Speaker 1: Get in test with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to
Speaker 1: text Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland and today I'm joined by
Speaker 1: a very special guest host while Lauren is out watching
Speaker 1: one of our friends get married to one of our
Speaker 1: other friends. And that guest host is Ben Bolan. Hey, Jonathan,
Speaker 1: thank you for having me on the show. Uh, longtime fan,
Speaker 1: first time co host. Yep, that's true. I hope anyway,
Speaker 1: why I know the cost part is true? Anyway, this
Speaker 1: actually means that we have both members of a particular
Speaker 1: house stuff works podcast as guest hosts at some point
Speaker 1: in the history of the show. Yeah, that's right, good
Speaker 1: call man. Uh, longtime tech stuff fans will remember that
Speaker 1: one of my co host, uh, the legendary Matt Frederick,
Speaker 1: made a guest appearance on tech Stuff right many many
Speaker 1: moons ago. So anyway, we are great full to have
Speaker 1: you here. And uh, you know you you're you're kind
Speaker 1: of sort of a transportation guru by now, I would say,
Speaker 1: And I asked Ben what topic would he like to cover,
Speaker 1: and he said, Hey, have you guys covered hyper loop?
Speaker 1: And that's when I had to kind of kick the
Speaker 1: ground and look at the look at the ground, and
Speaker 1: then say no, because we did an episode about Elon Musk,
Speaker 1: who has a lot to do with hyper loop, but
Speaker 1: we did that on March thirteen, and he didn't talk
Speaker 1: about hyper loop until like June. Yeah, this is a
Speaker 1: pretty This is a fairly recent development in the context
Speaker 1: of his career. Now, Elon Musk. For anybody who hasn't
Speaker 1: checked out the Tech Stuff episode on you, yeah, shame on.
Speaker 1: You get the to a speaker of some sort, find
Speaker 1: an RSS feed or iTunes or something and download that
Speaker 1: and listen to it. We'll wait, Okay, welcome back, Welcome back.
Speaker 1: And that was what you just listened to if you
Speaker 1: hadn't heard it before. Was a great overview of this
Speaker 1: inventor's life, including his origin story and the companies he's
Speaker 1: been associated with. Jonathan if if I could defer to
Speaker 1: you for a quick recap of l mu s okay
Speaker 1: so um. He came up with a little idea that
Speaker 1: would eventually be called PayPal. PayPal is, of course, a
Speaker 1: payment system that you can use online. You can create
Speaker 1: an account through PayPal, and it allows you to process
Speaker 1: payments or to to make payments to vendors. That accept PayPal,
Speaker 1: particularly things like eBay. But it was one of those
Speaker 1: ideas to try and make online transactions secure and easy,
Speaker 1: so that maybe you didn't want to um to hand
Speaker 1: over your credit card information every time. Maybe you wanted
Speaker 1: to create a special bank account and then make that
Speaker 1: a PayPal account, and so you could do transfers in
Speaker 1: a more secure format. You knew that you had a
Speaker 1: certain amount of money in that account, nothing beyond that
Speaker 1: was ever going to get tampered with. Yeah, it kind
Speaker 1: of controlled your risks. Yeah, absolutely. And now, of course,
Speaker 1: as we've talked about with inventors in the past, because
Speaker 1: you've also done a show called Stuff of Genius, so
Speaker 1: we know that often when somebody invents something that appears
Speaker 1: to be new, they're standing on the shoulders of giants
Speaker 1: earlier innovations. PayPal not necessarily the first time someone attempted
Speaker 1: to do this, but by far the most successful instance. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and even that was not Elon Musk's first foray
Speaker 1: into business. He had tried a few times, but PayPal was,
Speaker 1: I guess you could say ridiculously successful. It gave him
Speaker 1: the freedom to pursue whatever else he wanted to do
Speaker 1: because he made so much money so quickly that the
Speaker 1: constraints were off, and so he began to pursue another
Speaker 1: interest of his, which was, you know, cars that go
Speaker 1: really fast. Yes, Tesla Motors, another little company by Musk
Speaker 1: that some of you may have heard of, you know,
Speaker 1: Scott Anagement and I cover this often on car stuff
Speaker 1: and tech stuff. Has also looked into some of the
Speaker 1: fascinating innovations and technology here. Uh. So we've got a
Speaker 1: guy who's done PayPal, We've got a guy who's done
Speaker 1: Tesla Motors. Uh. He also was interested in another transportation initiative. Yeah,
Speaker 1: before we even get to hyperlop. He was interested in
Speaker 1: a transportation that would send you up, like really really up,
Speaker 1: and not not balloons on a house. No, no, not
Speaker 1: not not that up. No. We're talking, of course about
Speaker 1: space X, which is a privatized space initiative. Really it's
Speaker 1: it's the business of getting things up into space. Because,
Speaker 1: as we all know, NASA was getting further and further
Speaker 1: budget cuts as time was going on, and it became
Speaker 1: apparent that if we weren't going to have a public
Speaker 1: space industry, something that was funded by the government, then
Speaker 1: if we still wanted to pursue things in space, and
Speaker 1: we do because there's a lot of important stuff out there,
Speaker 1: communication satellites being one of the simplest to explain. It
Speaker 1: meant that we had to have some private industry step in.
Speaker 1: And so Musk said, you know, I think this is
Speaker 1: something else that I'm really interested in. I've always been
Speaker 1: interested in space. And he began to devote quite a
Speaker 1: bit of time and money and resources to creating a
Speaker 1: viable private space enterprise, and in fact, but not the spaceship,
Speaker 1: and that would have been probably a little beyond even
Speaker 1: his amazing reach it. Yeah, so mostly what he's looking
Speaker 1: at is our ways to try and create an economically
Speaker 1: feasible private space enterprise. And he talked a lot about
Speaker 1: how that's difficult to do because you have very limited
Speaker 1: vendors from whom you can get the important components for
Speaker 1: your rockets. So he remember specifically, he pointed out this
Speaker 1: problem he had in Russia, where he would be quoted
Speaker 1: a price, he would agree to purchase a certain number
Speaker 1: of units of rockets at that price, and then upon
Speaker 1: the actual manufacture of it, be told, oh we're sorry,
Speaker 1: I know, we said that was gonna be twenty million
Speaker 1: dollars for all of these but it's actually gonna be
Speaker 1: twenty million per rocket. Yeah, something along those lines. It's
Speaker 1: just yeah. And he talked about how, you know, you
Speaker 1: have to deal with these things, and that it gave
Speaker 1: him a lot of uh experience and knowledge about the
Speaker 1: industry and how to try and and get around that
Speaker 1: by making as much of the stuff yourself as possible.
