Latest / The Dutch Investors / #111 | A Journey to the Center of the Internet | Interview w/ Andrew Blum, Author of Tubes

Transcript

#111 | A Journey to the Center of the Internet | Interview w/ Andrew Blum, Author of Tubes · The Dutch Investors

• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's kind of one of the keys of understanding how the physical infrastructure of the internet works is that is that these are two separate realms, the kind of physical and the digital, but they absolutely need each other to operate.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: I could say they they very clearly knew exactly what the most important places on their map were.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: One of the first that I that I visited and still kind of a favorite is 60 Hudson Street.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was pretty shocking to me that there was a building that I'd walked by all the time that I didn't realize was one of the sort of most significant places on the planet where the networks of the internet physically connect to each other.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think the internet gave ordinary people more power, or do you think the internet actually gave more power to uh these large companies?
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a tough one.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I mean it depends.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's just definitely a sort of story of disruption of the kind of institutions of media, but to what at what cost?
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: The reason we lost the understanding is because of the success of Google and Facebook primarily.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um you could say Apple too, perhaps, but Google and Facebook primarily in taking up so much of the air.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: So much of you kind of have to sort of peek around those giants to see the other things underneath, to really remember that there is um that there is a lot, uh, a lot beneath the surface.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: We work online, we talk to friends, on the other side of the world, we watch videos, transfer money, and increasingly we have conversations with AI.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: And most of it happens almost instantly.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: But there's something I hadn't really thought about until recently because where is the internet actually?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that's when I stumbled upon this book.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: If I send a message from my home in the Netherlands to someone in New York, where does that message go?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: And who owns those connections?
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: We talk about the cloud as it is something that is floating somewhere above us.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: My guest today is Andrew Blum, the author of Tube's A Journey to the Center of the Internet.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: And Andrew actually went looking for the internet.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: And he visited the places where the internet where it doesn't exist.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Andrew, I hope this introduction does you some justice, but uh thanks for uh joining me.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think you have you have a US publication.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like not a first run, but it's not a control run, so uh you know you can't.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, not at all.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: More on it?
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's still pretty good.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: What edition did I open?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Still still well aged.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: Damn.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh when I opened the book, it actually uh usually the first ten pages already tell me whether I'm going to like the book or not.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and when I started opening the book and started reading, it it started with um a scroll, which which actually already caught my attention in the beginning.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's quite uh quite something.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: You your internet was I had some issues at home with the internet.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then somebody came over and turned out a squirrel had been chewing on the cable.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: There were I mean, most people would just cables between me and everyone else exchanging messages with.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And this was 2000.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a different kind of messages, different sort of different, different level of pervasiveness.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we weren't online all the time in the same way.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like if there were all those cables were there, how how could I find them?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's it there had to be a continuous path.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I was told repeatedly that because the internet breaks data data up into packets, that the you could never find the path.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: And if it were many paths, that meant there was no path at all.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but of course, that that can't actually physically be true.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: There has to be a path.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so I went, I went looking for that path.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: I went looking for the people who could explain to me how it fits together.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then I decided to make my own judgments about what the important parts were, you know, what the sort of meaningful parts were, you know, really with the belief that like, you know, places, you know, we we places our places on the map, but places are also how we think about them and how we imagine them and how we talk about their importance and how we protect them or how we how we value them or how we buy them or sell them.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the places are about all of those things.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: So this uh this is a very important thing.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: It was really where does that go?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, like, the internet service provider company.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know much about them.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't really want to journalists.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um what next?
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it was became self-evident that if my cable connected to wherever whatever their kind of you know neighborhood or or or kind of citywide hub was, then that citywide hub had to connect to everyone else.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to it's hard to kind of take myself back to kind of not that sort of the ignorance of that.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: But it really was this conviction that like, you know, the internet can't, we didn't even use the word cloud then.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like the internet just can't be this sort of ethereal thing.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it can't just be the telephone system.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: There has to be something more to it.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: There has to be some place where the networks of the internet, I knew I'd always known that the internet is a network of networks.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we call it the internet.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like that was a I'd known that since, you know, since the 90s when I first got online.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: But then it's like, well, okay, so where are those places?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like who can tell me where these places are where one network of the internet connects to another network of the internet?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: And if those places existed, could I go visit them?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Could who who who had the keys?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Who owned them?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Who could let me in?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Who could show me around?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's funny, you know, since in more recently we think of the internet.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Could you uh in terms of the hyperscaler?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Explain the concept a little more because I the network of network.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: I actually didn't know that before that these books actually.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: So so much is travel is done on Meta, so much is done on Google, um, you know, so it's it's hard to kind of see what what's what's beneath.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: But really, um, you know, the initial notion was that you had um you had logic networks.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: So you had the connection, universities primarily connecting with other universities in the in the in the very early days.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so you would have a uh sort of a telecom connection, uh a circuit as it was called.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so a research university in in Los Angeles, UCLA, for example, would connect to a research university in in Silicon Valley, Stanford.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that becomes one of the first circuits, and that's a single network where they are they are sort of uh you know defining a logic network.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: They're they're sort of you know have both the a physical telephone circuit, but then also a protocol for how to communicate over it.