
to know. How easy would it be to damage these things?
Could you topple modern civilization by literally cutting the cord?
(21:31):
Here's where it gets crazy. Yes, absolutely, there are several
ways to do this. I'm so glad you asked. But
before we get into that, let's go let's uh, let's
Matt maybe like you were saying, let's let's help people
visualize what this looks like. If you just if you
had an atlas of undersea cable what would that map be?
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Yes, I would recommend everyone, if you are not driving
right now, head on over to Submarine Cable map dot
com and you can actually visualize what the cable systems
look like. This is all the global cable systems that
are known to exist. We're assuming by the way, for
(22:14):
this episode that there are several systems that we can't see,
and they are not mapped, but these are the official
ones that exist. Now, if you take a look at
this map and then you visualize yourself encountering the planet Earth, right,
this sphere thing, yes, it's a sphere. You encounter this
(22:35):
sphere thing that has lots of water that appears blue,
lots of land that appears green and brown, different shades.
And if you could, if you could see this cabling
running across the planet, you would you might think, oh,
this planet is some kind of mixture of biological machinery
(22:55):
like system.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Right.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
It almost looks as though these things are maybe using
the analogy of a human anatomy system. These things are
all connected and make this planet.
Speaker 4 (23:10):
Alive in some way. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
It looks strange. It looks like veins and arteries that
are connecting different land masses.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
I think of it too, You know, Gaya is cyborg.
That's really interesting concept, Matt's. It reminds me of a
nervous system. It reminds me of that beautiful and terrifying
experiment conducted in Japan where fungi or fungi naturally mapped
out the train system of Japan, and it does look
(23:41):
like somewhere the dots of the origin points will make
it look a little bit like a circuit board. That's
yea god nuts.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Yeah. It reminds me a lot of building my first computer,
like desktop computer, when I learned how to do that
long long time ago, with just the cabling inside there
connecting up various parts of the motherboard to the other components.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
It's fascinating.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Also, you can see the disparity that dates back all
the way to the days of the telegraph. There are
clearly empty areas. The South Pacific is one. You know,
you go under Africa like once you get once you
get a few one hundred miles south of South Africa,
there's nothing, and there's nothing connecting Antarctica yet. Officially, the
(24:30):
closest would be Puerto Williams in Chile, which is not
a big tourist destination for a lot of people.
Speaker 4 (24:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Yeah, And New Zealand is encroaching.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Yeah okay, and there's you know, of course landlocked countries
get the short shrift here because there's undersea cable will
have to go to the surface to reach them. So sorry,
all stands except for Pakistan.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
But Ben, that's so, that's a great point.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
So for for all this undersea cabling you're looking at,
if you're looking at the website, there is a crap
ton of overland cable the same type that connects up
all the major cities, all the major hubs that have
data running to them that then get sent out in
the other cable systems that are you know, some of
(25:22):
them are still above ground. Yeah, it is uh, whoa,
that's weird to me out like visualizing all the cable
that's laid across the planet.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
The reason this is only a submarine cable map is
because if it was in all the cable map, it
would be nigh illegible.
Speaker 4 (25:39):
Yeah, but.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
That's the I mean, that's it's a great thing because
it shows us the disparity. It shows us the communications centers,
and it also shows us in a pretty efficient way,
it shows us population centers, so and and you know,
depending on what you're purposes are it also it also
(26:02):
shows you targets right just so and right now. It's nuts.
I'm glad you mentioned the secrecy. This is inherently conspiratorial stuff, folks.
We looked into the work of a lot of analytics firms,
and one that is the most prominent, gets quoted the
most often in trade organizations and in popular publications as well,
(26:27):
is an analyst firm called TeleGeography, and they're they're doing
some pretty best in class work for the public. As
a twenty twenty three they said that this year they
know of five hundred and fifty two existing or planned
subse cables, with more doubtlessly on the way, and they're
(26:48):
focusing on subse cables. They have other work that touches
other forms of communication. But one important note we should
make is those land cables, which still you know very
much in existence, they can be a lot harder to trace,
especially if you get into the interior of a country
with secrets like the US, Russia or China. So it's
(27:13):
actually it's actually a little bit easier to find the
oceanic cables. And we mentioned a little bit. Do we
want to talk a little bit more about their their cutaway,
like how they how they look on the inside.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Oh yeah, I found a really great image of this too, Ben,
I'm gonna find it here. I found one on vox
dot com. This is an article that you can find
right now titled a map of all the underwater cables
that connect the Internet, and they've got a cutaway here.
Speaker 4 (27:44):
Oh they pulled it from Wikipedia.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
The Wikipedia cutaway. Okay, look, Wikipedia is not a solid source,
let's be honest. But the cutaway from Wikipedia in this
case is legit. Like the diagram is, you've got a
bunch of coating, so you've got a polyethylene insulator, copper sheathing.
Inside of that, you've got steel wires for rigidity and
(28:08):
frankly for armor, and then you've got inside of all
that little matroshkadal you've got the optical fibers in a
silicon gel's. It's very weird because when I'm describing it, it
makes me think of layered pastries. But one thing the
cutaways may not show is, you know, like you were
(28:30):
talking about the fact that they may be buried a
little bit, and the fact that they're coated with tar
pretty often.
Speaker 4 (28:37):
Well, yeah, and we found it.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
In a couple of different sources that the cabling size
differs because some of them describe them as a garden hose,
so you imagine the I don't know the diameter of
a garden hose or the diameter again of a soda can,
standard sized, wide mouthed soda can, and I guess there
are just different sizes because but we didn't even talk
(29:00):
about this yet. Right now on this planet, there are
only four companies that are the major manufacturers, the manufacturers
and layers of this type of cable.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
And they're not the people who own the cable necessarily,
they're not the people who run the information. They're the
creators and installers.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yes, yes, and let's just go through the really quickly.
You can look all of these up. In the United States,
there's a thing called SubCom. You can check out their website.
It was on it earlier. It's interesting, it's fascinating. There
in Japan there's the NEC Corporation. In France there's al
Kattel Submarine Networks. And in China there's a company called
(29:45):
HMN Tech. And these are pretty much these are the
big players at.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Least, and some of them are older than others, but
everybody does business with them because you know, they have
it's a supply and demand, you know, I mean, there
are only so many games in town, and these things,
these four companies and these cables, they're still using some
(30:15):
old tech, some old tactics, some old processes. They lay
the ships that lay this cable essentially do it the
same way people lay telegraph cable back in the mid
eighteen hundreds. And some cable makers, like SubCom. Interesting fact
about them, they actually evolved from an old rope manufacturing
(30:37):
company that made rope and just happened to have a
factory next to a deep water port. So that's history.
Hinges on such small things. And like you said, these
cables are not all created equal. This summer faster than others,
better at transmitting more information more consistently. They're taking lessons
(30:58):
learned from previous function issues. And there's a great article
on cnet by guy a journalist named Stephen Shankland, and
he points out that the fastest transatlantic cable out there
right now is built is funded by Microsoft Meta, the
tech giants. This thing alone can carry four hundred tera
(31:21):
bits of data per second, and Shanklin points out that
for comparison, not to make everybody feel bad about your
own gaming rig, four hundred terabytes of data per second
is four hundred thousand times faster than your home broadband,
even if you have the highest end service available to
the public.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
Well That's good because I'm only assuming that there are
four hundred thousand people using the Internet every second they
would connect that cable. There's probably millions of people at
any given second using that cable, and I guess they
only need a certain amount, you know, a percentage of
that huge capacity every second. But good golly, I don't know.
(32:08):
We need to get that thing even bigger. We need
bigger cables.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Man, Let's turn the ocean into one big cable. What
could go wrong? Yeah, so it's let's go back to
TeleGeography because I was I was impressed with there's stuff.
There's one quote from an analyst there, Alan Maldon, who
gets quoted in multiple conversations about this, and he does
a good job of emphasizing me. He says, the whole
(32:33):
network of undersea cables is the lifeblood of the economy.
It's how we're sending emails and phone calls and YouTube
videos and financial transactions. And that last one, I don't know.
He's just outlining the public stuff. He's not talking about
other factors that may come into play. I think you're
naily to Matt the idea of sharing a ride. Basically,
(32:57):
there's this big global subway and everything that you send
or receive. Hops on the train with strangers.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
Oh, some of those strangers on that train, I don't know,
might make you nervous. Everybody's everybody's fine on the train.
If you're somebody might make you nervous, That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Right right, right, So, once upon a time, this was
primarily the domain of like state powers working with telecom
industry players. Right mo Bell lays a new wire or
new cable, et cetera, et cetera. But of course we've
already mentioned them. The new kids on the block are
(33:41):
are the tech bros, the tech empires, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon,
those four primarily, but many others. They've got money to
play and they won in the game there. What was
that term? There's a term we learned from hyperscalers. They're
called in the industry because of all the money that
they have put into play here.
Speaker 4 (34:01):
Oh yeah, oh for sure, let's talk about it.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
These guys, these hyperscalers, the Metas and Amazons and the
Googles and the Microsoft, they're responsible for two thirds of
all of that cable traffic.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
Oh you know what, it's making me think of?
Speaker 2 (34:18):
What's that do you remember.
Speaker 4 (34:21):
Oh, I'm gonna blank on it.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
I think it was Ted Stevens or some other senator
a long time ago. They made this comment publicly about
a series of tubes and the tubes are getting clogged
and all this other stuff. It was something to do
with that neutrality.
Speaker 4 (34:38):
God, that's been a while, but you're right.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
It was Ted Stevens.
Speaker 4 (34:42):
It was Ted Stevens, bing bing bing.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
I get a bingo thing for me. Sorry, my brain
doesn't generally work like this. But he got ridiculed for
calling the Internet a series of tubes or a tubes
they could get clogged, right, But really, if you visual
this way, at least the international interconnectivity that becomes the Internet,
(35:04):
that is the Internet.