Speaker 1: In fact, that was one of the things he said,
Speaker 1: like this explains why NASA budgets go out of control.
Speaker 1: It's not that they're poorly managed. It's that you have
Speaker 1: such limited resources to go to to get what you
Speaker 1: need that you're kind of held hostage by them. So,
Speaker 1: but that all of these interests are stuff that we
Speaker 1: had already talked about on tech stuff, right. Yes, that
Speaker 1: was the quick, dirty recap of the episode you should
Speaker 1: listen to in full. We say all of this to
Speaker 1: say that Musk has some street cred. He's not just
Speaker 1: some guy, you know making a YouTube video. Uh. He
Speaker 1: is proposing another transit innovation, another potential transit innovation, and
Speaker 1: that would be the hyper loop. But my first question, you, Jonathan,
Speaker 1: we're talking hyper loop, what what is it? Well, if
Speaker 1: we were to take elon Musk's own words, and this
Speaker 1: is somewhat paraphrased from an interview he gave at the
Speaker 1: D eleven event. He said, it's a cross between a
Speaker 1: concorde and a rail gun and an air hockey table.
Speaker 1: He added the air hockey table last, like he said
Speaker 1: concorde and a railgun first, and I got a great responses.
Speaker 1: You know, technically, if I really want to blow your minds,
Speaker 1: I need to add in the fact that there's an
Speaker 1: air hockey table element in there too, and uh. Then
Speaker 1: he made uh an inappropriate joke, But essentially he said
Speaker 1: that if these three things got together and had nice
Speaker 1: romantic times, hyper loop would be the bibbet that would
Speaker 1: be produced as a result. So now that that alone
Speaker 1: doesn't really tell you what hyper loop is. And I
Speaker 1: think that was actually Musk's point. He knew he didn't
Speaker 1: want to spoil the surprise at that event, so he
Speaker 1: wanted to give just enough information for people to get
Speaker 1: curious about it, but not enough to actually explain what
Speaker 1: it was. Right, and one of the things one of
Speaker 1: the best ways for us to approach this over the
Speaker 1: course of this episode, I think we're going to go
Speaker 1: into what the science behind a hyper loop. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe some pros, some cons some similar systems. Uh, the
Speaker 1: elevator pitch. We we can't really beat that great quote
Speaker 1: about but if you want to, if you want something
Speaker 1: that's a little easier to actually visualize beyond the fact
Speaker 1: that what you're gonna shoot people through some form of
Speaker 1: high energy mechanism and they're just gonna fly across you
Speaker 1: and you get points if they hit the gold was this, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but no, it's it's more like, all right, so it's
Speaker 1: it's an elevated system in more ways than one. For one,
Speaker 1: it's going to if it were to be built, it
Speaker 1: would be built on pylons that would go and hold
Speaker 1: the the whole system above ground. Um. It's was proposed
Speaker 1: to be between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Yes, with
Speaker 1: an incredibly short transit time. Yeah, we'll get into that.
Speaker 1: I don't want to spoil it, but but it's it's
Speaker 1: the ideas that the capsules that you would travel in
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be a train. It would be a sort
Speaker 1: of a capsule that could hold a certain number of people. Um.
Speaker 1: That these these capsules would float above the floor of
Speaker 1: the system. The whole thing would be inside a tunnel
Speaker 1: that's on top of these pylons, so it's all enclosed,
Speaker 1: but the capsule would float above the ground, so that
Speaker 1: means you've eliminated friction from the wheel. There's no wheels
Speaker 1: to which and then it would be propelled down this tube,
Speaker 1: which also would have very low air pressure, so you
Speaker 1: would have low air resistance. It's a partial vacuum. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll talk a little bit more about that too in
Speaker 1: a second. So essentially you're talking about some sort of
Speaker 1: imagine a straw, but the straw has closed off at
Speaker 1: both ends more or less, there's there's a little bit
Speaker 1: of a gap in there to allow some air passage.
Speaker 1: And then imagine a p that's inside, like a dry
Speaker 1: p that's inside that that straw, And then imagine that
Speaker 1: you have somehow maybe bombarded that p with electrons so
Speaker 1: that now has built up a negative electrostatic charge, and
Speaker 1: then you put another negative magnet end next to it,
Speaker 1: and it would zip across to the other end of
Speaker 1: the tube. In a very very oversimplified way, that's what
Speaker 1: the hyper loop is. And yes, you are inside, so
Speaker 1: you yeah, obviously there's some questions that we have to answer,
Speaker 1: but that's the general idea. So you know, this is
Speaker 1: this is actually it's we'll talk about this too. This
Speaker 1: is not the first time this kind of system has
Speaker 1: been proposed, And in fact, there's a really interesting story
Speaker 1: we'll get to about another person who has proposed a
Speaker 1: very similar system that they've they've been talking about for
Speaker 1: a couple of years before Musk ever said anything, and
Speaker 1: they received a slightly different reaction, I would say, than
Speaker 1: what Musk has received. Um, and we'll we'll have to
Speaker 1: talk about spoilers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just just teasing you.
Speaker 1: So hyper Loop essentially, what we're getting at is it's
Speaker 1: a high speed transportation system that allows multiple passengers to
Speaker 1: go between the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco,
Speaker 1: at least initially, should never be built. Yeah, and uh, also,
Speaker 1: of course the questions that we need to address that
Speaker 1: are going to be popping up in everybody's head. Um.