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's this question of, okay, well, if we have our circuits and we connect to a third person, but then there's two other people or three other people who also have their circuit, can we then all connect together?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Can we interconnect?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that sort of basic idea that you can have a uh, you know, a sort of a network overlaid upon another network that's connecting to each other becomes the foundation of the internet.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the kind of visualization for that that I like is a sort of pile of fishing nets.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's like I have my phishing net and it's got all the sort of nodes where then where the the rope, the cables of the net connect to each other, where then you throw your phishing net on top, and then we, they're they're kind of resting on top of each other, and then they in they interconnect in different places.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then that once you have the kind of protocol, not just the kind of the logical protocol, not just the software, but also the kind of social construct, the kind of the agreement for how these networks will connect to each other and who's gonna pay whom for that connection, then you can begin to have a uh the the growth that begins kind of in the 80s and really takes off in the in the 90s.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, of course, with the dot-com boom in, you know, around around 2000, 2001, things really got going, and Amsterdam's role in that was so crucial.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and then a lot has happened since, certainly.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, today kids grow up with uh TikTok, YouTube, uh Google.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I kinda I was kind of growing up in in an in an in a time where the internet was already there, 1998.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it it wasn't as important and then as big as it is now, obviously, but I kind of grew up with the internet growing.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: But these kids today, I feel like today's just the website.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: The kind of the blame for the kind of explanation.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: With the hyperspection of the internet.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: The reason we lost the understanding is because of the success of Google and Facebook primarily.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um you could say Apple too, perhaps, um, but Google and Facebook primarily in taking up so much of the air.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, and in really kind of, you know, uh, you know, um sort of sort of can you know, being in front of our eyeballs for so much of the time that we spend online.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly there's an internet still that is not Google and and Meta, but so much of you kind of have to sort of peek around those giants to see the other things underneath, to really remember that there is um that there is a lot, uh, a lot beneath the surface there.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um that of course now is being sort of scrambled by our sort of emerging understanding of how the the AI companies now are kind of redefining those that that that that dynamic.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a good point.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well the the first thing that maybe I had to figure out where to go to the beginning, who was gonna let me in.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Trying to find like the center of the internet was a group called Nano, the North American Network Operator.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: You visited that.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, organization of geeks who were the network operators, the that sort of the technicians who you know connected the the networks of the internet to each other.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time, that group was, you know, they met quarterly because it was they kind of always had to be together and be in touch with each other.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time, the group was just the meetings were a few hundred people, even less.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um and what they they they they show up at that meeting, each representing a network.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: So a network could be a telecom company, a network could be Google, you know, a network could be uh a kind of uh somewhere in between, about as they call it, uh say a transit provider, a company that sort of um, you know, uh sells the traffic on the internet's pipes.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh once I sort of got to their conference and started talking to this group of people, I could say they they very clearly knew exactly what the most important places on their map were.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh one of the first that I that I visited um and and still kind of a favorite is 60 Hudson Street, which is uh uh an office building, an old telecom building in Lower Manhattan, um, you know, about uh, I don't know, about about a about a mile and three quarters from where I'm sitting right now, um that um that was originally a place where telegraph lines connected when it was built in 1929, and then became a place where telephone lines were connected.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then when the current generation of fiber optic cables across the ocean, across the Atlantic, were laid to the end of the in the 90s and the early 2000s, it was kind of self-evident that of course they would go to the place where all the networks already connected, and that was 60 Hudson Street.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so from there, once you kind of had those important international connections, then everything kind of grows up from there.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I it was pretty shocking to me that there was a building that I'd walked by all the time that I didn't realize was one of the sort of most significant places on the planet where the networks of the internet physically connect to each other.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: And when I say physically connect to each other, I mean with like a yellow cable.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's a cage of equipment for that belongs to one network, and there's a yellow cable that goes up into the ceiling and goes down into the cage of equipment of another network.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that that connection is absolutely physical and it happens, it happens in multiple places for redundancy, but it certainly happens in in that place at 60 Hudson, um, which is kind of has a kind of, you know, it has a sort of a you know, Art Deco vibe.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's not, it's not, it was high-tech, it was high-tech 100 years ago, but um, but is uh but certainly has a different feel today.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh I mean a museum that's a busy and uh very valuable place, um, you know, certainly.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: So more of a museum today.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I would love to understand like the basics a little better, because we all use the internet today, but many of us still struggle to like fully understand it or explain it.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: You're sitting here in the Netherlands?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: You're sitting in the United States.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it's uh I'll add another piece of complexity to it, but it's uh almost instantly.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean the first thing to recognize is that what happens connecting to an internet.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Can you walk us through that journey from a company that services our home or office and can and and whose job it is to connect us to the broader internet?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: So where I'm sitting right now, I'm I'm connected to the internet as a spectrum customer, you know, one of the big, you know, pr very big media companies in the US.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um Yep.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, yep.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, again, big, you know, mate, major Dutch telecom, you know, 125 years old, probably, whatever it is.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, um and um so that's the first step.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: But then you have to think, okay, so we have our connection.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're responsible for the truck, they're responsible for the wires outside of the house, they're responsible for the router on my, you know, the cable modem and the router on my desk.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then from there, they have to connect to everyone else.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so I can I can be pretty confident that that that um that spectrum is connecting to one of the international um networks uh at 60 Hudson Street.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: That would be a pretty good guess.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, there there might be others.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And because we're um we're both on pretty big networks, it might be as simple as that.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: It might be actually that KPN has a um has a has a piece of equipment in Manhattan and Spectrum and KPM connect directly or peer, they connect as as peers to each other.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so it really could be as simple as that if we were, if we traced our our our path and then there was just from Spectrum to KPM, that one connects the other.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um because KPM or Spectrum uh goes through the trouble of of buying bandwidth across the ocean um because it's more cost efficient and and and uh and more you know um more better protect better you know more redundant to um to do that themselves rather than than buy traffic on a third party in some form or another.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: But the complexity of to add to that, of course, is that we're not just talking to each other, but we're uh using the you know Riverside as a platform to record the podcast.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's a kind of open question of, you know, where, you know, what is Riverside's infrastructure in this?