Speaker 4 (35:06):
Maybe he wasn't that far off.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
He really wasn't. You know. These are when you go
down to the nitty gritty, we're talking about physical capability, right, Yeah,
even in the so called cloud. Guess what that rides
the subway too, you know what I mean?
Speaker 4 (35:25):
It's tube traffic.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Yes, it very much is. And the like you said,
are our big dogs on the tech side. Are two
thirds of that traffic now easy and they are increasing.
Analysts say they're surging and their share of the traffic
each and every calendar year. This means essentially more people
and more businesses are doing more stuff that needs a
(35:50):
ride on the on the information subway. So just like
when a city grows and you get a lot of
people moving in and there are more and more cars
on the highway, you have to invest in maintaining and
repairing the existing roads or expanding them. Yeah, you also
have to expand them, and then you also have to
build entirely new roads. And if you don't, then your
(36:12):
city's going to be in a lot of trouble very soon.
For anybody who's played sim City, all right whatever.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
Or Atlanta traffic or.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Atlanta traffic's not a game. But I do feel like
I'm playing it now because we're driving back into our office.
Oh my gosh, So congratulations to everybody in Atlanta traffic
who is driving like they've already made their peace with
God or whatever. I forgot about it.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Man, when there is a vehicle in front of the
vehicle in front of you, riding on that person's tail
doesn't do anything.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
It's just not a And I, uh, yeah, I've already
been racking up more Atlanta war stories. I did. I
did find, you know, used to struggle with road rage map,
but I did find a new tactic that I think
is helpful and instructive to everybody involved. Since we're an
(37:09):
audio show, this might not make sense, but if you
were in a traffic heavy area and you have to
drive around people who are still kind of like learning
about themselves in their car and all around them.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
And they know laws about keeping to the right if
you're going slow, sure.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
And if they're out of blinker fluid or whatever, the
best way, in my opinion, the best thing I've found
is that yelling and people doesn't work. You know, Flipping
the bird is just sort of juvenile. What I like
to do is point at the person, laugh and then
give them a thumbs down. And that is so much better,
(37:44):
and it really does it really does work. I think
it's humorous and appropriate.
Speaker 4 (37:53):
Do the gladiator thing.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
You point at them and then give them a sideways
finger and then it kind of tilts one way or
the other and then goes down.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Hey, and keep it a positive. Sometimes I give people
a thumbs up too, but you have to be careful
to make sure that's not sarcastic anyway. That's different we
got a car episode coming up. It's a doozy, but
right now, that car and traffic analogy I think is
pretty apt because it is a crowded city, it is
growing right by any metric, and the trend will accelerate.
(38:26):
We've got a couple returning guests in tonight's episode. One
would be the shady consultancy McKenzie. They are in addition
to being shady, they're pretty accurate with a lot of
their stuff when it serves their purpose to be so.
And they said that undersea cable links are going to
(38:48):
grow at an economy of scale. Already reached that part,
so the Internet hopefully will get faster for everyone, prices
will hopefully get lower. We'll see about that. And then
they said this will all lead to like a four
percent boost in global employment a seven percent boost in
economic activity. It sounds like a win win if everybody
(39:12):
can behave sure.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
I mean, everybody's gonna make so much money. Wait four companies,
and then I guess the telecommunications companies after that will
make a lot of money. At that same outfit you found,
ben TeleGeography projects that ten billion dollars is going to
be spent on new subse cables from this year twenty
twenty three for the next two years twenty twenty five,
(39:37):
and that's global ten billion dollars is going to be
spent on laying new stuff and also spent on repairing,
you know, issues that happened to the cables and maintaining
those systems and that those that's mostly going to be
handled by those four big companies.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Yeah, exactly, because again they're the only ones in town.
And it's kind of like Semiconductor Foundries billion manufacturing base.
There's a pretty tall milkshake. It's tough order this time.
Speaker 4 (40:07):
We didn't even talk about ben.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
You can't physically get a human down there to work
on the cables. Still, I send a repair person.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Not yet you.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
I mean seriously, when you lay the stuff, it's a
trawler that you have to drop down that doesn't have
any biological material on it. It's just a machine and
it lays the cable. Then when one breaks or you're
laying a new one, you do the same thing. Because
humans don't exist at those depths.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
None have been proven to exist for very long at all.
So this sounds great for business. Again, when when if
possible and the monopoly of companies or the small oligarchy
of companies that are able to do this or making
money hand over a fist right and they're doing their
(40:54):
best work. But around the world, despite all this good stuff,
cables aren't increased concern for pretty much everybody who thinks
about them for more than a few minutes. They are fragile,
they're incredibly important. That means if you want to attack someone,
these cables are a fantastic target. You can kind of
see where we're going with this. Welcome to a new
(41:17):
theater of the continuing war. A lot of journalists have
pointed out the attack or the sabotage of the nord
Stream one and two gas pipelines, and look, put morals
and ethics and your favorite teams aside, just look at
the logistics. That's a difficult operation. It's easy for us
(41:42):
to sit somewhere and read about it and say, well,
you know, just go to a part where nobody's hanging
out and blow it up. But there's a lot going
into that. Because people have their eyes on those pipelines.
It's way easier. Even with remote parts of the seabed,
it's way easier to just cut the garden nose.
Speaker 3 (42:04):
Yeah, it's hard to see through you know, miles of water. Sure,
you know whatever, it's hard to see that stuff. And
you know, and that is weird to think about, ben
because there is a ton of surveillance under the water
when it comes to like hubs where.
Speaker 4 (42:24):
These cables are laid.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
But they are huge swaths of them that are just
cable under like barely underneath the surface, and it's just
there and nobody's watching.
Speaker 4 (42:37):
You know.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Again, we're talking hundreds of feet thousands of feet of
cable that are exposed that if you knew where to
go and just dropped something a little heavy and sharp
under the ocean floor, not even explosive, no, literally sharp.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
And former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev spoot some people when
he said, yeah, these subc cables their fair game in
a conflict.
Speaker 4 (43:08):
Why irrational international waters?
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Yeah, he seemed kind of irritated. He was like, why
wouldn't what come on? Man? Do you even war? And
if you then you start looking at this is something
that's kind of the heart of the show here. Want
to look at the choke points, want to look at
the conspiracies that will naturally blossom in this environment. Take Taiwan,
(43:31):
the archipelago of Taiwan. It has twenty seven subse cable
connections right now. If and this is just if you
were someone who had an opinion about the future of
Taiwan and you wanted to impose your will or your
(43:52):
opinion about the future, then you want to you would
start with the cables. That's one of the one of
the things you would do if your operation goes hot.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
And one thing to keep in mind, we're talking about
severing these cables. These companies can repair a broken cable,
let's say, or a missing piece of cable in hours.
It's potentially possible to repair something within hours, but it's
also more likely that it's going to take a lot
longer than that, right, And if one of these cables
(44:25):
is attacked, it would probably be strategically timed to where
communications are cut off to you know, a specific place
like a Taiwan, let's say, and then and then another
type of attack would occur. So it's almost like it's
almost like turning the lights off, right if you're just
putting the whole thing on a house and it's a
(44:47):
home intruder and they cut the lights and we're in
a scary movie.
Speaker 4 (44:50):
That's the first thing they do.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Yeah, we'll get into some systems theory here too, but
think of like a physical DDoS attack. That's really that's
what you can do. Overload the system due to the
relatively high number due to a couple of calculations, which
we're going to allude to, but for the sake of everybody,
we're probably not going to do the actual calculation slash
(45:14):
math on air. But you can play along at home
and tell us what you think. Of course, so even
another returning guest, shady one at that in q TEL,
is worried about the possibility of cables becoming a theater
in the next war.
Speaker 3 (45:32):
You remember in q tel, right, those are the guys
that put money into stuff that the CIA and the
FBI and other intelligence agencies in the US want them
to put money into. What But they're nonprofit, right, But
they are CIA backed, but they do good stuff. But
also the NSA is involved.
Speaker 4 (45:52):
It's weird.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
Yeah, every government agency you have ever had a problem
with outside of the IRS is involved within qtel.
Speaker 3 (46:03):
Do some searches are in q tel and Facebook.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Check out our episode before the cables go So anyway,
do check it out. The current president of in q Tel,
there's a guy named Steve Bauscher, and he said, quote,
there's a lot of talk these days about how space
is the next contested domain, but I think undersea is
going to be very much a contested domain. Those are
(46:31):
going to be targets in any sort of get this
met kinetic conflict, which is just like, look, in qtel
is a heavy player. They do a lot of stuff.
Kinetic conflict is kind of to me a non helpful euphemism.
We all know what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
See what you really got to bring inertia into this,
you know, like, is it at rest or does it
want to stay there? Or is it already moving?
Speaker 4 (46:59):
What kind of can energy was applied to this war?
Speaker 2 (47:03):
Yeah, exactly. And I guess before we go too far
down the undersea rabbit hole, we do have to make
a note. The reason, Matthew, you and I are talking
so much about the fragility of these cables is that
there does not have to be a conspiracy, nor sabotage,
nor an active war or terrorism for these things to
get screwed up. To the point of you mentioned about
(47:25):
just dropping something heavy and sharp, Yeah, that happens all
the time because storms hit the ocean and ships are
all over the ocean and they drop their anchor and
storm blows them and the anchor just pulls the cable out.
Speaker 3 (47:40):
God, dang it, we got another cable.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
What No, we're here for the tuna. Anyway. Eighty five
percent of cuts and damage the cable currently comes from
fishing equipment and anchors. And then there are natural disasters
that occur like you mentioned Pacific islands often which only
have one connecting cable. Tonga is a great example. Volcanic
eruption screws up the cable. They lost communication for weeks.
(48:07):
It was a double plus on good situation. So even
in times of piece, just like you said with the
road analogy, you have to constantly maintain this stuff, improve it,
check on it. It's all very expensive, and that's just
to keep it running, not to make it better at all.