Speaker 1: I I just want to put this on the radar
Speaker 1: for the very end of the show, Jonathan. The question
Speaker 1: I want to us both to attempt to answer the
Speaker 1: very end of the show is this vaporware. That's an
Speaker 1: excellent question. And yes, I think that we will have
Speaker 1: to kind of give our own opinions on that at
Speaker 1: the very end. So we've got a lot to talk about.
Speaker 1: But before we get into the nitty gritty about exactly
Speaker 1: how this thing is supposed to work, should it ever
Speaker 1: be built, let's take a quick break and thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: You've probably tried Hulu dot com now. With Hulu Plus,
Speaker 1: you can watch your favorite shows anytime, anywhere. Hulu Plus
Speaker 1: lets you watch thousands of hit TV shows in a
Speaker 1: selection of acclaimed movies on your television or on the
Speaker 1: go with your smartphone or tablet, and it all streams
Speaker 1: an HD for the best viewing experience. With Hulu Plus,
Speaker 1: you can watch your favorite current TV shows like Agents
Speaker 1: of Shield, Community and Sleepy Hollow. You can also check
Speaker 1: out exclusive content, including Hulu originals like The Awesome starring
Speaker 1: s Nell, seth Myers, and moon Boy starring Chris Odeld.
Speaker 1: From four to Hulu Plus also offers a great selection
Speaker 1: of acclaimed films for only seven dollars and nine cents
Speaker 1: a month. You can stream as many TV shows and
Speaker 1: movies as you want, wherever you want. Right now, you
Speaker 1: can try Hulu Plus free for two weeks. When you
Speaker 1: go to Hulu plus dot Com Forward slash Tech. That's
Speaker 1: a special offer for our listeners. Make sure you use
Speaker 1: Hulu Plus dot Com Forward slash Tech so you get
Speaker 1: the extended free trial and they know that we sent you.
Speaker 1: Go to Hulu Plus dot Com Forward slash Tech now.
Speaker 1: And as for shows I like to watch on Hulu Plus,
Speaker 1: Agents of Shield is a big one, actually, because occasionally
Speaker 1: I'm traveling and I miss stuff and when I come back,
Speaker 1: I want to catch up and see what's going on.
Speaker 1: I feel that shows really just now starting to hit
Speaker 1: it stride. I think it might have struggled a little
Speaker 1: early in the Marvel universe. It's so huge, and then
Speaker 1: you're dealing with these you know, human people and how
Speaker 1: they are interacting in this world, and I think they're
Speaker 1: really getting into some interesting territory. So that's a recommendation
Speaker 1: for me. You should go check it out. Alright, so
Speaker 1: we're back, Let's talk about how the hyperloop would actually work. Now,
Speaker 1: you remember I was mentioning that whole idea of a
Speaker 1: closed off straw with a p in it. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: if you know that's that's that's okay, except for the
Speaker 1: fact that if you have air in that tube and
Speaker 1: the air doesn't have anywhere to go. That p is
Speaker 1: going to be pushing against the air in that tube,
Speaker 1: and even if there's space around the PA, it's not
Speaker 1: going to go as fast as it could if there
Speaker 1: were no air at all, right, Right, The air resistance
Speaker 1: is one of the biggest speed killers. Yeah, so there
Speaker 1: you might have heard of some maglev trains, you know,
Speaker 1: trains that actually float above the track through magnetic levitation.
Speaker 1: And by magnetic levitation, we're esimibly talking about magnets that
Speaker 1: repel one another and maintain the trains distance above a tract.
Speaker 1: Usually it's it's like just a tiny distance above it, right,
Speaker 1: and that's you know, and this this helps reduce friction
Speaker 1: for those those sorts of systems. I think what we're
Speaker 1: seeing here is that these can be thought of as
Speaker 1: similar in some ways, but they have they have very
Speaker 1: different mechanisms. And also, you know, if you have a
Speaker 1: maglev train that's in an uncovered track, then it still
Speaker 1: has to deal with that air resistance. You know, it's
Speaker 1: top speed is going to be mitigated by the but
Speaker 1: it has to put push against air. So one of
Speaker 1: the elements of this hyper loop system is it would
Speaker 1: be at a very low pressure, you would have have
Speaker 1: a near vacuum, but not a total vacuum. Total vacuum
Speaker 1: is very difficult to maintain if you are talking about
Speaker 1: a significantly long tube, right, Yeah. Total vacuum is in
Speaker 1: fact so difficult to maintain that even if one could
Speaker 1: just throw billions of dollars at the problem making really
Speaker 1: long when uh, it might be impossible to do it effectively.
Speaker 1: You would have to have some form of of you know,
Speaker 1: vacuum stations all along the tube just to constantly deal
Speaker 1: with any differentiation and pressure. So instead, Musk says, why
Speaker 1: don't we just have something that will lower the air
Speaker 1: pressure quite a bit, uh, And that will allow for
Speaker 1: reduced air resistance because you don't have as much air
Speaker 1: to push against, and then all that means the capsule
Speaker 1: can move faster within that tube. So that's that's one
Speaker 1: element to another element is, well, how do you get
Speaker 1: the tube to float above the base of the track,
Speaker 1: the base of the tunnel, And it's not through magnetic levitation? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's weirdly enough. It goes back to our
Speaker 1: air hockey comparison, right exactly, the air cushioning, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you've got You've got these little air skis on
Speaker 1: the base of the metal capsule. So imagine these flat surfaces,
Speaker 1: lots of surface area on the base of this capsule,
Speaker 1: and then the track could blow air up and the
Speaker 1: capsule is on a cushion of air. So that there's
Speaker 1: another reason why you can't have a total vacuum, because
Speaker 1: if you're using air to keep the capsule up, Uh,
Speaker 1: you obviously can't have a total vacuum. Right. Yeah in
Speaker 1: this in this case, in a very crew comparison, it
Speaker 1: would be trying to drive a car without wheels. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: and um for anyone who has tried that, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: I wish we had talked earlier. I know a lot
Speaker 1: of people who have cars without wheels on their front yard.
Speaker 1: But that's because we live in the South, right, that
Speaker 1: is because we live in the South. But so if
Speaker 1: we just take if we just take these two ideas, right,
Speaker 1: partial vacuum, eliminating the air resistance, having these air skis. Um.