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Are we both connecting to Riverside's data center?
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: And Riverside being a company that's you know very focused on latency, you know, it's really important for their, for their their product that we, there's no delay in our call, um, you know, that all that it's a high bandwidth connection that we can sort of both see.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: They are probably making an effort to put their their servers as close as possible to these network hubs.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe that means that they're in Ashburn, Virginia, which is a kind of major center of the internet, and then a huge data center hub.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um maybe that means their their server is in in Newark, New Jersey, you know, as close as possible, you know, you know, 10 milliseconds away from 60 Hudson.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um maybe because you're uh you're a European customer riverside, maybe they're it's being hosted in uh in Amsterdam, in a data center in Amsterdam.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I mean we could probably figure that, we could probably find the answers to that question.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it is important to recognize that at, excuse me, as the complexity has grown of the tools that we're using, it's no longer just like connecting a phone call, but but we're kind of layering in all these other things that are so carefully optimized so that they so that we see, you know, so that the late the there's no latency in our in our conversation, that it's kind of, you know, it's in some ways almost better than it would have been with a phone call, you know, 30 years ago, you know, with a, you know, with a where where we had a you know an audible delay of almost a second um you know across the ocean.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: Let's say I'm uh I'm 12 years old.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I'm not, but uh uh let's say I'm 12 years old and you're trying okay, so we know that there's this space between us, there's these data centers, there's these hubs that connect these things together.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's a cable.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: So the way that the internet people talk about layers reach your layers.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: What are those in the control layers?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Or just uh layer zero is dirt, and layer one is what happens in those in those cables.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: And layer two is the kind of encoding, the sort of highest level encoding of the flashes of light through a fiber optic cable.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you get to layer three, you get to more what we think of as software.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you get to think of the kind of different programming languages and different different uh encoding mechanisms that do that.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't know much about that stuff.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's sort of uh that's like a like my focus is always on layer zero, the dirt, where things actually is, and layer one, the kind of physicality of it.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: And occasionally you kind of have to, when you talk about these sort of you know, pile of phishing nets of networks, then you're talking about layer two and sometimes about layer three.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and you know, when you talk about you know Google or Meta, you're talking about layer two or layer three, but then you're also talking about layer one, because now they actually own physical cables across the ocean and certainly they own data centers.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: So to kind of answer your question, it's sort of like I can tell you, I can talk to you about the physical pieces of it, the layer zero, layer layer one, and a little bit of layer two.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: But when we get up to the kind of um, you know, how is the how does this encoding work?
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what's how do we, you know, what is the kind of theory of information that that sort of compresses, you know, the the output from our cameras and from our microphones and then and then transmits it across that.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's more like a layer three or you know, you know, Riverside would be like a layer four, you know, that an application conversation.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um so it's kind of interesting.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a the geography and the physicality of it is kind of you know disintermediated from the from the sort of logic of it, from the software of it.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's kind of one of the keys of understanding how the physical infrastructure of the internet works is that is that these are two separate realms, the kind of physical and the digital, um, but they absolutely need each other to operate.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, absolutely.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: So am I correct in saying that uh and not only that, but as speeds increase.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that is it's converting the cop the cut the signals traveling over the copper wire that the modem on my desk is connected into into pulses of light.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: And once it's converted to it's probably not converted back again until it hits your desk even.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um you might even you probably even have a fiber connection at home.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: So so it's kind of light all the way through.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there are moments where it's tran it's it's goes back into a circuit board and is converted from light to elect uh to electrons and then back to light.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but for a surprisingly long stretch of that journey, um, it is pulses of light.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that is the most efficient way to encode the information by far.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it was worth saying there too, it's like the it's not just light, it's many many um you know, it's it's uh it's it's many frequencies um or colors of light and and there's so much space there um that you you know that you it's it's kind of you know astonishing how much information can be can be can be uh can be uh can be encoded there.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know if it's just me, it must also be you, otherwise you wouldn't have done all this research.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: But sometimes it just amazes me what we come up with as a human species.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's just if you think about it, like I don't know if people think too much about this, but I really do.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it's pretty it's pretty it's pretty incredible.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: We were like primates, we made fire, and now we could make like material and turn it into the internet and into visuals and sounds just to video.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: Amazes me.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, that a phone call was like a specific kind of magic.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was like you could be, I remember, you know, being like a college student in Europe and you know, calling home and like you know, if you if you put in your physical phone card, it would connect you with, you know, the the money would tick down.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: But like, you know, you could your family would be in the other on the other end of the line.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: And anywhere you were, um, it and that was by the time I was around, that was pretty cheap.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but but it was still sort of pre-cell phone.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then by the time cell phones come in, then you then it's like you any you can be anywhere and anyone else can be anywhere, and then you have that connection, you know, between you.