That's just to keep this kind of jury rig contraption. Going.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
Yeah, I think about ac companies or car manufacturers or no, no,
not car manufacturers, car dealerships. We just talked about this, Ben.
A car dealership makes a lot of money selling cars,
but not the bulk of their money. Most of the
money at a major car dealership is made through maintenance,
(48:53):
through the maintenance of vehicles it sells, and signing somebody
into a contract to only get their car worked on
in that place where they bought their car. That's the
trick like, and it's kind of the same with these
companies on cable, right, they're going to make most of
their money fixing the stuff that they've already built.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
Yeah, I hate that. We both know that from experience, now,
you know what I mean. What a bummer. Anyway, So warranties,
that's another good episode. So it's there's another problem here.
This stuff is an excellent target for war or excuse me,
cough cough, kinetic conflicts cough cough, because just like spy satellites,
(49:35):
it's incredibly difficult, if not operationally impossible, to keep the
location of these things secret if powerful forces really want
to know. Now, you as the public, if you're listening
and you're a civilian, you can see all kinds of
maps like SubCom and they'll usually have some caveat like
location is approximate or something. The location is not approximate.
(49:58):
For a lot of the big players they know, right,
and some state governments that might be beefed up with
each other. Are also in a position where they can
force the tech bros to tell them everything legally right,
and geography decides everything on this planet. Subsea cable routes
(50:19):
are no exception. That's where we got to talk about
something that I think fascinates both of us. Batt the
cart to take the traffic analogy. One of the biggest
traffic jams is in Egypt.
Speaker 4 (50:31):
Yeah, I never would have expected this.
Speaker 3 (50:35):
Check out the article the most Vulnerable Place on the Internet.
It's written by Matt Burgess for Wired and November two.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
Right, yeah, pretty up to speed even now.
Speaker 3 (50:49):
Oh yeah, there are six cables that Matt Burgess points
out that are concentrated through the Red Sea and they
actually go over the land in Egypt. If you go
to that same way website we told you about before
the map, you can actually see where they go over
land in Egypt. And that's what we call a choke point.
Speaker 2 (51:10):
Why Ben, well, Matt, we call it a choke point
because if you wanted to, Okay, seventeen percent of all
the Internet traffic in the world goes along these cables.
It passes through Egypt, and this is due to geography
(51:31):
without some sci Fi level Terrafor me, there's no way
to get rid of this choke point.
Speaker 3 (51:36):
There's not, and you can again it is striking if
you pull out on that map, then you zoom in
towards Egypt, kind of the northeast side of Egypt. You
see where all of those cables it's like you're talking about,
it's like a cable tie is wrapped around them.
Speaker 4 (51:54):
It's nuts.
Speaker 3 (51:55):
And that's just before they go over land in Egypt
while heading to the northwest.
Speaker 2 (52:00):
Yes, exactly. And let's go back to wired. I love
the word citing this one. So Matt Burgess says, passing
through the Red Sea and across Egypt is the shortest
primarily underwater route between Asia and Europe. And you can
take some of these cables across land, but it's generally
(52:22):
going to be safer for them to be at the
bottom of the sea because it's tougher to disrupt them
or compromise them, which we'll talk about later.
Speaker 4 (52:30):
A man, do you talk about compromising these things?
Speaker 2 (52:32):
Yeah, it'll come up at the end, right. So every
other possible route in this area is a logistical pain
in the butt. If you look at the south pull
up that Matt Matt mentioned earlier. Then you'll see cables
can pass around Africa under sea, but they're much longer,
you know. It's like the old maritime days of sailing
around the cape. And if you go to the north,
(52:54):
you'll see there's only one cable that travels above Russia.
It's street name, the Polar Express. Love it, but it's
just not practical for what we need stuff to do.
And if you try to do alternative roots, which people
have been trying to do for years and years now,
then you run into the second problem economy or war. Syria, Iraq, Iran,
(53:16):
Afghanistan aka the Graveyard of Empires. That's not a place
where you want to run a cable.
Speaker 3 (53:23):
Yeah, I but the old conspira brain is doing something here, Ben.
Speaker 2 (53:27):
Oh what you got cooking?
Speaker 3 (53:29):
Where has the US been focusing their kinetic efforts in
those areas?
Speaker 1 (53:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (53:40):
Yeah, Oh gosh, they are resource rich, aren't they? And
of course the Strait of hor Moves is its own
little story to be told. That's a really good point, Matt.
Now you're in my head about it, okay. And so
they go through the red seat, right, we've got to
get back to those countries and the Grand aims in
a future episode. The Red Sea is not perfect by
(54:01):
any means for this sort of stuff, because the Red
Sea is big. It's a sea, but it's shallow, and
that means it's way easier to get down there and
get up to some grimlin shenanigans. As a matter of fact,
in twenty thirteen, the Egyptian Navy arrested three people who
were doing just that. They were like, Oh, these cables
(54:22):
aren't that far away. Let's get frigging kinetic.
Speaker 4 (54:26):
Let's see what happens. Sneep. It's way harder than a
little snip.
Speaker 3 (54:32):
But yeah, it's pretty crazy. If you look at that map,
you can see where there are vulnerabilities, minor choke points
that exist across the planet, places where if you had
bad intentions, you could do some serious damage to the
connectivity of large swaths of land.
Speaker 2 (54:51):
Very quickly as well. Yeah, so Egypt TWA and those
are just two examples of a trend that continues across
the globe. And yet the system itself does have redundancy.
Like obviously, the people who run companies as smart as
tech empires are not going to say, yeah, one cable,
(55:11):
that's fine, because they are so used to people losing
their minds when the Internet goes out, So not even
like a I kid you not not even like worried
about saboteurs or war. They're worried about their customer service
departments getting overwhelmed. So they have multiple cables or space
on multiple cables because they need that redundancy. If one
(55:34):
thing goes out, then they have another route hopefully and
they have a lot of redundancy. Or it's very smart.
That's how you want a system to be built. But
some countries like Tongas still just have the one connecting cable.
And if you're one of those four companies that you mentioned, Matt,
when something goes wrong, they have the ability to pinpoint
(55:54):
where the cut occurs so they can isolate it. But
they often have to get a government permit because these
are cables that go across nations, they have to get
a government permit to operate. So a repair can take
two weeks on average, but if anything else goes wrong
during that time, the repair window automatically extends. Like in
(56:15):
the wake of Fukushima, one repair took two months. Yeah,
and that means if we think in terms of system analysis,
to your earlier point. You if you are a bad
faith actor, if you are an attacker, you have some
advantages depending on your goal. Like the Taiwanese example we're
talking about, So they have twenty seven cables, and if
(56:37):
they wanted to cut off if the if China or
some other attacker just for the sake of argument, wanted
to cut off Taiwan and cripple them in advance of
a physical war, they would just need to overwhelm the
repair capabilities. For they cut the twenty seven cables at
once as close to as close to simultaneously as possible,
(57:00):
just like in Breaking Bad spoiler where Walter White has
all those people killed within two minutes at the prison.
Just do that.
Speaker 3 (57:08):
Well, what if you had what if the strategy was
to have a dedicated connection from a different angle that
didn't require those cables to connect to the interior systems.
Then you cut the exterior systems so communications can't go
out or come in from other parts of the world,
but you could still connect to the systems via the land. Right,
(57:32):
there's potential there to basically take everyone off guard by
breaking most communications but still being able to function within
systems at the same time while while they're disconnected. That's
really creepy because you're talking about like financial hits. You're
talking about stuff that could cripple systems without any kinetic maneuvers.
Speaker 2 (57:57):
Yes, asymmetric warfare one hundred percent. This is an excellent
example of it. I like your scenario too.
Speaker 3 (58:04):
I don't well that scenario at all.
Speaker 2 (58:07):
I think it's intellectually simulating. So there's all I guess
I have to say that too, right, so you know
what happens then, Really, even if you're not putting boots
on the ground, you're extending that repair window, right and
that and as we know, a lot can change within
a month or two, so you've gone now you've gone
(58:27):
from two weeks to maybe months on the outside. And
there's also the ability for industrial espionage terrorism in the
corporate front, very like Shadow Run terrorism. If do you
remember that game Shadow Run? Yeah? Shadow Runs amazing. Okay,
So it's it's a it's a little tricky if you're
(58:51):
one of those cats because of the redundancy of cable,
the difficulty of reaching them all at once. You want
to do a war of a thousand cuts. So the
cost benefit, which we're not going to do in depth
is this. Most breaks in the cables occur in shallow
water because that's where most of the boat traffic is
likely to hit them with an anchor. Those also get
(59:14):
repaired much more quickly, much more easily. So you would
want to eat the cost of getting out in the
deep deep water cutting cables at the most inaccessible places,
which requires some specific equipment, so you would probably want
to be careful about how you procure that. This raises
your effort, but it also massively increases the amount of
(59:35):
effort someone has to undertake to repair it. There are
only a few companies that can do this. It's again
an intellectually fascinating game, and it's probably best for us
not to do the math on air.
Speaker 3 (59:48):
Yeah, let's not do the math, because you could develop,
let's say, a brand new type of submarine that gets
introduced in the past couple of months than just andre same.
Maybe that submarine has some quiet technology that is literally
a heavy, sharp thing that you could drag across the
(01:00:08):
ocean floor. That's all you would need to do, especially
if that submarine was very quiet and difficult to.
Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
Detect, Especially if that submarine actually worked, which is up
for debate.
Speaker 4 (01:00:21):
Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2 (01:00:22):
I know, but but yes, you're making a beautiful point.
That's a problem. That's asymmetrical warfare, classic textbook. You know,
if you have an enemy who outperforms economically or in
terms of infrastructure, you don't have to waste untold billions
of dollars trying to catch up with them. You can
(01:00:43):
spend a lot less money just to break the thing
they made, which is we live in interesting times. And
like I said, you know, we knew we were not
going to get to everything here. We've only explored the
physical dangers. We do want to do that plot twist
you mentioned as well, Matt. We both alluded to. We
have not talked about puzzle palace level compromise of data
(01:01:05):
and the cables, which is happening. We have not talked
about interception or the insertion interposition of purposely misleading information.