Speaker 1: One of the first things that I thought about when
Speaker 1: I was reading about the hyper loop system was it
Speaker 1: always reminded me in principle of the pneumatic bank tubes.
Speaker 1: Remember those yes, exactly what you're talking about. And there's
Speaker 1: even a there's even this such a tangent. But there's
Speaker 1: even a system that someone tried to build, I believe
Speaker 1: in New York that was supposed to be a pneumatic
Speaker 1: train system spoil alert didn't work out, and so how
Speaker 1: how would we like We're gonna keep explaining the science,
Speaker 1: but but it's it's important that we underline, we emphasize
Speaker 1: that this is at best wildly ambitious. So we've got um,
Speaker 1: we've got back to uh to the idea with the science.
Speaker 1: Now at this point, we're we're talking about principles, we're
Speaker 1: talking about blue sky stuff. I love that you up
Speaker 1: the p example. This is a great example P A
Speaker 1: P E A for our family show. I'm sorry, so
Speaker 1: this uh, this p this sealed capsule um could carry
Speaker 1: twenty eight passengers, right, so it's larger than your average.
Speaker 1: He even suggested that if you wanted to expand the hyperloop,
Speaker 1: you could have larger capsules that could carry not just passengers,
Speaker 1: but cars as well. One of the reasons for that
Speaker 1: is that the proposed stations that would be in Los
Speaker 1: Angeles and San Francisco would actually be in outlying areas,
Speaker 1: meaning that once you've got there, you would not be
Speaker 1: right there in the city center. You would have to
Speaker 1: find some other means of transportation to getting you to
Speaker 1: your final location, assuming that it's not a hotel that's
Speaker 1: adjacent to the to the station, right, which would be
Speaker 1: probably wildly expensive. Yeah, well, you know, yes, And I
Speaker 1: remember I read one report that said, because you would
Speaker 1: have to transfer to a different form of transportation, that
Speaker 1: would significantly increase the travel time. And I'm thinking, have
Speaker 1: you ever driven between San Francisco and Los Angeles, because
Speaker 1: I don't know, you know, if you know what the
Speaker 1: word significant means, because I have gone between San Francisco
Speaker 1: and Los Angeles by car and it is not leisurely
Speaker 1: is a good word for it? How long did it take?
Speaker 1: We actually decided to make it a road trip, so
Speaker 1: we stopped overnight between the two and we we took
Speaker 1: a more scenic route anyway, we didn't take a direct
Speaker 1: route between San Francisco and l A. We went down
Speaker 1: the coastal Highway, so we were already going out of
Speaker 1: our way. But we stopped just south of Big Sir,
Speaker 1: which is gorgeous. By the way, if you've ever been
Speaker 1: to California and you've been there, you know what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about, and if you haven't, you should check it out.
Speaker 1: It's absolutely beautiful landscape. But it's a long drive, and
Speaker 1: we decided we would make that an experience as opposed
Speaker 1: to a frustration. Right, we planned for it to be
Speaker 1: a long drive and that we would take a break
Speaker 1: halfway down. Now, if you were to go just down
Speaker 1: the highway, it'd be a few hours, right, It wouldn't
Speaker 1: be It wouldn't be like a you know, a twelve
Speaker 1: hour drive or anything, depending upon how bad the traffic is,
Speaker 1: because it can get rough. But it's it's it's definitely
Speaker 1: not a quick trip and uh, at least not yet,
Speaker 1: but the hyper loop could possibly make it a quick trip. Now.
Speaker 1: We haven't talked even about the propulsion system. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: talked about that. It's floating above the track, well not
Speaker 1: even a track, it's floating above the ground of this tunnel,
Speaker 1: which again is elevated. It's on these pylons, and we
Speaker 1: talked about how uh you know, it's uh, we got
Speaker 1: the lower air pressure inside the tunnel, but how does
Speaker 1: it actually move. It uses a series of linear electric
Speaker 1: motors which actually create a magnetic field, and so in
Speaker 1: this case, it's like the maglev trains that also use
Speaker 1: magnetic fields for two purposes. They use it one to
Speaker 1: levitate the train and the second one is to propel
Speaker 1: the train down the track. So while you're not using
Speaker 1: magnetism to levitate the capsule inside the hyper loop, you
Speaker 1: are using it to push it forward. And here's the
Speaker 1: neat thing. It's because you've got that low air pressure
Speaker 1: system within this tunnel and you don't have to worry
Speaker 1: so much about friction. You've really reduced friction. You only
Speaker 1: have to accelerate the capsule for a relatively short amount
Speaker 1: of time and then it can glide the rest of
Speaker 1: the way because you don't have to continuously pour an
Speaker 1: energy to maintain that speed. I mean you will slow
Speaker 1: down on your own because, uh, you still have intropy
Speaker 1: to deal with. It's not a purely frictionless system. It's
Speaker 1: not a pure vacuum. So clearly eventually it's going to stop.
Speaker 1: But the term there is eventually. So that's the neat
Speaker 1: thing is that you accelerate to a top speed and
Speaker 1: then you stop, and then you just allow the capsule
Speaker 1: to travel the rest of the way. So now that
Speaker 1: we know how it goes, how fast can this thing go?
Speaker 1: The route is three hundred fifty four or miles or
Speaker 1: about seventy kilometers h Yeah, and and since we know, uh,
Speaker 1: since now we can get into our spoiler territory and
Speaker 1: say that the proposed transportation time is thirty five minutes.
Speaker 1: That's incredible. That's so such a short amount of time
Speaker 1: to go between l A and San Francisco. That's that's crazy.
Speaker 1: We are automatically gonna be old codgers who people will
Speaker 1: dismiss when we say, you know, day, it took here.
Speaker 1: It took care at least five hours to get it.
Speaker 1: It takes more than thirty five minutes to drive across
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. I mean that's l A is enormous. So yeah,
Speaker 1: and this, um, so this this speed, let's see, how
Speaker 1: would you I've I've heard some differing numbers, so um,
Speaker 1: I usually say, I usually say it's right around like
Speaker 1: just below six hundred miles per hour as the average speed.
