I think maybe the larger theme also, which I haven't written a ton about, but it's kind of like

a bunch of things that I want to write now are kind of about this, is the sense that like,

it feels increasingly hard to think about the way that like physical facts in the world

really affect things. So like I'm reading this long article right now by Neil Stevenson from

the mid-90s about this undersea cable that

connected, you know, it's like, I don't know, I don't remember how many kilometers long,

but it's like this extremely long cable that it's like basically offering broadband

internet service connecting like Japan and Asia and Australia and Europe and the Middle East.

And like, you know, 99% I think of the data traffic, of all data traffic happens in cables, right?

Like if I, like we're talking right now because information is traveling in physical cables

between where I am and Egypt.

And I feel like watershed borders is kind of the same way where you're, you know, you think, you think about the water that comes into your house and you maybe think about your sort of municipal water system.

But this is determined by like physical facts about the world, right?

Like all this works is determined by geography and altitude and where different mountain ridges are, which is just not something that I find myself thinking about

very often. Or like, I somewhat belatedly read Flash Boys, the Michael Lewis book about high-speed

traders. And like one of the most interesting anecdotes in that book is these people have like,

they spend all this time building the straightest fiber optic cable possible from Chicago

to New Jersey in order to

shave some nanoseconds off of the time it takes for their signal to make it there.

Which is like, you know, one of the people in this book, one of these hedge funds, decided,

oh, like, we have the internet now.

So that means we don't have to be based in New York anymore.

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