Speaker 3 (01:01:15):
Yeah, these are fiber optic cables. You can split off
fiber optic cables and duplicate the data. The United States
figured out how to do that a while ago. Remember
what we talked about that one, and they went, let's
just look at all the data.
Speaker 4 (01:01:30):
Where can we plug in?
Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
Oh, look, we can just plug in to the literal
pipes and duplicate the pipes and see everything.
Speaker 4 (01:01:37):
I'm using the phrase pipes on purpose.
Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Okay, and we want to keep it a secret, So
let's make sure this skyscraper doesn't have any windows. That way,
no one can look in and it won't seem suspicious.
Speaker 4 (01:01:50):
Oh, the Long Lines building. Check it out.
Speaker 3 (01:01:52):
It's in Manhattan and it's really creepy. Can I really
quick shout out before we end here?
Speaker 4 (01:01:58):
Ben?
Speaker 3 (01:01:59):
Somebody named Johnny Harris, awesome reporter, journalist. He's got a
great YouTube channel. That's the way I interact with his content.
He made a video not long ago in August titled
Submarine Cables and the Rise of Mass Surveillance. If you
are interested in the surveillance side of this, we would
highly recommend checking that out.
Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
Yeah, and I want to highlight at the end of
your one. Maybe it's just a restatement here. It's short
term effective to cut these cables as an act of
kinetic conflict. Is long term effective and arguably more intelligent
(01:02:40):
to compromise the cables, because if you are playing the
cat and mouse of espionage, or if you're on the
road to a hot war, then you don't want people
to know that you have an ear to the ground
on them, so you would never tell people. Then you
compromise the cables all to say, I imagine a small
(01:03:02):
handful of manufacturers and installers. I imagine they get a
lot of interesting meetings, you know what I mean. And
you have to wonder what their social media is like. Anyway,
these are the genuine concerns. It turns out that human
beings haven't changed all that much since that unknown scribe
decided to jush up the hieroglyphs. So what happens next?
(01:03:26):
What do you think, folks? Is this critical infrastructure going
to be targeted the way that power plants are being
targeted in the US now, which just sort of faded
from the news but is definitely still happening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts. Find us online while the
cables still run Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, x naed, Twitter, and
(01:03:49):
if you don't care for that, you can always always
give us a phone call.
Speaker 3 (01:03:55):
Yes, our number is one eight three three std WYT.
You've got three minutes, give yourself a cool nickname and
let us know if we can use your message and
voice on the air. It's that simple. If you want
to send us a bunch of information. If you need
an undersea cable to get us stuff, why not instead
send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (01:04:39):
Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
A production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Our colleague Noel is on an adventure, but will be
returning shortly.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer, all mission controlled decad Most importantly, you are you.
You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't
want you to know. All praise to the codes, all
praise to the cables. The world is full of hidden things,
you know, Matt. This is something you and I have
(00:50):
been talking about and for a while off air, and
I think a hazard. We're both pretty fascinated. We're both
pretty excited maybe to explore this today. It's spooky stuff.
We've talked before in the past. We did a number
of live shows a few years back where we talked
(01:12):
about hidden things all around you, right, like hidden languages
of the city, facade, buildings, all that stuff. But we
never really talked about how some of the biggest hidden
things in the world today concern information, not even just
like I know when we say information, we all think like, oh,
top secret stuff, Oh the aliens are real. But it's
(01:34):
more like it's equally important to learn how information is transported,
the physical structure that gets it from point A to
point Z and beyond. You know, I don't know about you,
but for a long time I didn't put much thought
into this. I was just like, oh, the modem works
or oh the cables out.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
I think maybe it has to do with the way
our individual apartments and homes are connected to the information hub,
like you're talking about ben Uh. For us, it is
a cable that is run into a into our house, right,
and usually a single cable, whether that's you know, a
fiber optic from like AT and T or for a
(02:20):
time Google, or you know an exfinity literal like coaxial
cable that runs into your house. Like, that's the way
we get information, and that's that's the hub. But where
does what's that cable connected to? And what what where's
the server that has all the information that makes up Reddit?
Speaker 2 (02:41):
What what is that that tiny tendril that goes into
your house? Where does that come from?
Speaker 4 (02:48):
Right? Capillary?
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Yeah, that capillary, that's a great word for it. Most
people who are not in industries related to this don't
put too much thought into it. Just make sure it works,
call someone if it doesn't. And we all know that
if a few things go wrong, people discover this during
the pandemic with just your little cable, your life will
(03:11):
change for a few days, it will become more complicated.
And it turns out that is true on a macro scale.
If just a ludicrously cartoonishly small number of things go
wrong in the world, the house of communicative cards may
collapse entirely. And so tonight's question, how easy would it
(03:32):
be to collapse some or all of the global communication network?
Here are the facts. I guess before we talk about that,
we need to just set up a quick background on
communication and codes. In fact, Matt, you and I, when
we were working together on this episode, we were thinking
(03:53):
we can do codes and code breaking and undersea cables
as one thing, and that turned out not to be
the case. This isn't even everything about undersea cables, but
it's crazy.
Speaker 4 (04:07):
Yeah, oh for sure.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
And as we tried to get on here, we attempted
to use the system that we generally used to record remotely.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
I'm at my.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
House bends at his house, Michig controls in his house,
and we get together through our cables and we can
see each other and talk to each other and we record.
But that system was down when we got on.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
Guys. Just point that out. Just point that out.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
We're doing it a different way today. Actually, this is
kind of an old school way that we used to
do every time. Yeah, but just for a little peek
behind the curtain. When something goes down, as you said, Ben,
it can really affect things. So a company located somewhere
in Israel, their stuff goes down, and now we can't
record way over here in Atlanta and New York, sorry, Paul.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Yes, or anywhere, because we have used this same platform
internationally fairly often in the past, you know, and we
are of course immensely astounded and grateful to do something
that is essentially is like a high level spell at
(05:16):
any other time in history. Right.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
Oh, yeah, you don't need anything.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Just connect to your internet thing and your camera and
your microphone and everybody's good to go.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
That's magic, man.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
But yeah, but let's let you're right, Ben, let's jump
into codes cryptography, sending information way far away, and how
do you make sure only your intended person understands what
that message is.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, cryptography proper the discipline the systematic study of codes
and how codes can be created or broken. Weirdly enough,
it's a very new science. It only started around one
hundred years ago. But it turns out since the dawn
(06:02):
of recorded history, people have been trying to communicate with
other specific people in a way that doesn't allow outsiders
to participate. The first known evidence of cryptography in some
kind of form goes all the way back to nineteen
hundred BC or BCE, your mileage may vary. There's this
(06:26):
chamber in the tomb of a nobleman in Egypt named
Nunhotep the Second, and at some point in the creation
of this chamber, this burial structure, an unknown scribe whose
name is lost to history, started styling on the hieroglyphs.
They started writing weird things, just weird insertions of stuff
(06:51):
that usually wouldn't go in your funereal writing.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Yeah, it's interesting. So when we're thinking about codes and
attempting to hide something in plain sight like that, because again,
any code could potentially be read or received by anyone.
As we said, it's only supposed to be deciphered by
(07:16):
you know, the intended recipients.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
Right. So in this case, the.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Way that these hieroglyphics were changed, it's almost as if
it was it wasn't necessarily hiding a message or something.
It was to change the message a little bit, right.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Yeah, it was to make it pop. And the more
I've thought about this since researching it, Matt, the more
it reminds me of that halcyon period of the Internet
in the early two thousands, where people would write stuff
in message boards and they would start putting in random
lowercase x's, you know, especially to indicate they were like
(07:52):
hardcore or something that would change this message or you know,
it could remind you in earlier analog days of notes
that children would pass in grade school and they would
want their penmanship to have a pop to it. So
instead of the dots atop the eye, you get the hearts,
you know, and the little smiley face. So maybe this
(08:14):
guy was just jusing it up because he loved this
Egyptian nobles so much. But to your point, and this
is an open question in Egyptology, people are not sure
whether this was to again just make the thing seem
more formal and fancy and beautiful and intricate, or whether
(08:35):
the placement of those symbols, just like the placement of
fnord in Illuminatus trilogy, they weren't sure whether it was
meant to change the context of what was being written
or carved. I guess. And this because it indicates some
transformation of the original text, it is the oldest known
(08:58):
predecessor of cryptography today. So the other interesting thing here
is if you look at most major early civilizations, there
is some form of encoding and transmitting information. And we
found a great example from ancient Indian civilization, something called
(09:22):
the arth Shastra.
Speaker 4 (09:24):
WHOA, this sounds really interesting.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
So this is like, this is some kind of secret
language that we was used specifically for a spy service.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Yeah, this is uh. And we got this from a
great security blog called RedHat dot com. This is this
appears to be I should say, some Kissinger level MI
I six James bod stuff because the guy who writes
it at the time this is three point fifty to
two seventy five PCE. He's a prime minister of his state.
(09:58):
His name's called Teli, so shades a Kissinger, and he
talks about how his civilization has a well established sophisticated
espionage service, and he talks about giving assignments to spies
and operators in what translates to secret writing codes. And
(10:22):
you know, I guess this is back in the day
man where they could have done. They could have done
the BCE version of two Sketchy guys in Fedora's at
a park asking weird questions as codes. You know, I
always thought that was so silly, but people really did
it anyway. So that's history of cryptography, ancient past. It's
(10:43):
so in Baga Badgers. It's worth exploring when we're talking
about this off air in a future episode or a
future series of episodes. And you know, when you think
of cryptography and code breaking today in the West, at least,
you probably think about the heroic story of Touring breaking
the Enigma machine. But the weirdest thing about code breakers
(11:05):
right now that we need to know is a lot
outside of touring, a lot of the historically world changing
heroic acts of code breaking they probably remain classified today.