Speaker 1: Somewhere somewhere between five and six hundred miles per hour
Speaker 1: would be the average speed. So that's roughly around nine
Speaker 1: kilometers per hour, give or take, you know, kilometers per
Speaker 1: hour because because again, like you said, the discussions vary
Speaker 1: on this because it all depends upon uh, you know,
Speaker 1: how you're defining everything. And thirty five minutes, I think
Speaker 1: when they say thirty five minutes, to me, that just
Speaker 1: sounds like a number like it, Like, I don't know
Speaker 1: that they have specifically worked it out where scientifically speaking,
Speaker 1: it's thirty five minutes travel time and almost to me
Speaker 1: sounds like, well, here's here's a short enough amount of
Speaker 1: time for you to consider this incredible accomplishment. But that
Speaker 1: would mean that you would have a top speed, Like
Speaker 1: I said, you'd hit that top speed and then allow
Speaker 1: it to slow down. That would be probably around between
Speaker 1: seven and fifty and seven and seventy five miles per
Speaker 1: hour or around twelve hundred kilometers per hour for your
Speaker 1: top speed. That's faster than what how most uh commercial
Speaker 1: jets travel, right, And that also gives us That also
Speaker 1: gives us a good place to note that if you
Speaker 1: are ever writing in this and you have some sort
Speaker 1: of phobia about this kind of stuff, um, you know,
Speaker 1: do your best, you might you might need to um
Speaker 1: have someone sing you a sweet song thirty five minutes
Speaker 1: because if you think about you were in an enclosed capsule.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing that there wouldn't be any real windows, because
Speaker 1: what would be the point. There's are really a way
Speaker 1: to do it that would be worth the effort. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess you could. You could put something
Speaker 1: along the tubes so that when you travel it's almost
Speaker 1: like animation. I've actually seen train tunnels that have this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff where because as long as the train
Speaker 1: is moving at the average speed, you get this illusion
Speaker 1: of animation because of the way that things are lit
Speaker 1: and the way you're moving through this tunnel. So I
Speaker 1: guess you could do that. But otherwise you are in
Speaker 1: an enclosed steel tunnel. It's not like you've got a
Speaker 1: lot to look at. So if you are claustrophobic, I
Speaker 1: would imagine that would be scary. Plus you're going to
Speaker 1: experience some some you know, some acceleration. I I I'm
Speaker 1: sure that the acceleration would be gradual, so it wouldn't
Speaker 1: be so incredible that you'd be all, you know, crushed
Speaker 1: back in your seats experiencing like ten g's of force.
Speaker 1: That would be way too much, um, but there, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there will definitely be noticeable effects. It's pretty much
Speaker 1: unavoidable at that at that level of speed. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then you have to also worry about deceleration when you
Speaker 1: get to the end of your trip. So again they
Speaker 1: would be using magnets to help slow down the capsule's
Speaker 1: travel so that you would come to a smooth stop.
Speaker 1: But that would be something that you have to take
Speaker 1: special care of. And obviously, like you, you definitely need
Speaker 1: to put this into very narrow ranges of acceptance because otherwise,
Speaker 1: how can you guarantee that the average person would would
Speaker 1: experience no ill effects inside this capsule? Keeping in mind
Speaker 1: that the average person that you know, there's what we
Speaker 1: say average, we're talking about a huge variety of variables,
Speaker 1: everything from uh, you know, health issues, part conditioning, pregnancy
Speaker 1: right right exactly, or you know, just someone who is older,
Speaker 1: would they be safe? Would they are they likely to
Speaker 1: suffer ill effects from this acceleration and deceleration. Someone who
Speaker 1: really had to use the bathroom but they forgot to
Speaker 1: do it before they got in the train. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know if there would be a bathroom in here.
Speaker 1: You would think there would need to be, just because
Speaker 1: you know, if you've got a group of people together, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and asking someone to hold it for thirty five minutes
Speaker 1: might be a bit much, depending upon that person, but
Speaker 1: they they're probably Okay, I'm gonna go out of lim
Speaker 1: and say there probably isn't at least yet. We do
Speaker 1: know that there are emergency exits built along the tubes,
Speaker 1: um or at least there would be. We haven't. We
Speaker 1: haven't built anything yet. Yeah, let's underline that again. And
Speaker 1: you did a great job emphasizing that in the beginning,
Speaker 1: but we can't say it enough. This has not been
Speaker 1: built yet and of this podcasting this podcast and um
Speaker 1: there also there's an additional uh, there's a supplemental power
Speaker 1: source here, the solar panels. Yeah. In fact, that's a
Speaker 1: great point there. I totally forgot to mention that too.
Speaker 1: Where does the hyperloop get its power because you're talking
Speaker 1: about electric motors providing that force to propel them. Uh,
Speaker 1: presumably you'd be using some form of electric motors to
Speaker 1: to create the air cushion. So where are you getting
Speaker 1: that power? And Musk had said, well, let's put solar
Speaker 1: panels along the top of this this raised tunnel, and
Speaker 1: you just harvest solar energy and you store that and
Speaker 1: use that as the power source, saying that if you
Speaker 1: did this properly, you would not have to tap into
Speaker 1: the power grid at all. It would be completely self
Speaker 1: contained in that respect, which you know obviously that would
Speaker 1: be a huge benefit. You could say, well, while the
Speaker 1: operating costs have only like we can't even estimate what
Speaker 1: the operating costs of this system would be, but if
Speaker 1: you can remove power from that, then you can at
Speaker 1: least compare that part to any other alternative plan. That's true.
