Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

I'm Dan from Mack on today's show. President Trump says we'll all become much poorer if he's impeached, and why you soon may have to pay more for an aisle seat on a plane.

But first,

hacking the electric grid. Now, almost any time we see or read about big national cybersecurity

threats, this is usually near the top of that list, this idea that the entire country,

or at least big parts of it, could suddenly be plunged into darkness, or or into freezing cold during winter or sweltering heat during summer.

And the fears actually go well beyond personal comfort because we rely on electricity for just about everything.

For example, if you've ever seen a gas station in the middle of a power outage, it's usually dark too, which means it's harder to refill a backup

generator or gas up a truck that delivers us things like food. Or even think about the next election

and how all those voting machines are plugged in. What if the lights went off right when the

tabulations were starting? What happens then? As for how real the threat is, the Department of

Homeland Security and FBI recently detailed

two years of efforts by Russian government entities to access U.S. power companies.

And if that's not good enough for you, this was also the plot of a recent diehard film.

Virtual terrorism. Hit the reset button. Melt the system just for fun. Hey, it's not a system.

It's a country. Now, first, it's not necessarily time to panic and load up the bunker. So for starters, Bruce Willis is only 63 years old, so he'll be protecting us for a little while more. But more importantly, that whole thing about knocking out the electric grid may be a bit overstated, as we report at Axios this morning. First, because hacking the power grid is

actually very, very hard to do, which is the reason it hasn't happened yet, even though it feels

like virtually everything else in the world and country has been hacked. And there's also a silver

lining that's a little bit bigger, which is that there's not necessarily such a thing as the power grid.

Seriously, more on that in 15 seconds with Axio's cybersecurity reporter Joe Uchell.

But first, this.

Axios chief technology correspondent, Enah Freed, shares breaking news and analysis on the most consequential companies and players in tech from the

...