And that's because what they did was so important and
we're part of it. We are all part of it.
(11:26):
It doesn't matter if you are a civilian, doesn't matter
if you're military, doesn't matter if you're on your merry
way and some other pursuit. If you have an Internet connection,
you are involved with using codes in your day to
day life. And you may not realize it, but all
that streaming video mad, the stream video you and Paul
and I are using now, all those articles you might read,
(11:48):
the podcast, the audio books, they originate from somewhere else,
before they reach that little cable that reaches a modem,
or before they reach the little before they fly out
from their server to reach your phone. They come from somewhere.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Yeah, and they're also encrypted. All of that data is encrypted,
and to end, encryption is the thing now. And even
if you go to a website or use an app,
it doesn't matter. There's a reason it says HTTPS now
rather than HTTP, because everything is secured and all those communications.
It's a must because so many people have access and
(12:25):
so many people have an understanding of how the system works,
it's all got to be basically secret.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
And being unable to code, to write some in some
degree of a computer language, make no mistake, folks. In
the near future, not being able to do that is
going to be a lot like being illiterate in the
eighteen hundreds. It's a big deal. And when we talk
about this great communications web, which you've heard I'm sure
(12:56):
in countless ted talks folks, it naturally can these images
of satellite links, you know, Starlink orbital systems. You got
an eye in the sky that is making sure you
can watch Eurovision in real time. The truth of the
matter is not that that does exist. People do use
(13:16):
that that is on the way, but the vast majority
of communication on this planet is much more terrestrial. As
we have foreshadowed here right now, the bulk of global
communication does not occur in space. It occurs under the ocean.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Oh yeah, I wonder if anyone out there has the
experience I had where a long time ago, I had
a wealthy family member, you know, like kind of distant
family member, visited their house. They had this thing that
I had never seen before as a kid. It was
satellite television, and it's what you're describing there. Early there
(13:56):
have been where.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
They had a satellite dish on their.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Somewhere and it connected up to a literal satellite and
that's how they were getting the television signal.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
But it happened to be a stormy day that day.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
So this brand new, awesome satellite TV thing they had
was all scrambled and crappy. You know, I just remember thinking, well,
that's weird, that doesn't make sense, that's expensive. But you know,
I think that's one of the major reasons what we're
talking about today. These undersea cables are so primary, so absolute,
(14:30):
the absolute backbone to any internet communication, any telecommunication.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Absolutely. Yeah, that's a that's a fun memory to men
because I had I had experience with that sort of
stuff too, and had the same disconnect on multiple levels,
like we're paying this much and the weather is the
weather is our arbiter, the weather basically holds our remote control.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Yeah, well it was like the first time having a
car and on an AM radio station in a thunderstorm
and going, what the heck is going on?
Speaker 4 (15:04):
Why does it sound so horrible?
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Oh, it's if interference literally in the sky, that's what's happening.
This isn't great.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
And then it makes you wonder about how many signals
they're shooting through your physical body. But that's yes story
for another evening, right that. So, satellites involve some amazing
human innovation, some astonishing engineering and math, but they're still not,
as they're not as reliable nor as versatile as the
(15:37):
established infrastructure, which runs invisible throughout the world's ocean. A
small army of under sea or subse cables as they're
called the industry, crosses the world. It makes modern civilization possible,
and we'll get to it. But just so you know, folks,
if you see one of these cables, they're not super impressive.
They look like if Godzilla was a garden hose. They
(16:01):
look like Mega Godzilla. They look like an armored garden
hose with some tar leaking out.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
I've heard it described as actually this, this soda can
I'm holding up is smaller than I guess the girth
of these cables. Yeah, like a standard soda can is
basically how big this thing is. And often it's buried
right sure, like within the ground of the seafloor, at
(16:28):
least that's how it begins. But then there are portions
of it where it's going to protrude and you're actually
just gonna see this cabling running across the ocean floor.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
Yeah, I was.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
This might be helpful to paint the picture for us
or our fellow conspiracy realist. Okay, no, judgment on anyone.
But think of your entertainment center or you're you're gaming
your computer station at your house. You probably have it
on some sort of furniture maybe, and either way, you
have a mass of wire connecting things behind that shelf
(17:03):
or that desk. Now, you may be someone who's super
into cable management and organizations, so you might have the
nice little like plastic ties keeping stuff in order. But
if you're like many people, you got a weird bull
of spaghetti back there. You got the one cable, the
tendril of the great communication sphere connecting you to the world.
(17:23):
Then you got your power cords, your HDMI lines, ethernet,
et cetera. It can look pretty crazy back there, and
the ocean is kind of like that. It's definitely going
to be more like that as time continues, unless there
is an unprecedented scientific breakthrough, and it's been that way
for a while. The very first international undersea cable is
(17:49):
older than modern cryptography.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
Really.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
It was late in August of eighteen fifty eight or
that's when it became operational, and its whole purpose was
to send Morse code across the Atlantic. Just beep beep,
deep deep.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Deep, Yeah, yeah, well, and there there was a bunch
of cabling before that that didn't stretch quite that long, right,
Like they were connecting up smaller land masses across a
large ocean or sea or you know, whatever body of water.
It is crazy that in eighteen what is it, seventy one,
(18:25):
the entire planet except for a couple of small places,
was connected by this type of cable. So you could
telegraph pretty much anywhere except for Antarctica.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yeah, they know what they did anyway, so the.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
Well, and again smaller masses of land, like smaller island
systems generally were also very often not fully connected, which
is which is something that even now, there are places
that don't have one of these cables running directly to them, right,
that do have to rely on other systems.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
But like, gosh, if.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
I'm just thinking about it now, then pretty much everywhere
on the planet has one of these undersea cables, at
least pretty close to it.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Yeah, the proximity has increased, it will continue to increase
as well. And I think you make a fantastic point
about the disparity of connection. You know, there are a
lot of places that logistically are just very difficult to
connect and then, of course the dominant religion of economics
(19:30):
also gets in the way. So the two big things
that are determining how this network grows are one geography
and two the school of thought called economics or the
financial state. Right, how many coupons can we get for
doing this? And so these later generations of cable they evolve,
(19:54):
they start carrying things like telephone, telephone information or telephonic communication.
And now these humble cables carry pretty much all the information,
Like you're the vast majority of information. If you get
it online, it arrives via one of these cables scooting
(20:15):
at an incredibly fast speed along these tiny glass threads
thousands of miles long that are just out in the
open ocean. Maybe they're buried, sometimes they are buried. Sometimes.
Let's be fair, we're going to explore all kinds of
statistics regarding this network. There's so much that we're honestly
not going to get to because you know, Matt and
(20:37):
I are old school house. Stuff works, guys, So we
will easily if we're not careful, we will easily spend
hours just saying, oh, and here's how this works, and oh,
did you know we're going to get to a lot.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
We just spent twenty one minutes or however long it's
been on like a page and a half of notes
that we have on this stuff because I just want
to talk about it.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
Sorry, so it's so fat.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Hopefully you find it fascinating too. Uh. And before we
break for a word from our sponsors, I want to
set you up with one big conspiratorial question, just you know,
the heart and soul of stuff they don't want you
to know. How easy would it be to damage these things?
Could you topple modern civilization by literally cutting the cord?
(21:31):
Here's where it gets crazy. Yes, absolutely, there are several
ways to do this. I'm so glad you asked. But
before we get into that, let's go let's uh, let's
Matt maybe like you were saying, let's let's help people
visualize what this looks like. If you just if you
had an atlas of undersea cable what would that map be?
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Yes, I would recommend everyone, if you are not driving
right now, head on over to Submarine Cable map dot
com and you can actually visualize what the cable systems
look like. This is all the global cable systems that
are known to exist. We're assuming by the way, for
(22:14):
this episode that there are several systems that we can't see,
and they are not mapped, but these are the official
ones that exist. Now, if you take a look at
this map and then you visualize yourself encountering the planet Earth, right,
this sphere thing, yes, it's a sphere. You encounter this
(22:35):
sphere thing that has lots of water that appears blue,
lots of land that appears green and brown, different shades.
And if you could, if you could see this cabling
running across the planet, you would you might think, oh,
this planet is some kind of mixture of biological machinery
(22:55):
like system.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Right.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
It almost looks as though these things are maybe using
the analogy of a human anatomy system. These things are
all connected and make this planet.
Speaker 4 (23:10):
Alive in some way. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
It looks strange. It looks like veins and arteries that
are connecting different land masses.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
I think of it too, You know, Gaya is cyborg.
That's really interesting concept, Matt's. It reminds me of a
nervous system. It reminds me of that beautiful and terrifying
experiment conducted in Japan where fungi or fungi naturally mapped
out the train system of Japan, and it does look
(23:41):
like somewhere the dots of the origin points will make
it look a little bit like a circuit board. That's
yea god nuts.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Yeah. It reminds me a lot of building my first computer,
like desktop computer, when I learned how to do that
long long time ago, with just the cabling inside there
connecting up various parts of the motherboard to the other components.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
It's fascinating.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Also, you can see the disparity that dates back all
the way to the days of the telegraph. There are
clearly empty areas. The South Pacific is one. You know,
you go under Africa like once you get once you
get a few one hundred miles south of South Africa,
there's nothing, and there's nothing connecting Antarctica yet. Officially, the
(24:30):
closest would be Puerto Williams in Chile, which is not
a big tourist destination for a lot of people.
Speaker 4 (24:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Yeah, And New Zealand is encroaching.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Yeah okay, and there's you know, of course landlocked countries
get the short shrift here because there's undersea cable will
have to go to the surface to reach them. So sorry,
all stands except for Pakistan.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
But Ben, that's so, that's a great point.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
So for for all this undersea cabling you're looking at,
if you're looking at the website, there is a crap
ton of overland cable the same type that connects up
all the major cities, all the major hubs that have
data running to them that then get sent out in
the other cable systems that are you know, some of
(25:22):
them are still above ground. Yeah, it is uh, whoa,
that's weird to me out like visualizing all the cable
that's laid across the planet.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
The reason this is only a submarine cable map is
because if it was in all the cable map, it
would be nigh illegible.
