This video was was made possible by CuriosityStream. When you sign up with the link in the description,
you’ll also get access to Nebula, the streaming video platform that HAI is a part of. This is the Mtskheta district. The Mtskheta district is in the, hmm, the
Mtskheta-Mtianeti region of Georgia—the country Georgia, not the town in Vermont,
Georgia. The American State, Vermont, not the neighborhood
in Melbourne, Australia, Vermont. The country Australia, not the village in
Cuba, Australia. The country, Cuba not the… oh, boy. Ok, it’s really not that confusing. The Mtskheta district’s largest town is
Mtskheta. I’d try to tell you more about the district
but that’s all Wikipedia gives me and, in what you’ll soon realize is a fantastically
ironic twist, their website is down. Elsewhere in the district is the small village
of Armazi where there lived a 75 year-old named Hayastan Shakarian. Now, there are actually two Armazi’s—one’s
a famous archeological site, one’s a tiny, rather boring riverside village. I know you don’t care, but I care. I care because I spent an hour trying to figure
out why our 75 year-old lived in a village last inhabited in the year 736. So, to be clear, we’re talking about this
Armazi, not this one. So, there’s not a whole lot of info out
there about this Armazi, but what we do know is that it has a railway station. The railway station is relevant not because
it provides low-cost, environmentally friendly transport and, by extension, social and economic
mobility, even though we do love that, but rather because that means that the railway
runs through the village and that means that something else runs through the village—a
fiber optic cable. That’s because, at some point, Georgia’s
state-owned railway company, Georgian Railways, thunk a thought. You see, way far away from Armazi is the port
city of Poti which sits on the Black Sea, the world’s greatest kidney shaped body
of water. Poti also happens to be the landing site for
the Caucasus Cable System, which stretches all the way west to Bulgaria. The Caucasus Cable System is, according to
its website, a super-great, super-cool submarine telecommunications cable that transmits as
much as 12.6 terabytes of data each second. If I had that kind of speed, I could upload
each Half as Interesting video in less than a second but unfortunately, I have BT/Comcast/Telstra/insert
your country’s hated internet provider here, so it takes an hour. This direct route connecting to Europe’s
land-based cables means that Georgia can get its internet without having to rely on connections
through places that it doesn’t get along too well with, like Russia. It also, apparently, speeds up the connection,
meaning data from London can make it to Georgia in just 54 milliseconds. This is all super-great, we love this, but
in order to actually get to where people live in Georgia, like Tbilisi, you’ve got to
have land-based cables to transmit the data. Of course, getting these cables first installed
is often a bit complicated as you need to find and get permission to bury the cable
across all sorts of different pieces of land, but, hear me out here, wouldn’t it be convenient
if only one entity owned land stretching all the way from Poti, where the cable lands,
to Tbilisi, the capital, and beyond. Enter Georgian Railways, which, super-conveniently,
is also owned by the Georgian government. It set up another company, creatively named
Georgian Railway Telecom, which was given ownership of a 16 inch or 40 centimeter strip
of land right next to the railway tracks all across the country. In this piece of land, it installed a fiber
optic cable to bring the fast internet from the Caucasus Cable System to the rest of the
country and even to neighboring countries like Armenia. This is how Armazi, which has the Poti to
Tbilisi railway running through it, also got a fiber optic cable running through it. Also, a shower thought for you, that means
that the digital file of my voice has run through Armazi because I certainly have plenty
of Georgian viewers. Oh, nobody care? Oh, ok. Now, our 75 year-old Armazi resident, Hayastan
Shakarian, like many residents of this area of Georgia, was quite poor back in 2011 so
she worked to make some extra cash by scavenging and selling copper. Wait, what happened to train’s social and
economic mobility? I’ve got to rethink my subtly injected political
commentary. On a March 28, 2011 copper-finding expedition,
Hayastan started as normal, looking around the forest, then somehow make her way into
the area of the train tracks. She probably saw something promising, dug
down, and eventually came across a cable. She might have thought this cable included
copper and, therefore, somehow, managed to cut it, but at that moment, in a unified collective
cry, the entirety of the nation of Armenia went, “no.” That’s because that cable provided, apparently,
about 90% of Armenia’s internet. Therefore, for the next twelve hours, the
entire nation of 3 million people, with little exception, was without internet—TV stations
couldn’t get their news, companies couldn’t send their emails, hospitals couldn’t download
patient files, and, perhaps most devastatingly, nobody could watch Nebula. Georgia’s internet, meanwhile, was mostly
just slowed down a bit as they had other cables running in, but, of course, elsewhere in Armenia
everyone panicked, nobody knew what to do, and they couldn’t even go on Twitter to
complain. Eventually, though, the telecom company isolated
the issue to Armazi, fixed the cable, and the perpetrator, Hayastan Shakarian, was arrested. So what’s the moral of the story? Well, it’s that you should get the Nebula
and Curiosity Stream apps now and download a bunch of videos offline just in case Hayastan
Shakarian comes along and breaks your country’s internet—or if you’re ever on an airplane
or don’t want to destroy your data plan. On Nebula, you’ll find all the normal content
from tons of your favorite educational creators, HAI and Wendover included, in addition to
special originals made possible only because of the custom-built creator ecosystem of the
platform. On Curiosity Stream, meanwhile, you’ll find
thousands of fantastic non-fiction documentaries and shows on tons of fascinating topics. The other great selling-point of these two
platforms is that they’re crazy affordable, especially given their bundle deal, and signing
up helps support loads of independent creators. Nebula is now bundled with any Curiosity Stream
subscription at CuriosityStream.com/HAI which costs just $3 a month or $20 a year or that
same link will get you a month free.
Are there any sources for this? I'd be interested in reading up on it little more