Speaker 1: And also, you know, the other the other power source
Speaker 1: they're inside the pods would be the batteries that Tesla
Speaker 1: that again come from uh, Tesla bottlelesque electric cars. Well
Speaker 1: they don't, they're related to it, yeah, and Tesla, the
Speaker 1: Tesla motors. The one of the things that they've they've
Speaker 1: really innovated in is battery technology and charging technology. They
Speaker 1: have something called a supercharger which allows them to charge
Speaker 1: batteries to essentially full capacity at relatively short intervals. So
Speaker 1: that would allow them to continuously operate and recharge these
Speaker 1: these capsules so that you didn't have to worry about
Speaker 1: taking them offline for a great deal of time. Now, clearly, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the criticisms I've heard is that
Speaker 1: this system might work in California, where you get a
Speaker 1: lot of sunshine. But if you were to try and
Speaker 1: expand this so that you could, you know, maybe people
Speaker 1: who I don't know don't live in California. As crazy
Speaker 1: as that sounds to the two people who in this
Speaker 1: room three, really because we got no here too, none
Speaker 1: of us live in California. We would not be able
Speaker 1: to take advantage of this unless we were to head
Speaker 1: out and see our buddies at Revision three and then say, hey,
Speaker 1: let's go to Disneyland. Uh. And you know it's just
Speaker 1: a thirty five minute tripped on hyperloop. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: it's It wouldn't necessarily work everywhere using solar energy in
Speaker 1: the k Yeah, yeah, the UK might not get enough
Speaker 1: son to keep that going so they Now, you could
Speaker 1: argue that sure, you could offset whatever the power needs
Speaker 1: were with solar panels, and then the rest you would
Speaker 1: supply with whatever the power grid would supply. So it's
Speaker 1: not like it's an all or nothing game. It's not
Speaker 1: a zero sum game. I don't mean to say that,
Speaker 1: but it's one of those things you've got to take
Speaker 1: into consideration. So all right, so this sounds pretty incredible. Ben, this, this,
Speaker 1: this whole system sounds amazing to me. Um. You know what,
Speaker 1: everything that's amazing comes to the price tag. And I'm
Speaker 1: curious how much Musk thinks this system would cost. Oh man,
Speaker 1: you know, I think the bargain number that I've heard
Speaker 1: thrown around is as low as six billion. That's what
Speaker 1: I saw. That's the the alpha design has been called
Speaker 1: six billion dollars because this is again, no one has
Speaker 1: seriously looked into building this, at least to the point
Speaker 1: where talks go beyond just a kind of hypothetical situation. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good point. Right now. A lot of the
Speaker 1: numbers that you and I are pulling come directly from
Speaker 1: a fifty seven page uh. I think it's fair to
Speaker 1: call the manifesto written by Musk about the hyper loop
Speaker 1: and this, uh, this number comes from his estimate. This
Speaker 1: Alpha system. Think of it like, uh, think of it
Speaker 1: like when the first PlayStation came out, you know, it
Speaker 1: was it was it was chunky, it was first gin.
Speaker 1: It didn't have all the amenities, all the bells and whistles.
Speaker 1: For instance. The Alpha system doesn't take into account the
Speaker 1: idea of um which you mentioned earlier. The idea of
Speaker 1: putting passenger vehicles on pods. Right. So, in fact, I
Speaker 1: think they said that if you wanted to make it
Speaker 1: for passenger vehicles UH to be stored on those kind
Speaker 1: of pods as well, it would be more like seven
Speaker 1: point five billion, and at one point five billion increase
Speaker 1: for something that significant seems really really optimistic to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: optimistics the diplomat because you imagine that any capsule that
Speaker 1: could hold at least a vehicle and presumably more than one,
Speaker 1: if you're talking about this being a mass transportation system,
Speaker 1: then you know you're going to have to have larger capsules,
Speaker 1: which means in turn you have to have larger tunnels
Speaker 1: to to accommodate those larger capsules, stronger pylons or the weight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's I mean, everything ends up having to be larger
Speaker 1: and more more resilient, and it just then means that
Speaker 1: it's going to cost more. So one point five billion
Speaker 1: more is kind of I mean, I'm curious to see
Speaker 1: how they arrived at their numbers. Um, I've read other estimations.
Speaker 1: One person had suggested that it would be more like
Speaker 1: one hundred billion dollars to make such a system because
Speaker 1: you have to factor in everything from the design prototypes,
Speaker 1: developing it, testing it, making sure that it's safer people
Speaker 1: to use, and then finally building out the real system,
Speaker 1: and then uh, and then operating it, maintaining it. You
Speaker 1: know that there are a lot of costs in there,
Speaker 1: so uh, it's interesting too. Did you see how much
Speaker 1: they had proposed a ticket would be on the hyperloop? Yeah,
Speaker 1: twenty dollars. One way, it's more it would be more
Speaker 1: expensive for you to take a cab to the station
Speaker 1: than it would to take a trip from San Francisco
Speaker 1: to Los Angeles. Yeah, and twenty dollars. That to me,
Speaker 1: out of all the numbers I've got thrown around, twenty
Speaker 1: dollars is the one that is most likely to make
Speaker 1: me smirk, because that's that's blue sky. Know. If it works,
Speaker 1: is it fantastic? Sure? If it's fifty dollars for a ticket,
Speaker 1: is it worth it still? Yes? Yes, there's so much
Speaker 1: worth it. Yeah. That's the thing is that I wonder there.