Speaker 4 (25:39):
Yeah, but.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
That's the I mean, that's it's a great thing because
it shows us the disparity. It shows us the communications centers,
and it also shows us in a pretty efficient way,
it shows us population centers, so and and you know,
depending on what you're purposes are it also it also
(26:02):
shows you targets right just so and right now. It's nuts.
I'm glad you mentioned the secrecy. This is inherently conspiratorial stuff, folks.
We looked into the work of a lot of analytics firms,
and one that is the most prominent, gets quoted the
most often in trade organizations and in popular publications as well,
(26:27):
is an analyst firm called TeleGeography, and they're they're doing
some pretty best in class work for the public. As
a twenty twenty three they said that this year they
know of five hundred and fifty two existing or planned
subse cables, with more doubtlessly on the way, and they're
(26:48):
focusing on subse cables. They have other work that touches
other forms of communication. But one important note we should
make is those land cables, which still you know very
much in existence, they can be a lot harder to trace,
especially if you get into the interior of a country
with secrets like the US, Russia or China. So it's
(27:13):
actually it's actually a little bit easier to find the
oceanic cables. And we mentioned a little bit. Do we
want to talk a little bit more about their their cutaway,
like how they how they look on the inside.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Oh yeah, I found a really great image of this too, Ben,
I'm gonna find it here. I found one on vox
dot com. This is an article that you can find
right now titled a map of all the underwater cables
that connect the Internet, and they've got a cutaway here.
Speaker 4 (27:44):
Oh they pulled it from Wikipedia.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
The Wikipedia cutaway. Okay, look, Wikipedia is not a solid source,
let's be honest. But the cutaway from Wikipedia in this
case is legit. Like the diagram is, you've got a
bunch of coating, so you've got a polyethylene insulator, copper sheathing.
Inside of that, you've got steel wires for rigidity and
(28:08):
frankly for armor, and then you've got inside of all
that little matroshkadal you've got the optical fibers in a
silicon gel's. It's very weird because when I'm describing it, it
makes me think of layered pastries. But one thing the
cutaways may not show is, you know, like you were
(28:30):
talking about the fact that they may be buried a
little bit, and the fact that they're coated with tar
pretty often.
Speaker 4 (28:37):
Well, yeah, and we found it.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
In a couple of different sources that the cabling size
differs because some of them describe them as a garden hose,
so you imagine the I don't know the diameter of
a garden hose or the diameter again of a soda can,
standard sized, wide mouthed soda can, and I guess there
are just different sizes because but we didn't even talk
(29:00):
about this yet. Right now on this planet, there are
only four companies that are the major manufacturers, the manufacturers
and layers of this type of cable.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
And they're not the people who own the cable necessarily,
they're not the people who run the information. They're the
creators and installers.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yes, yes, and let's just go through the really quickly.
You can look all of these up. In the United States,
there's a thing called SubCom. You can check out their website.
It was on it earlier. It's interesting, it's fascinating. There
in Japan there's the NEC Corporation. In France there's al
Kattel Submarine Networks. And in China there's a company called
(29:45):
HMN Tech. And these are pretty much these are the
big players at.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Least, and some of them are older than others, but
everybody does business with them because you know, they have
it's a supply and demand, you know, I mean, there
are only so many games in town, and these things,
these four companies and these cables, they're still using some
(30:15):
old tech, some old tactics, some old processes. They lay
the ships that lay this cable essentially do it the
same way people lay telegraph cable back in the mid
eighteen hundreds. And some cable makers, like SubCom. Interesting fact
about them, they actually evolved from an old rope manufacturing
(30:37):
company that made rope and just happened to have a
factory next to a deep water port. So that's history.
Hinges on such small things. And like you said, these
cables are not all created equal. This summer faster than others,
better at transmitting more information more consistently. They're taking lessons
(30:58):
learned from previous function issues. And there's a great article
on cnet by guy a journalist named Stephen Shankland, and
he points out that the fastest transatlantic cable out there
right now is built is funded by Microsoft Meta, the
tech giants. This thing alone can carry four hundred tera
(31:21):
bits of data per second, and Shanklin points out that
for comparison, not to make everybody feel bad about your
own gaming rig, four hundred terabytes of data per second
is four hundred thousand times faster than your home broadband,
even if you have the highest end service available to
the public.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
Well That's good because I'm only assuming that there are
four hundred thousand people using the Internet every second they
would connect that cable. There's probably millions of people at
any given second using that cable, and I guess they
only need a certain amount, you know, a percentage of
that huge capacity every second. But good golly, I don't know.
(32:08):
We need to get that thing even bigger. We need
bigger cables.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Man, Let's turn the ocean into one big cable. What
could go wrong? Yeah, so it's let's go back to
TeleGeography because I was I was impressed with there's stuff.
There's one quote from an analyst there, Alan Maldon, who
gets quoted in multiple conversations about this, and he does
a good job of emphasizing me. He says, the whole
(32:33):
network of undersea cables is the lifeblood of the economy.
It's how we're sending emails and phone calls and YouTube
videos and financial transactions. And that last one, I don't know.
He's just outlining the public stuff. He's not talking about
other factors that may come into play. I think you're
naily to Matt the idea of sharing a ride. Basically,
(32:57):
there's this big global subway and everything that you send
or receive. Hops on the train with strangers.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
Oh, some of those strangers on that train, I don't know,
might make you nervous. Everybody's everybody's fine on the train.
If you're somebody might make you nervous, That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Right right, right, So, once upon a time, this was
primarily the domain of like state powers working with telecom
industry players. Right mo Bell lays a new wire or
new cable, et cetera, et cetera. But of course we've
already mentioned them. The new kids on the block are
(33:41):
are the tech bros, the tech empires, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon,
those four primarily, but many others. They've got money to
play and they won in the game there. What was
that term? There's a term we learned from hyperscalers. They're
called in the industry because of all the money that
they have put into play here.
Speaker 4 (34:01):
Oh yeah, oh for sure, let's talk about it.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
These guys, these hyperscalers, the Metas and Amazons and the
Googles and the Microsoft, they're responsible for two thirds of
all of that cable traffic.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
Oh you know what, it's making me think of?
Speaker 2 (34:18):
What's that do you remember.
Speaker 4 (34:21):
Oh, I'm gonna blank on it.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
I think it was Ted Stevens or some other senator
a long time ago. They made this comment publicly about
a series of tubes and the tubes are getting clogged
and all this other stuff. It was something to do
with that neutrality.
Speaker 4 (34:38):
God, that's been a while, but you're right.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
It was Ted Stevens.
Speaker 4 (34:42):
It was Ted Stevens, bing bing bing.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
I get a bingo thing for me. Sorry, my brain
doesn't generally work like this. But he got ridiculed for
calling the Internet a series of tubes or a tubes
they could get clogged, right, But really, if you visual
this way, at least the international interconnectivity that becomes the Internet,
(35:04):
that is the Internet.
Speaker 4 (35:06):
Maybe he wasn't that far off.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
He really wasn't. You know. These are when you go
down to the nitty gritty, we're talking about physical capability, right, Yeah,
even in the so called cloud. Guess what that rides
the subway too, you know what I mean?
Speaker 4 (35:25):
It's tube traffic.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Yes, it very much is. And the like you said,
are our big dogs on the tech side. Are two
thirds of that traffic now easy and they are increasing.
Analysts say they're surging and their share of the traffic
each and every calendar year. This means essentially more people
and more businesses are doing more stuff that needs a
(35:50):
ride on the on the information subway. So just like
when a city grows and you get a lot of
people moving in and there are more and more cars
on the highway, you have to invest in maintaining and
repairing the existing roads or expanding them. Yeah, you also
have to expand them, and then you also have to
build entirely new roads. And if you don't, then your
(36:12):
city's going to be in a lot of trouble very soon.
For anybody who's played sim City, all right whatever.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
Or Atlanta traffic or.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Atlanta traffic's not a game. But I do feel like
I'm playing it now because we're driving back into our office.
Oh my gosh, So congratulations to everybody in Atlanta traffic
who is driving like they've already made their peace with
God or whatever. I forgot about it.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Man, when there is a vehicle in front of the
vehicle in front of you, riding on that person's tail
doesn't do anything.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
It's just not a And I, uh, yeah, I've already
been racking up more Atlanta war stories. I did. I
did find, you know, used to struggle with road rage map,
but I did find a new tactic that I think
is helpful and instructive to everybody involved. Since we're an
(37:09):
audio show, this might not make sense, but if you
were in a traffic heavy area and you have to
drive around people who are still kind of like learning
about themselves in their car and all around them.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
And they know laws about keeping to the right if
you're going slow, sure.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
And if they're out of blinker fluid or whatever, the
best way, in my opinion, the best thing I've found
is that yelling and people doesn't work. You know, Flipping
the bird is just sort of juvenile. What I like
to do is point at the person, laugh and then
give them a thumbs down. And that is so much better,
(37:44):
and it really does it really does work. I think
it's humorous and appropriate.
Speaker 4 (37:53):
Do the gladiator thing.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
You point at them and then give them a sideways
finger and then it kind of tilts one way or
the other and then goes down.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Hey, and keep it a positive. Sometimes I give people
a thumbs up too, but you have to be careful
to make sure that's not sarcastic anyway. That's different we
got a car episode coming up. It's a doozy, but
right now, that car and traffic analogy I think is
pretty apt because it is a crowded city, it is
growing right by any metric, and the trend will accelerate.
(38:26):
We've got a couple returning guests in tonight's episode. One
would be the shady consultancy McKenzie. They are in addition
to being shady, they're pretty accurate with a lot of
their stuff when it serves their purpose to be so.