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly, you know, it's not about making a sort of a technological connection between two places, but a technological connection between two people.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, that was the kind of moment when when we started when we began to forget about the physicality of it.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you've got a telephone on the wall, you know, that's that's plugged in, then you're you're pretty tuned into the way that um that there is a physical connection between you.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: But when it becomes Wi-Fi and it becomes a kind of uh a sort of communication portal that you bring with you, you know, it never mattered, your email never mattered, cared where you were, you know, you always just kind of got it, you you it found you wherever you were.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, that's kind of a hard thing to remember that that was like a thing, but that was sort of surprising.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: And as soon as you get that, then you begin to lose this connection with the physical connection, um, you know, the physicality of the kind of space in between.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that was really a lot of what I was after was trying to understand how um, you know, sort of bring that physicality back to kind of remember that like, you know, of course, we're we're sitting in a specific place on Earth, you know, you know, New York and and and then and I don't know if you if you're in Amsterdam proper or not, but like are pretty special, you know, unusual places, you know, specific places.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's it's tough to, you know, it's you know we spend a lot of time forgetting that that matters, um, but because of the sophistication of these digital tools, but it it certainly it certainly still is there.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, Amsterdam was probably one of the places that was most successful at making itself in the internet hub.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I started emailing you.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you told me that Amsterdam has a special place in your heart, New York is special too.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: New Amsterdam.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um but it you know, New York was a is a capital of finance, you know, it was kind of self-evident that the the networks would find New York, but Amsterdam um was more deliberate in sort of in sort of building and and sort of seeding the infrastructure so that the that the infrastructure so that so that the networks found it.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it wasn't just like, oh, you know, that we have to build the networks to the to Wall Street.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: In Amsterdam, it was really a deliberate policy of laying as much fiber in the ground as possible, um, allowing all the different anyone who wanted to, whenever there was a trench in the ground, anyone who wanted to could then lay fiber in that trench as well.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so you, by allowing that to happen, first of all, you don't have to dig up the street as often, but second of all, you end up with a ton more fiber to work with.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: And while in the beginning, and this is kind of in the late, late 90s, early 2000s, that seemed like overkill.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty quickly, all that fiber was the enabling infrastructure for Amsterdam to become a major point of interconnection for the networks of the internet.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: And add on top of that, the kind of Dutch tradition of being a meeting place or a marketplace and of being, you know, uh accepting of everyone, uh especially for for trade, for commerce.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so you end up with um the uh Amsterdam Internet Exchange, AMSIX, being a kind of really special, really unusual um, you know, hub for the networks of the internet to connect with each other.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that wasn't, that wasn't, that didn't kind of happen by accident.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like that happened very deliberately by a pretty small group of people pursuing a set of policies and allowing infrastructure to be built that were, you know, very much in keeping with the long Dutch tradition of being a meeting place and a harbor, you know, not for ships, you know, not for the infrastructure of ships, but for the infrastructure of bits.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just I loved that, you know, that I mean, it's as a New Yorker, there's a lot of close associations, but I loved um in my exploration of the internet, I loved the way in which the Amsterdam and the Dutch more broadly were were sort of open to the op open to the openness of the internet.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and not only that, but organized and deliberate enough to build the infrastructure that would actually allow the kind of uh business, you know, business construct of the of the internet to to happen um in the Netherlands.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: Certainly.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, pretty fascinating.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh apparently it's somewhat in our uh in our DNA, and uh I I I I I I would have never thought of I didn't even know this was a a thing in Amsterdam until I mean I read it in your own.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: I did a little uh more research.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: And this is more than 15 years.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well you'll research you.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: Can you give me like a summary of some of the places there are sort of fewer capitals of the places you've been to around the world?
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I suppose there's still a hierarchy of the most important places, um, but so many places have gotten so built up that I think that's it's it's harder to sort of keep track of that.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um at the time though, um the top of the list by far was was um Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um those were you know, those were those were the those are the hubs.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, they're they are the you know, financial hubs, they're the telecommunications hubs, and they became the internet hubs.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then the US, a little bit more complicated, um, but it was New York, Northern Virginia, um for reasons we can talk about, uh, LA and Silicon Valley primarily, um, a little bit of Miami, Dallas, Chicago, um, but those were those those are the most important places.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other kind of key, key kind of list of key type of places that I that I visited were the ones that that serve the undersea cables across the ocean.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: And there you're talking sometimes about the same places, about big port cities, um, but there's also a kind of um, you know, uh more specific geography that the cables, you know, need that's separate from the ports.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that uh uh that in one case was the coast of Nova Scotia, um, you know, where kind of closest, you know, closest point to Europe, um, from one of the closest sort of populated or sort of accessible places in the North America to Europe, um, or outside of Lisbon in Portugal, you know, which has always been a kind of port city for Africa and and and and and um and and the south.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the same was true for the undersea cables, where Lisbon became the the um the connection point to a new cable down the west coast of Africa.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't make it to I didn't make it to Asia.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't make it to Asia.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: The they were too too too complicated to bring that in as well.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I talk about the Asian countries a little bit.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um but you didn't Singapore is Asian countries?
