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.