And they said that undersea cable links are going to
(38:48):
grow at an economy of scale. Already reached that part,
so the Internet hopefully will get faster for everyone, prices
will hopefully get lower. We'll see about that. And then
they said this will all lead to like a four
percent boost in global employment a seven percent boost in
economic activity. It sounds like a win win if everybody
(39:12):
can behave sure.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
I mean, everybody's gonna make so much money. Wait four companies,
and then I guess the telecommunications companies after that will
make a lot of money. At that same outfit you found,
ben TeleGeography projects that ten billion dollars is going to
be spent on new subse cables from this year twenty
twenty three for the next two years twenty twenty five,
(39:37):
and that's global ten billion dollars is going to be
spent on laying new stuff and also spent on repairing,
you know, issues that happened to the cables and maintaining
those systems and that those that's mostly going to be
handled by those four big companies.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Yeah, exactly, because again they're the only ones in town.
And it's kind of like Semiconductor Foundries billion manufacturing base.
There's a pretty tall milkshake. It's tough order this time.
Speaker 4 (40:07):
We didn't even talk about ben.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
You can't physically get a human down there to work
on the cables. Still, I send a repair person.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Not yet you.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
I mean seriously, when you lay the stuff, it's a
trawler that you have to drop down that doesn't have
any biological material on it. It's just a machine and
it lays the cable. Then when one breaks or you're
laying a new one, you do the same thing. Because
humans don't exist at those depths.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
None have been proven to exist for very long at all.
So this sounds great for business. Again, when when if
possible and the monopoly of companies or the small oligarchy
of companies that are able to do this or making
money hand over a fist right and they're doing their
(40:54):
best work. But around the world, despite all this good stuff,
cables aren't increased concern for pretty much everybody who thinks
about them for more than a few minutes. They are fragile,
they're incredibly important. That means if you want to attack someone,
these cables are a fantastic target. You can kind of
see where we're going with this. Welcome to a new
(41:17):
theater of the continuing war. A lot of journalists have
pointed out the attack or the sabotage of the nord
Stream one and two gas pipelines, and look, put morals
and ethics and your favorite teams aside, just look at
the logistics. That's a difficult operation. It's easy for us
(41:42):
to sit somewhere and read about it and say, well,
you know, just go to a part where nobody's hanging
out and blow it up. But there's a lot going
into that. Because people have their eyes on those pipelines.
It's way easier. Even with remote parts of the seabed,
it's way easier to just cut the garden nose.
Speaker 3 (42:04):
Yeah, it's hard to see through you know, miles of water. Sure,
you know whatever, it's hard to see that stuff. And
you know, and that is weird to think about, ben
because there is a ton of surveillance under the water
when it comes to like hubs where.
Speaker 4 (42:24):
These cables are laid.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
But they are huge swaths of them that are just
cable under like barely underneath the surface, and it's just
there and nobody's watching.
Speaker 4 (42:37):
You know.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Again, we're talking hundreds of feet thousands of feet of
cable that are exposed that if you knew where to
go and just dropped something a little heavy and sharp
under the ocean floor, not even explosive, no, literally sharp.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
And former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev spoot some people when
he said, yeah, these subc cables their fair game in
a conflict.
Speaker 4 (43:08):
Why irrational international waters?
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Yeah, he seemed kind of irritated. He was like, why
wouldn't what come on? Man? Do you even war? And
if you then you start looking at this is something
that's kind of the heart of the show here. Want
to look at the choke points, want to look at
the conspiracies that will naturally blossom in this environment. Take Taiwan,
(43:31):
the archipelago of Taiwan. It has twenty seven subse cable
connections right now. If and this is just if you
were someone who had an opinion about the future of
Taiwan and you wanted to impose your will or your
(43:52):
opinion about the future, then you want to you would
start with the cables. That's one of the one of
the things you would do if your operation goes hot.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
And one thing to keep in mind, we're talking about
severing these cables. These companies can repair a broken cable,
let's say, or a missing piece of cable in hours.
It's potentially possible to repair something within hours, but it's
also more likely that it's going to take a lot
longer than that, right, And if one of these cables
(44:25):
is attacked, it would probably be strategically timed to where
communications are cut off to you know, a specific place
like a Taiwan, let's say, and then and then another
type of attack would occur. So it's almost like it's
almost like turning the lights off, right if you're just
putting the whole thing on a house and it's a
(44:47):
home intruder and they cut the lights and we're in
a scary movie.
Speaker 4 (44:50):
That's the first thing they do.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Yeah, we'll get into some systems theory here too, but
think of like a physical DDoS attack. That's really that's
what you can do. Overload the system due to the
relatively high number due to a couple of calculations, which
we're going to allude to, but for the sake of everybody,
we're probably not going to do the actual calculation slash
(45:14):
math on air. But you can play along at home
and tell us what you think. Of course, so even
another returning guest, shady one at that in q TEL,
is worried about the possibility of cables becoming a theater
in the next war.
Speaker 3 (45:32):
You remember in q tel, right, those are the guys
that put money into stuff that the CIA and the
FBI and other intelligence agencies in the US want them
to put money into. What But they're nonprofit, right, But
they are CIA backed, but they do good stuff. But
also the NSA is involved.
Speaker 4 (45:52):
It's weird.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
Yeah, every government agency you have ever had a problem
with outside of the IRS is involved within qtel.
Speaker 3 (46:03):
Do some searches are in q tel and Facebook.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Check out our episode before the cables go So anyway,
do check it out. The current president of in q Tel,
there's a guy named Steve Bauscher, and he said, quote,
there's a lot of talk these days about how space
is the next contested domain, but I think undersea is
going to be very much a contested domain. Those are
(46:31):
going to be targets in any sort of get this
met kinetic conflict, which is just like, look, in qtel
is a heavy player. They do a lot of stuff.
Kinetic conflict is kind of to me a non helpful euphemism.
We all know what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
See what you really got to bring inertia into this,
you know, like, is it at rest or does it
want to stay there? Or is it already moving?
Speaker 4 (46:59):
What kind of can energy was applied to this war?
Speaker 2 (47:03):
Yeah, exactly. And I guess before we go too far
down the undersea rabbit hole, we do have to make
a note. The reason, Matthew, you and I are talking
so much about the fragility of these cables is that
there does not have to be a conspiracy, nor sabotage,
nor an active war or terrorism for these things to
get screwed up. To the point of you mentioned about
(47:25):
just dropping something heavy and sharp, Yeah, that happens all
the time because storms hit the ocean and ships are
all over the ocean and they drop their anchor and
storm blows them and the anchor just pulls the cable out.
Speaker 3 (47:40):
God, dang it, we got another cable.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
What No, we're here for the tuna. Anyway. Eighty five
percent of cuts and damage the cable currently comes from
fishing equipment and anchors. And then there are natural disasters
that occur like you mentioned Pacific islands often which only
have one connecting cable. Tonga is a great example. Volcanic
eruption screws up the cable. They lost communication for weeks.
(48:07):
It was a double plus on good situation. So even
in times of piece, just like you said with the
road analogy, you have to constantly maintain this stuff, improve it,
check on it. It's all very expensive, and that's just
to keep it running, not to make it better at all.
That's just to keep this kind of jury rig contraption. Going.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
Yeah, I think about ac companies or car manufacturers or no, no,
not car manufacturers, car dealerships. We just talked about this, Ben.
A car dealership makes a lot of money selling cars,
but not the bulk of their money. Most of the
money at a major car dealership is made through maintenance,
(48:53):
through the maintenance of vehicles it sells, and signing somebody
into a contract to only get their car worked on
in that place where they bought their car. That's the
trick like, and it's kind of the same with these
companies on cable, right, they're going to make most of
their money fixing the stuff that they've already built.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
Yeah, I hate that. We both know that from experience, now,
you know what I mean. What a bummer. Anyway, So warranties,
that's another good episode. So it's there's another problem here.
This stuff is an excellent target for war or excuse me,
cough cough, kinetic conflicts cough cough, because just like spy satellites,
(49:35):
it's incredibly difficult, if not operationally impossible, to keep the
location of these things secret if powerful forces really want
to know. Now, you as the public, if you're listening
and you're a civilian, you can see all kinds of
maps like SubCom and they'll usually have some caveat like
location is approximate or something. The location is not approximate.
(49:58):
For a lot of the big players they know, right,
and some state governments that might be beefed up with
each other. Are also in a position where they can
force the tech bros to tell them everything legally right,
and geography decides everything on this planet. Subsea cable routes
(50:19):
are no exception. That's where we got to talk about
something that I think fascinates both of us. Batt the
cart to take the traffic analogy. One of the biggest
traffic jams is in Egypt.
Speaker 4 (50:31):
Yeah, I never would have expected this.
Speaker 3 (50:35):
Check out the article the most Vulnerable Place on the Internet.
It's written by Matt Burgess for Wired and November two.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
Right, yeah, pretty up to speed even now.
Speaker 3 (50:49):
Oh yeah, there are six cables that Matt Burgess points
out that are concentrated through the Red Sea and they
actually go over the land in Egypt. If you go
to that same way website we told you about before
the map, you can actually see where they go over
land in Egypt. And that's what we call a choke point.
Speaker 2 (51:10):
Why Ben, well, Matt, we call it a choke point
because if you wanted to, Okay, seventeen percent of all
the Internet traffic in the world goes along these cables.
It passes through Egypt, and this is due to geography
(51:31):
without some sci Fi level Terrafor me, there's no way
to get rid of this choke point.
Speaker 3 (51:36):
There's not, and you can again it is striking if
you pull out on that map, then you zoom in
towards Egypt, kind of the northeast side of Egypt. You
see where all of those cables it's like you're talking about,
it's like a cable tie is wrapped around them.
Speaker 4 (51:54):
It's nuts.
Speaker 3 (51:55):
And that's just before they go over land in Egypt
while heading to the northwest.