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't visit um for a couple of reasons.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: One, the Chinese internet is its kind of own ball of wax.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think you mentioned a couple places in the then and still now a lot of challenges in terms of reporting about that as a journalist, you know, going and asking a lot of questions.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then the other, you know, Tokyo is a major Asian hub.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but Tokyo, as is often the case, kind of has its own specific stories and its own specific way of doing things.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so why that while that overlapped um, you know, with the way it's done, other places, um, it was just a it was a a different story, a different thread of this of the narrative, where Frankfurt and Amsterdam um operated very similarly.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: The people who ran them were very close with each other, close competitors, um, close colleagues, uh, and then and then London was a sort of um you know opposition to the two of them in some ways, all competing to be the most hospitable place on the internet for networks to connect to each other, to charge a toll in a certain way when that happens, um, but then also to recognize that their growth is is mutually beneficial.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: As one grows, the others grow.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the internet only works, and I believe you t you you say this in the book as well, because it is sort of based on trust.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: You are where you say you are, and the networks connect, and that way it sort of works.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: Does that mean that if somebody really wants to find out where you are, like where something is, there's always a way?
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because I mean, is it just a lot of things?
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: Openness and trust is so important for the internet, but at the same time, everybody wants sort of privacy and a scared.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: Where the networks have to be like if you're gonna communicate with each other if my network doesn't know where your network is.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: So there has to be a kind of you know, but then you're talking about going up the going up the stack, going to different applications, and there you have, you know, in a sort of consumer way, layers of privacy added into that.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: Layers of privacy and occasionally, you know, layers where, you know, moments where it's less about um, you know, it's it's it's less about privacy and more about um uh more about sort of a verification of who you are.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um so yeah, it's I mean it's a complicated tension, but but but it's I think the important thing is to separate some of the applications, not just some of the applications, but the applications that have become really dominant, you know, particularly social media in different ways, um, which is very centralized.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a small number of dominant social media companies, um, with the original underlying sort of philosophy of the internet itself.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um and they're really two totally separate things.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, a real cloud, a real data a real a real hard drive, a real data center.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: So the clouds.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: No, and a big warehouse.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's everything in the hardest line that's stored in the city.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um have to be physically connected to the rest of the internet.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: And of course those like in the sky, as clouds in the sky.
• 33:59
  unknown: Yes.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: So no, no, no, uh so it's a it's a um, you know, that but the cloud, I mean the cloud was originally in kind of marketing terms to just recognize that these things are always where they are.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, these things are really everywhere.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that obscures the physicality of them.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, now in the AI conversation, uh it's gotten a lot more uh you know, it's got a lot more intense in the recognition that these data centers that power these tools take a lot of power, occasionally use a lot of water, you know, the power they need has consequences for for carbon emissions, um, has consequences for people's costs on the grid, um, you know, costs for their electricity.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: So it's, you know, now we're we're I think we're getting back in touch with the fact that the the the the cloud isn't just you know ethereal, but has major consequences um and sort of and sort of uh you know has uh you know has major impacts in all sorts of ways.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, lots of data centers.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: Can you paint uh I think you've been into several data.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean the data centers, um, they're often really loud.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: Can you describe what it's like?
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: You uh you open the door.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: I imagine there's a door.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um what is what is it like?
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: Is it hot?
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: There aren't that many people in that lights up.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: Paint as a picture?
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um they have a really particular smell.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like a like a toast, like a burnt toast smell.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's sort of a combin yeah, yeah, it's it's it's very distinct.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like a combination of the of the all the equipment and the kind of like ions from the equipment or and all the air conditioning.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um but you can kind of you there's a really specific, distinct smell to a data center.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: Occasionally, like walking outside a telephone building, you get a whiff of it.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um but as soon as you walk in, it's always the same smell.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then um, you know, and then there's often some uh not very happy people uh kind of stooped over, you know, their equipment trying to fix some problem.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if there are people in there, either something has to be set up or something's gone wrong.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and um, you know, they these are the kind of, you know, it still has to be done by hand a lot of the time.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so you you never visit a data center that's empty.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: There's always a couple, couple cages um with people, with technicians kind of hard at work trying to solve some problem at all hours of the day, uh, often sort of looking really frustrated, sometimes wearing like ear protection because it is so loud, uh, always wearing uh, you know, a fleece because um it's freezing cold in the air for the equipment.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, okay.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: So there's that's pretty it's a good picture.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's this incredible thing about uh the infrastructure we made that made this possible like the the fact that we just can uh do this now on a podcast, people from all over the world can listen to this.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: 30, 40 years ago it would have been a totally different story.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: When you think back to the early days of the internet, you might remember that.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: Is there what did people believe back then how it would change the world?
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because now AI is like a big thing.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't thought about what how doing that is the original thing.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: We can replace, right?
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a lot of thought about how the conversation back in the days now about AI and AGI.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember what lines up people believed back then?