Speaker 1: I've seen some economists say that I can't understand how
Speaker 1: they would come up with this idea that if you
Speaker 1: had a twenty dollar ticket, it would recapture the cost
Speaker 1: of building this thing within the time frame that Musk
Speaker 1: was suggesting. Uh, you know, I just I also think now, granted,
Speaker 1: Musk is a a pretty smart businessman. He's he's he's
Speaker 1: achieved way more on the business side of things than
Speaker 1: I have or that I ever expect to achieve. Hey,
Speaker 1: come on, you know, you never know what tomorrow brings.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe I maybe I end up coming up
Speaker 1: with Hey, I came up with an idea that could
Speaker 1: win me a Nobel Prize when I was talking about
Speaker 1: possibly the existence of white holes and why we haven't
Speaker 1: identified any. I'm still waiting on that check. I got
Speaker 1: a certificate though, I'll show it to you. Listeners sent
Speaker 1: me a certificate. Um. But yeah, it's just to me
Speaker 1: that just that twenty dollars per ticket, it really makes
Speaker 1: me wonder how many people per day this system would
Speaker 1: allow to travel so that you would recapture those costs
Speaker 1: within a reasonable amount of time. Well, I've got musk
Speaker 1: take on it, and it is an excellent question because
Speaker 1: that price has to we have to assume that there
Speaker 1: are there there's at least concre estimation behind that. Um,
Speaker 1: here is what he's thinking. He said the capacity of
Speaker 1: would be on average eight forty passengers per hour. Wow,
Speaker 1: So he argues that's more than sufficient enough to transport
Speaker 1: all of the six million passengers traveling between l A
Speaker 1: and San Francisco per year. Uh, and that accounts for
Speaker 1: sevent of those travelers to use hyper loop during rush hour.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of there's a lot of wind
Speaker 1: at your back scenario stuff going on, and forty per hour,
Speaker 1: that's you know, that's pretty amazing if and how many
Speaker 1: people did they say the capsule could hold, like twenty something,
Speaker 1: so that there are a lot of capsules traveling on
Speaker 1: that system in order to get and obviously this is
Speaker 1: a two way loop. I mean there's a loop, so
Speaker 1: you would divide that by two to figure out how
Speaker 1: many are traveling north versus south essentially and leaving every
Speaker 1: two minutes. That's the interval of the trains. Again, that's
Speaker 1: the proposed interval of the trains. And um you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: it might sound weird to some of the listeners that
Speaker 1: you and I are taking a few moments every few
Speaker 1: minutes to say, well, that would be this is conditional.
Speaker 1: But it's very, very very important to note this because
Speaker 1: any time that we're talking about um an infrastructure process
Speaker 1: uh an infrastructure of this size, or in any any
Speaker 1: kind of new transportation. We have to understand that it's
Speaker 1: very safe to assume that the cost will balloon, will
Speaker 1: skyros sure, yeah, because you're always going to run into
Speaker 1: other costs, just like Musk ran into other costs with SpaceX,
Speaker 1: things that he did not anticipate because he was told
Speaker 1: one thing and it turned out to be another thing.
Speaker 1: I would imagine the same situation would happen here where
Speaker 1: things that you know, you're basing it off of a
Speaker 1: certain set of expectations, but you haven't factored into all
Speaker 1: the other variables that could affect any of those numbers,
Speaker 1: including things like well, in order for me to get
Speaker 1: the political uh angle covered, I need to make sure
Speaker 1: that all these other things are covered first, or I'm
Speaker 1: not going to get the support I need to get
Speaker 1: this done, which kind of you know, this is kind
Speaker 1: of brings us into those pros and cons. Obviously, the
Speaker 1: pro here is that you would have a high speed
Speaker 1: transportation system that could get you between two distant cities
Speaker 1: in thirty five minutes, which is phenomenal for a low
Speaker 1: price twenty bucks a ticket. That's yeah, I can imagine
Speaker 1: so many people in l A or San Francisco taking
Speaker 1: weekend trips. You know, because you've got twenty bucks a person,
Speaker 1: it's not nothing. You can go visit the other city
Speaker 1: and your you can spend most of your time doing
Speaker 1: whatever it is you want to do instead of in
Speaker 1: the car. Great idea. I like the idea that's getting
Speaker 1: most it's electricity from solar power, so it's not causing
Speaker 1: too much of a carbon footprint. Depending upon how you know,
Speaker 1: you would have to factor in how much carbon footprint
Speaker 1: was generated just through the construction, but the operation you
Speaker 1: would imagine would be you know, pretty low since you're
Speaker 1: using solar power as your source of energy. I love that.
Speaker 1: I love innovation obviously. I love the idea that if
Speaker 1: this were actually to be as cost efficient as Musk claims,
Speaker 1: it would be remarkably less expensive than the proposed train
Speaker 1: high speed train system that they want to build between
Speaker 1: l A and San Francisco. Ah. Yes, I'm so glad
Speaker 1: you mentioned that, because that's one of our that's one
Speaker 1: of our other factors. We should take just a just
Speaker 1: a sidebar here and talk about that. Uh. Hyper loop is.
Speaker 1: While hyper loop might be the Internet favorite right now.
Speaker 1: It is not is not the only contender in the
Speaker 1: game for high speed transit in this realm uh. There's
Speaker 1: also California's UH state sanctioned transit system, which um which,
Speaker 1: let's see, what's the nicest way to say it, It
Speaker 1: throws that six billion dollar price tag into a very
Speaker 1: favorable contrast, right. Yeah. Musk was making this point when
Speaker 1: he was talking about hyperloop for the first couple of times.
Speaker 1: He said he was looking at the figure for this
Speaker 1: proposed bullet train between l A and San Francisco, and
Speaker 1: he said, there are two factors here, two superlatives that
Speaker 1: you never want. One, it's the most expensive bullet train
Speaker 1: per mile than any other one in the world. And
Speaker 1: to it's the slowest one. So it's very slow and
Speaker 1: very expensive. He's compared to other bullet train systems. Right,
Speaker 1: And we know that we know that in the case
Speaker 1: of bullet train technology, this is not in the same
Speaker 1: situation as a hyper loop. Bullet train technology has been tested,
Speaker 1: has been proven to work successfully in Japan, it works
Speaker 1: successfully in China, there's some in Europe as well as
Speaker 1: some in Europe as well. And it's not as though,
Speaker 1: it's not as though this is slow and inordinately expensive
Speaker 1: because of a lot of research. It might just be,
Speaker 1: as Must proposes, a frustrating example of poor implementation, which
Speaker 1: he was so frustrated with it that it led to
Speaker 1: this hyper loop idea. Yeah, I said that that was
Speaker 1: essentially the impetus that got into thinking there had to
Speaker 1: be a better way to get people quickly between uh
Speaker 1: these two cities and at a lower price. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I'll put on some pros to dovetail with the pros
Speaker 1: that you you earlier mentioned withdraw all great good points. Um.