Speaker 2 (52:00):
Yes, exactly. And let's go back to wired. I love
the word citing this one. So Matt Burgess says, passing
through the Red Sea and across Egypt is the shortest
primarily underwater route between Asia and Europe. And you can
take some of these cables across land, but it's generally
(52:22):
going to be safer for them to be at the
bottom of the sea because it's tougher to disrupt them
or compromise them, which we'll talk about later.
Speaker 4 (52:30):
A man, do you talk about compromising these things?
Speaker 2 (52:32):
Yeah, it'll come up at the end, right. So every
other possible route in this area is a logistical pain
in the butt. If you look at the south pull
up that Matt Matt mentioned earlier. Then you'll see cables
can pass around Africa under sea, but they're much longer,
you know. It's like the old maritime days of sailing
around the cape. And if you go to the north,
(52:54):
you'll see there's only one cable that travels above Russia.
It's street name, the Polar Express. Love it, but it's
just not practical for what we need stuff to do.
And if you try to do alternative roots, which people
have been trying to do for years and years now,
then you run into the second problem economy or war. Syria, Iraq, Iran,
(53:16):
Afghanistan aka the Graveyard of Empires. That's not a place
where you want to run a cable.
Speaker 3 (53:23):
Yeah, I but the old conspira brain is doing something here, Ben.
Speaker 2 (53:27):
Oh what you got cooking?
Speaker 3 (53:29):
Where has the US been focusing their kinetic efforts in
those areas?
Speaker 1 (53:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (53:40):
Yeah, Oh gosh, they are resource rich, aren't they? And
of course the Strait of hor Moves is its own
little story to be told. That's a really good point, Matt.
Now you're in my head about it, okay. And so
they go through the red seat, right, we've got to
get back to those countries and the Grand aims in
a future episode. The Red Sea is not perfect by
(54:01):
any means for this sort of stuff, because the Red
Sea is big. It's a sea, but it's shallow, and
that means it's way easier to get down there and
get up to some grimlin shenanigans. As a matter of fact,
in twenty thirteen, the Egyptian Navy arrested three people who
were doing just that. They were like, Oh, these cables
(54:22):
aren't that far away. Let's get frigging kinetic.
Speaker 4 (54:26):
Let's see what happens. Sneep. It's way harder than a
little snip.
Speaker 3 (54:32):
But yeah, it's pretty crazy. If you look at that map,
you can see where there are vulnerabilities, minor choke points
that exist across the planet, places where if you had
bad intentions, you could do some serious damage to the
connectivity of large swaths of land.
Speaker 2 (54:51):
Very quickly as well. Yeah, so Egypt TWA and those
are just two examples of a trend that continues across
the globe. And yet the system itself does have redundancy.
Like obviously, the people who run companies as smart as
tech empires are not going to say, yeah, one cable,
(55:11):
that's fine, because they are so used to people losing
their minds when the Internet goes out, So not even
like a I kid you not not even like worried
about saboteurs or war. They're worried about their customer service
departments getting overwhelmed. So they have multiple cables or space
on multiple cables because they need that redundancy. If one
(55:34):
thing goes out, then they have another route hopefully and
they have a lot of redundancy. Or it's very smart.
That's how you want a system to be built. But
some countries like Tongas still just have the one connecting cable.
And if you're one of those four companies that you mentioned, Matt,
when something goes wrong, they have the ability to pinpoint
(55:54):
where the cut occurs so they can isolate it. But
they often have to get a government permit because these
are cables that go across nations, they have to get
a government permit to operate. So a repair can take
two weeks on average, but if anything else goes wrong
during that time, the repair window automatically extends. Like in
(56:15):
the wake of Fukushima, one repair took two months. Yeah,
and that means if we think in terms of system analysis,
to your earlier point. You if you are a bad
faith actor, if you are an attacker, you have some
advantages depending on your goal. Like the Taiwanese example we're
talking about, So they have twenty seven cables, and if
(56:37):
they wanted to cut off if the if China or
some other attacker just for the sake of argument, wanted
to cut off Taiwan and cripple them in advance of
a physical war, they would just need to overwhelm the
repair capabilities. For they cut the twenty seven cables at
once as close to as close to simultaneously as possible,
(57:00):
just like in Breaking Bad spoiler where Walter White has
all those people killed within two minutes at the prison.
Just do that.
Speaker 3 (57:08):
Well, what if you had what if the strategy was
to have a dedicated connection from a different angle that
didn't require those cables to connect to the interior systems.
Then you cut the exterior systems so communications can't go
out or come in from other parts of the world,
but you could still connect to the systems via the land. Right,
(57:32):
there's potential there to basically take everyone off guard by
breaking most communications but still being able to function within
systems at the same time while while they're disconnected. That's
really creepy because you're talking about like financial hits. You're
talking about stuff that could cripple systems without any kinetic maneuvers.
Speaker 2 (57:57):
Yes, asymmetric warfare one hundred percent. This is an excellent
example of it. I like your scenario too.
Speaker 3 (58:04):
I don't well that scenario at all.
Speaker 2 (58:07):
I think it's intellectually simulating. So there's all I guess
I have to say that too, right, so you know
what happens then, Really, even if you're not putting boots
on the ground, you're extending that repair window, right and
that and as we know, a lot can change within
a month or two, so you've gone now you've gone
(58:27):
from two weeks to maybe months on the outside. And
there's also the ability for industrial espionage terrorism in the
corporate front, very like Shadow Run terrorism. If do you
remember that game Shadow Run? Yeah? Shadow Runs amazing. Okay,
So it's it's a it's a little tricky if you're
(58:51):
one of those cats because of the redundancy of cable,
the difficulty of reaching them all at once. You want
to do a war of a thousand cuts. So the
cost benefit, which we're not going to do in depth
is this. Most breaks in the cables occur in shallow
water because that's where most of the boat traffic is
likely to hit them with an anchor. Those also get
(59:14):
repaired much more quickly, much more easily. So you would
want to eat the cost of getting out in the
deep deep water cutting cables at the most inaccessible places,
which requires some specific equipment, so you would probably want
to be careful about how you procure that. This raises
your effort, but it also massively increases the amount of
(59:35):
effort someone has to undertake to repair it. There are
only a few companies that can do this. It's again
an intellectually fascinating game, and it's probably best for us
not to do the math on air.
Speaker 3 (59:48):
Yeah, let's not do the math, because you could develop,
let's say, a brand new type of submarine that gets
introduced in the past couple of months than just andre same.
Maybe that submarine has some quiet technology that is literally
a heavy, sharp thing that you could drag across the
(01:00:08):
ocean floor. That's all you would need to do, especially
if that submarine was very quiet and difficult to.
Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
Detect, Especially if that submarine actually worked, which is up
for debate.
Speaker 4 (01:00:21):
Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2 (01:00:22):
I know, but but yes, you're making a beautiful point.
That's a problem. That's asymmetrical warfare, classic textbook. You know,
if you have an enemy who outperforms economically or in
terms of infrastructure, you don't have to waste untold billions
of dollars trying to catch up with them. You can
(01:00:43):
spend a lot less money just to break the thing
they made, which is we live in interesting times. And
like I said, you know, we knew we were not
going to get to everything here. We've only explored the
physical dangers. We do want to do that plot twist
you mentioned as well, Matt. We both alluded to. We
have not talked about puzzle palace level compromise of data
(01:01:05):
and the cables, which is happening. We have not talked
about interception or the insertion interposition of purposely misleading information.
Speaker 3 (01:01:15):
Yeah, these are fiber optic cables. You can split off
fiber optic cables and duplicate the data. The United States
figured out how to do that a while ago. Remember
what we talked about that one, and they went, let's
just look at all the data.
Speaker 4 (01:01:30):
Where can we plug in?
Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
Oh, look, we can just plug in to the literal
pipes and duplicate the pipes and see everything.
Speaker 4 (01:01:37):
I'm using the phrase pipes on purpose.
Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Okay, and we want to keep it a secret, So
let's make sure this skyscraper doesn't have any windows. That way,
no one can look in and it won't seem suspicious.
Speaker 4 (01:01:50):
Oh, the Long Lines building. Check it out.
Speaker 3 (01:01:52):
It's in Manhattan and it's really creepy. Can I really
quick shout out before we end here?
Speaker 4 (01:01:58):
Ben?
Speaker 3 (01:01:59):
Somebody named Johnny Harris, awesome reporter, journalist. He's got a
great YouTube channel. That's the way I interact with his content.
He made a video not long ago in August titled
Submarine Cables and the Rise of Mass Surveillance. If you
are interested in the surveillance side of this, we would
highly recommend checking that out.
Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
Yeah, and I want to highlight at the end of
your one. Maybe it's just a restatement here. It's short
term effective to cut these cables as an act of
kinetic conflict. Is long term effective and arguably more intelligent
(01:02:40):
to compromise the cables, because if you are playing the
cat and mouse of espionage, or if you're on the
road to a hot war, then you don't want people
to know that you have an ear to the ground
on them, so you would never tell people. Then you
compromise the cables all to say, I imagine a small
(01:03:02):
handful of manufacturers and installers. I imagine they get a
lot of interesting meetings, you know what I mean. And
you have to wonder what their social media is like. Anyway,
these are the genuine concerns. It turns out that human
beings haven't changed all that much since that unknown scribe
decided to jush up the hieroglyphs. So what happens next?
(01:03:26):
What do you think, folks? Is this critical infrastructure going
to be targeted the way that power plants are being
targeted in the US now, which just sort of faded
from the news but is definitely still happening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts. Find us online while the
cables still run Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, x naed, Twitter, and
(01:03:49):
if you don't care for that, you can always always
give us a phone call.
Speaker 3 (01:03:55):
Yes, our number is one eight three three std WYT.
You've got three minutes, give yourself a cool nickname and
let us know if we can use your message and
voice on the air. It's that simple. If you want
to send us a bunch of information. If you need
an undersea cable to get us stuff, why not instead
send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (01:04:39):
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