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: That original sense of what the internet could do.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think that it was much it was much more optimistic than the AI conversation, certainly.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: There was really a sense that um, you know, we talked a lot about the the digital divide, meaning that if people and parts if people don't have access to the internet, then they will fall behind economically, which which was true.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: But that there wasn't there wasn't really a whole sense a lot of a sense of the downside or of any downside of connecting to the internet.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: It was there was the recognition that if you could connect to the internet, then you would have access to all sorts of positive information.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: You could learn anything, you could, you could, you could look up anything, you could, you could search for anything, uh, you could connect with anyone.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you would have an infinite global market, no matter, you know, whatever you were doing.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, all those things are true, but one of the things that has happened is that infinite global market has been, you know, primarily kind of gobbled up by a relatively small number of companies.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I guess that's the the sort of nature of capitalism, that that's that that is that is the goal.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: But rather than the sense of of a kind of you know really diverse, you know, competitive, but sort of, you know, really lively combination of voices, we now have a kind of, you know, we have a a sort of we we live under the control of a smaller number of very large global corporations.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think when you to think about like what the optimistic view of that was, you know, it was really about a kind of recognition that connecting people, connecting all kinds of people and expanding markets was always going to be positive.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I it's I mean we can talk about sort of what how that's changed or what's what's what's scared people about it.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: But for me, and this is a kind of internet infrastructure point, one of the more dramatic things that I didn't expect was the extent to which the hyperscalers, as we call them now, you know, primarily, you know, Google, Google and Meta, but would not only kind of dominate the application space, but would actually build their own physical infrastructure.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: So they they have over the last 10 years actually built their own cables across the ocean, certainly built their own data centers, built their own networks, so that they're kind of you know eating the infrastructure from above.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it's not it's not just that like they're riding on top of some telecom infrastructure, but they are actually kind of taking over that infrastructure themselves, um, build rebuilding it, um, owning all of it, sort of top to bottom.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that that was a surprise.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: And and that's that's been really consequential.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's one of the reasons that the AI race is so intense right now is because you know it threatens, uh, it threatens the internet that they've built with with some some new innovation.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: What remains to be seen is because AI requires so much physical infrastructure, so much power to run, um it's it's it's a real open question of how that how that that that's then re- rebuilt, how we then sort of build that physical infrastructure to serve uh these new tools, and then what happens to the to the sort of quasi-monopolies that exist already.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I worry about the now building much of the internet's infrastructures themselves.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I wouldn't say lucky.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_00: Is that something we do worry about?
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_00: We have the natural check on these companies of being public companies that have a responsibility to their shareholders to, to a certain extent, disclose what they're doing, to be subject to a court of public opinion, to be subject to litigation, which you know in Europe happens again and again and again.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they have to be responsible actors in order to kind of operate in so many places.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think there's in a certain, to a certain extent, those forces, both those market forces as and those regulatory forces, have have kind of kept them in their lane in terms of privacy, in terms of uh harms to children, uh, you know, things like that.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um but um, you know, but still with major impacts that we're kind of still coming to terms with.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_00: And what's so dramatic with the current conversation about the about AI is those companies are not yet have not yet shown themselves to be responsible public actors.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: They're not accountable yet to uh to the market, and they're not accountable yet to regulation, although that is coming pretty quickly, but no one quite knows how how to put it in as fast as it needs to go in.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so they and then they don't quite know what they have, which we're in a strange position to be in.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like they don't quite even know what what they've created and what it can do, um, which is very different from Instagram, for example.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like it's like you know, Instagram is has, you know, might might uh you know be bad for children or or or uh or the newspaper business or or um you know our or or our attention spans, but we kind of, you know, but that sort of the possibilities for what it does to society are a little bit you know, a little bit easier to grasp than the kinds of questions we're asking about about AI.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's a great question.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, in some ways uh tubes needs a sequel because the the construction of data centers, especially in the U.S., is that the same thing.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you were writing tubes today, but the construction of data centers in the US is taking up all the air.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it's an incredible uh economic story, um, you know, with real risks of interdependencies that could lead to a real systemic economic collapse.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh it's a real social story where there are a lot of communities that are fighting over um whether or not they want a data center in their town.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, I think there's gonna there's a sort of realignment of what the benefits are to communities and what the harms are to communities when a big data center comes in.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'd be curious, you know, I know Amsterdam, I know the Netherlands had this conversation and has basically essentially.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Moratorium on data center construction, which at one point I understand was based on land, and then now is sort of more urgently based on power.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: And those are, you know, that's that's a more extreme response.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: And there's some communities in the US that are responding that way.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: But the economic forces are very strong, and the political forces are very strong as well in their eagerness to get these the giant data centers constructed that we need, quote unquote, need uh to power AI.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: You said that um the internet sort of gave more power to uh information, more freedom.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um do you think the internet gave to give an answer?
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: Do you give uh do you think the internet gave ordinary people more power?
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: Or well like do you think the internet actually gave more YouTubers?
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely a sort of story of disruption of the kind of institutions of of media.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um but you know, but to what at what cost?
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't know.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's so it's so hard to say because in in some ways they the platforms, the corporations, the hyperscalers control so much, but in other ways they do open up the possibility of of anyone to say anything, and there is a kind of ground up, you know, uh you know, coordination and communication and sort of you know social movements that come out of that.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I you know to I it's very hard to balance.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's certainly a bunch of bunch of bunch on both sides of the of the ledger.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: Am I correct in saying that the internet is a lot more fragile than people think?
