Colum McCann
Appearances
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
Right.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
You mean you haven't been swimming down underneath the cables, figuring out how to chop them or anything?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
Well, you know, it's really amazing. I mean, 95% of the world's intercontinental information travels underwater. And it's going in places that we have never visited. I was fascinated by this, because, you know, the underwater has all those, you know, dips and crags and underwater canyons and all sorts of things.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
And the fact that our voices and our emojis and all the silly things that we do... Are porn. And all the porn traveling at the bottom of the sea. Yes. There it is.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
They are slinking along.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
Yeah.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
Well, the weaknesses are startling. First of all, you know, we're connected. We're all connected. But we're also disconnected in the most extraordinary way. So I was interested in that. But where, then, are the weak points in the cables? Well, you have landing stations all over the world where the cables come in from the sea into a little bungalow-like structure.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
And you know, these planes, the plane that you're on right now is almost 40 years old. And when you land and you see Saudi Arabia and you see UAE and you see Qatar and you see all these, and they have these brand new Boeing 747s mostly, and you see ours next to it, it's much smaller, it's much less impressive. I believe that we should have the most impressive plane.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
And you recognize it because it has a chain-link fence around it and a generator at the side because they need electricity. And you can actually walk up to a lot of these landing stations, even in New Jersey and Long Island, and you can see the manhole covers in the ground. And you can lift up... Do you carry a... A what? One of those things to lift up the manhole covers?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
You just, you take it out like this and then you lift out the manhole cover and you can actually see the cables coming in to the, carrying all that stuff.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
Yeah. But you can also go out and you can dive underwater and you can see some of these cables. You know, we are actually, you know, we're quite vulnerable, even at deep sea, because if you take out a cable at deep sea, I'm talking like four or five, six kilometers down.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
If that goes out through, say, an underwater landslide or an earthquake or sabotage with a grappling hook, it will take up to six weeks to to get it fixed. Is that right? Yeah, because a boat has to go out. They have to find it. It's an extraordinary job. So if we had somebody trying to take out the world's internet for six weeks, what would that be like, by the way? Oh, my God.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
We would talk to one another.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
Well, maybe we should organize some sort of sabotage, some sort of national sabotage.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
The sea novels are always wonderful novels because, you know, when you go out to sea, you sort of lose everything, but you always want to go back home. So you meet these people who do go out to sea and they, you know, investigate these cables and repair them. They're on land. They really want a break to happen.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
But the minute they get out to sea, all they want to do is fix the brakes so they can go home again. And so this whole notion of home, belonging, not belonging, repair, I think repair is one of the great themes of our times.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
Well, I mean, you talk a lot about certainty and I agree with you entirely. We're sort of diseased with certainty. Everybody has to be so certain they can only go in one direction and the others can only go in another direction. What I am interested in is the floodplains between those canals of certainty, because that's where all the interesting stuff happens.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
That's where actually all the interesting people meet, because we're so much more interesting than we allow for others to think about ourselves.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
Narrative 4 is a global nonprofit that brings young people together to exchange stories with one another. And one of the things we would do, for instance, believe this or not, we could bring kids from the South Bronx together with kids from Eastern Kentucky. And one might think in today's America... Right? Exactly. That they might not be able to get on.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
But through the exchange of personal stories, they create this world where they realize they're not so different to one another. So what would happen is we would get together. I'd tell you a story. You'd tell me a story. I'd go back in, and I'd say, hi, my name is Jordan, and I have a lovely head of hair. And... And I say column, and I wish I had Jordan's hair. Exactly.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
But, you know, they tell really powerful stories that sort of negotiate the distance that we supposedly have between us. Say, for example, there's a young girl in the Bronx who wears a hijab. She's talking with a boy from Kentucky. Well, underneath her hijab, she might have AirPods. And in those AirPods, she's listening to Beyonce.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
And the boy down in Kentucky has been listening to Beyonce's most recent album.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
Exactly. And people come together. People come together in music. People come together in stories. People come together in laughter. And I do think, you're talking about hope, I do think, I do believe, sort of maybe naively, in the availability of hope.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Greeted By Sword Dancers in Qatar & RFK Jr. Swims Up S**t Creek | Colum McCann
Elon, I love the double hat. He's the only one that can do that. Well, Mr. President, they say I wear a lot of hats. Even my hat has a hat.