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's these undersea cables, and uh these cables have to come ashore somewhere.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um looking at the Baltic Sea, for example, with Russia, there's all these incidents involving undersea cables, and even if it's not sabotage or whatever, anchors or fishing.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: Traffic is primarily accidentally rerouted through other cables.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like the system is designed to report itself.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: But but there's a limit to that, of course.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if more than one cable breaks and each cable is occup is uh is operating near capacity, then you know, it it's not enough to have a single backup.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: You need multiple backups and other places to go.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_00: And we've seen that in recent years with different cable cuts, particularly in the Middle East and in the Red Sea, um, in the Red Sea and in and through the through the um the Suez and to Africa, where you have multiple cable cuts that have a real impact on the connectivity in the in those regions.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's less likely in Europe where there's so much connectivity and there's so many cables.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but there are still plenty of places where um the connect where the connections are thinner or more fragile.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we've seen that recently, I think was it last year or the year before with the cable cuts in the Mediterranean, where the internet in um in uh in parts of Africa to the Middle East where it was severely degraded and uh and that that that you know they're they actually couldn't function in the same way.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_00: But that's a that's a familiar story, right?
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, infrastructure is more brittle in some places than in others.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the the you know, the trains, you know, you know, the Netherlands is a great example of a of a more of a more resilient infrastructure in lots of ways.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, just a lot of can a lot of effort and and money and engineering going into uh into sort of making infrastructure of all kinds stronger, you know, trains, planes, you know, shipping, whatever it is, roads, um, where in parts of the world there isn't as much money or attention or engineering paid to it.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's true, that's true for all kinds of infrastructure, and it's certainly true for the internet.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: Your book also made me think about something beyond technology.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um you talk about the internet as if it belongs to everyone, um, but it depends on land, buildings, companies, cables, yada yada yada.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, that's a tough question.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean those are very real sources.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: We're certainly dependent on the internet.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: Has the internet made us still like a sort of fundamental.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_01: So if we just become kind of dependent that happens on the internet, really see.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that that creates more resiliency or more security.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, there there are yes, the systems are really entangled with each other.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, occasionally they do seem fragile, like we, you know, the moments when uh some piece of software running the airline industry breaks and then suddenly planes all over Europe or all over the world are grounded, you know, there you see repercussions like that.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then there are, you know, but the economic consequences of that, you know, the the failure of one company becomes the opportunity of another company.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it really is, it really is interesting to me that it's that all of these things are dependent, all of the kind of workings of this infrastructure, you know, while they are often seeded by governments, um, they are really operated by private companies and private companies competing with each other to offer the the best and most robust services.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um in that sense, we're yeah, we're dependent on all of these interconnected services and networks.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but we also do, you know, there is a sort of um freedom in the choice to switch from one to the other, um, you know, from one from one competitor to another competitor often.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if if Riverside stops working, I think you do have an extra choice.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: Though I guess Riverside is a pretty pretty pretty dominant pretty dominant player in uh podcasting as an example.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right, exactly, exactly.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I don't know.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh no uh my my world is stopping when uh riverside breaks.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, after spending so much time, I borrowing it.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean you said before it's pretty amazing that we've humans have built this.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, my hope is that humans are pretty good at building things pretty good at our instincts for self-preservation.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: AI thing.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: So my hope is that um, you know, with these new technologies, you know, our our our you know, they them either the technologies themselves or our ability to harness them creates um you know creates a uh a resiliency, you know, creates an ability to kind of you know live through, you know, survive whatever comes um faster than the ability to to destroy ourselves.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, so we uh you know that that has that has been the case in the um in the 80 years, you know, since um you know since of atomic weapons.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um the hope is that that's also the case where, you know, yes, we have a technology to to potentially destroy ourselves, but also we have the ingenuity to to prevent that from happening as well.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean I'd like to think that optimistic that optimistic view is more is more the case.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_00: But um but I don't I don't discount the um I don't discount the potential of AI to really cause major disruptions in the way the way we do all sorts of things.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it's it's just seems like there's so many it's there's it can do so much, and we we just we it's gonna be really interesting to see how the things it can do changes what what humans do and what purpose we we put it towards.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've always been quite optimistic about technology.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_01: I I I I do believe that throughout history, I really like looking at history, it's a good gives us good guidelines, that technological progress has made our lives better.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously it always brings risks, and there are always people who la who lose out along the way.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: But when you look at the bigger picture, I think uh we have to be positive, and I think AI will prove to be no different here.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_01: But um you know, technology doesn't automatically benefit everyone because uh that's what that's what the internet has created.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, for me, the dominant story when we talk about the values when we talk about the physical infrastructure.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: It brought it up.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_01: It became pretty concentrated in that couple people and uh companies.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_00: Many hundreds or thousands of networks competing with each other, with really just a few networks you know dominating things and everybody else kind of occupying a lesser space.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_00: And you're right to point out that um that that that sort of dominance of those networks then translates into the into the concentration of power in a small number of people.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, maybe the interesting question isn't whether technology makes us more capable, because it clearly does, but whether being more capable necessarily makes our own.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: I wish more people understood that it's still there underneath.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that there is a way to what do you th wish engage with it independently understood?
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: That there's a way to engage with it not on YouTube and not on Instagram, but like there's still a kind of independent internet that operates beneath all of that.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's it's possible to kind of still still uncover and still still exist on.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um there might be costs to that and it might might be sort of more challenging.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um but um but I think there's a lot of benefit in sort of maintaining the vitality of that that sort of you know independent, your small scale um, you know, kind of in internet infrastructure that uh happens underneath, whether in your choice of email provider, you know, for example.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, like, you know, Gmail is so dominant, but it's like you can find a local email provider, you know, and as just as one example, um, or or even just as a in in a website, you know, you can still put up a website in the internet.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's still, you know, that's that's still possible.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's you know, it's dependent on all of the the big systems that that sort of help help people find it, but it you can still just kind of do it.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think I wish, yeah, so I wish people had recognized that that that internet's still underneath and it's not only about Google and Meta on Amazon, but um, but there's still that that old thing, that old piece, those old pieces are still there, which I think is pretty, pretty fascinating.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_01: Looking back at um your journey, it's been uh it's been uh some time for you uh ago.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: Looking back to your writing, to your research, to the center of the book.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um what was um the most valuable lesson?
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or perhaps like it's you know, you can you can think it's these giant companies.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_01: Writing the book and researching uh the internet along the way.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, blinking lights or or you know, big data centers, um, or just like AI.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's still there's still people who are who are building it and taking care of it and expanding it and and trying to control it.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so I think that I mean, I I kind of maintained that lesson, you know, certainly from my visit to the internet, from the, you know, it wasn't, you know, the buildings were important, but the kind of people who who take care of them were even more important and more interesting.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like even when we have these these giant infrastructures, these giant technological constructions, it's still it's still run by people.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like people are still the center of it.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the things that makes AI so, so, so challenging and so confusing is that it's sort of, it's this, there's still people involved, there's still people building it, but there's this other kind of whatever weird intelligence that we don't really know what to make of that isn't a person, um, but sort of acts like a person, and we don't really know how to understand that or how to interact with it or how to how to control it.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's there is one very specific thing, uh, which um which is that the that the reflecting on your process, uh, the network operators were entirely managed.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the men didn't always behave well.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it was before the conversation about um about that about sexual harassment, um, about me too, as we call it here.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um it was before that conversation was more vibrant.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so I I kind of wrote about it a little bit, um, but I wish that I was clearer in sort of saying um that it was that the that the the social environment of these people who I admire a lot for their construction, but the social environment um was um was uh was sexist, uh was often derogatory, um, you know, was uh was sort of unacceptable in its in its in the in the dominance of the men who who who who who ran it at the time.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think I I think I included it a little bit, but I was still speaking to those men.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like I still they were still my audience.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like I still kind of wanted to make sure they approved of what I was saying.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um I could have been clearer about sort of uh sort of describing um what um where they uh where they were wrong, yeah.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_02: Well that's the problem.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_01: The new book is about the electric grid and about the energy organization.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: That the ships are in the middle of the city.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe you can tell me a bit more about that and uh to renewable carbon pre-generation.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_00: Expect the AI book and the way in which the grid adapts to that.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um Netherlands are an amazing story with that, with the offshore wind and the offshore grid and um and the effort to decarbonize primarily through the construction of that incredible infrastructure.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um the challenge um in the US at the moment is that uh we have had incredible whiplash in in the way that we talk about the electric grid and in the way that the electric grid is being built, where during the the Biden presidential administration, there was a huge effort to get as much solar and wind and batteries uh on the grid as possible.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh when Trump became president, all of that was not just slowed down, but actively stopped, um, not entirely successfully.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_00: It continues certainly, um, at you know, but not as fast.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then just as we have this incredible whiplash with a shift in policy, then we also had this crazy boom of AI where we have a growth in electro grid that we haven't seen in 50 years.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I started this book, neither of those two things were happening.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and um now I'm faced with trying to figure out what story I'm telling given this sort of whiplash of changes.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_00: So when I'll figure that out, uh hopefully next, hopefully this year, maybe next year.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate that.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_02: You've got time.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_01: All uh all good things take time.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: The more we talked about the internet, and the more I read uh in into your book, um the the further I went, the more I realized, like you said, how human it still is.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: We imagine this enormous automated system that somehow runs itself, but behind it are engineers, technicians, people repairing cables in the middle of the ocean, uh, people deciding how these networks connect.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost strange that something so important to modern life still depends on so many individual decisions and tiny things.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it's uh it's a fascinating book.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_01: I would recommend anyone that is interested in knowing a little more about the internet and how it works and to get Andrew's book, Tubes, A Journey to the Center of the Internet.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: And on that note, Andrew, thank you so much for uh for joining me.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean I'm you I'm pretty easy to find online at andreblum.net at my website um ajblum.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: Next time I open my laptop.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um my accession.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, um I spend a lot of time there, I don't scale a lot anymore.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_00: LinkedIn, you can find me on this.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: I always welcome I I I I love getting email from readers and um and people with questions.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh my email address is is is on my website.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um and um yeah, no, I appreciate the conversation.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: Appreciate your your your appreciation of the book.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's amazing to me how vibrant the topic is um so many years later, even you know, even more important than ever, even I appreciate that.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks so much for having me.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'll make sure to put all the links in our show notes and description.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Andrew, and I'm looking forward to your next book and I'm sure we'll get you on the pot again then.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: All right, thank you so much.