Speaker 1: One of the other pros that I see, and this
Speaker 1: is all blue sky. If this works, how amazing would
Speaker 1: it be to be able to build a network of
Speaker 1: hyper loops kind of picture just almost like a chain
Speaker 1: of loops around a around a coastline or traversing through
Speaker 1: the United States. I mean, that's wildly ambitious. That's that's
Speaker 1: something that's not to bring mortality into it, Jonathan, but
Speaker 1: that's something that might be beyond our lifetimes even if
Speaker 1: it did work. Right we have this, Uh, well, I
Speaker 1: could also imagine that if you're talking about a more
Speaker 1: of a nationwide rollout of this, you would face other,
Speaker 1: uh interesting opponents to it. I could imagine the airline
Speaker 1: industry being very much interested in the fact that you
Speaker 1: would suddenly have a high speed method getting between two
Speaker 1: locations at perhaps lower travel times than you would in
Speaker 1: the air and you know that would be Yeah, there'll
Speaker 1: be a lot more politics going into it, absolutely, And
Speaker 1: it's funny because on car stuff, we did an episode
Speaker 1: once on the proposal for a global inter interstate system
Speaker 1: lack of a better word, and by far even countering
Speaker 1: in the infrastructure, even countering in the cost of maintenance,
Speaker 1: which is astronomical. Uh. The by far one of the
Speaker 1: most difficult things would be political opposition, which I think
Speaker 1: leads us naturally into the cons of of this system. Right.
Speaker 1: So one would be we can't really be sure what
Speaker 1: the cost is, so we don't while we know what
Speaker 1: Musk claims he thinks it'll it'll cost that maybe wildly optimistic, um,
Speaker 1: Whereas we can look at what other systems cost based
Speaker 1: upon previous builds. Although I think the uh, the proposed
Speaker 1: bullet train is already something at like sixty eight billion dollars,
Speaker 1: so it's already ten times more expensive than what Musk
Speaker 1: is proposing, and it was sixty billion dollars and it
Speaker 1: jumped up eight billions, right. And it also it would
Speaker 1: take you about two hours forty minutes to get from
Speaker 1: l A to San Francisco on that train as opposed
Speaker 1: to as opposed to the Musk's Train or Musk's hyperloop.
Speaker 1: It's not trained but anyway, UM, so that's a con.
Speaker 1: Another cons it's a totally unproven technology. So with no precedent,
Speaker 1: it's really hard to say whether or not it will work.
Speaker 1: Like you could build some prototypes and test it out,
Speaker 1: but we honestly don't know. And it could be one
Speaker 1: of those things where you tested out and it doesn't work,
Speaker 1: and then you've you've, in some people's minds anyway, wasted time, energy,
Speaker 1: and effort in order to prove that you could not
Speaker 1: do what you had hoped to do. So there's that's one.
Speaker 1: Another one is just you know, trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how do you you know, how do you navigate those
Speaker 1: tricky political waters where you want to erect all these
Speaker 1: pylons alongside highways in California, you know, and and then
Speaker 1: just the construction alone, like how how long would that
Speaker 1: take to build an enormous loop built on pylons? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know, and and so there's there's that con as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's a that's an interesting one because that is
Speaker 1: a con that is going to become more expensive over
Speaker 1: time given the growth of that area of California. If
Speaker 1: you know, let's say, let's just be wildly optimistic. Man,
Speaker 1: let's say eight years from now, right, they break ground
Speaker 1: and they've got they probably have a lot of agreements
Speaker 1: secured for the land or whatever. But then it's obviously
Speaker 1: it's going to take more than a year to build
Speaker 1: something this gargantelan. So the next year comes around and wait, oh,
Speaker 1: the prices have changed. So instead of twenty million dollars
Speaker 1: for this stretch of land, it's twenty million per acre now,
Speaker 1: just like the rockets. But again, just back to your
Speaker 1: earlier point, there's no, it's very difficult because there are
Speaker 1: so many variables that are in the dark. I've got
Speaker 1: some additional cons that I haven't seen totally address um
Speaker 1: one of at least, and a lot of stuff we've
Speaker 1: been reading. Now. One con that I love that you
Speaker 1: brought up was the idea that of the price of
Speaker 1: course will balloon. And people have rightly said that there
Speaker 1: are some factors that are not taken in consideration here.
Speaker 1: I think that is up there with political political maneuver,
Speaker 1: and I think that is the thing that will be
Speaker 1: most likely to kill it. Another thing is um now
Speaker 1: you know, I'm I'm kind of like a softie in
Speaker 1: my heart on my sleeve or whatever. Uh. This could
Speaker 1: be damaging to some community easier industries that rely upon
Speaker 1: that traffic UH to sustain their part of the problem. Exactly,
Speaker 1: nail on the head. Now, of course this could be
Speaker 1: a little bit dark for some people. But in the
Speaker 1: spirit of objectivity, we must mention this what happens when
Speaker 1: there's an accident. What happens if we already have a
Speaker 1: sunk cost of billions of dollars and then there's a disaster. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because if the capsule has a failure inside, you're talking
Speaker 1: about a low pressure system, it's much higher pressure inside
Speaker 1: the capsule. You just like an experience of being in
Speaker 1: a plane at at a high enough altitude, You've got
Speaker 1: very low pressure outside, higher pressure inside. If there's a breach,
Speaker 1: then everything gets blown out and there's a there is
Speaker 1: a line of well, if you think about an entire
Speaker 1: loop of other capsules two minutes behind. So if there
Speaker 1: is any sort of failure of the propulsion system, then
Speaker 1: you could end up having a collision. If they're is
Speaker 1: a failure of the propulsion system in the sense of deceleration,
Speaker 1: then you could have injuries as the capsule gets to
Speaker 1: its stopping point. There are a lot of safety questions.
Speaker 1: I mean you're talking especially if talking about capsule's leaving
Speaker 1: every two minutes. That thing literally has to run like
Speaker 1: clockwork like. It would have to be so efficient. You
Speaker 1: would have to have a very secure system to slow
Speaker 1: down capsules and maybe have them in a little waiting
Speaker 1: area along one section of the loop before uh, the
Speaker 1: previous capsule is completely unloaded, because again, depending upon who
Speaker 1: is in that capsule, it may take longer than average,
Speaker 1: or you know, it may not take that long at all.
Speaker 1: And that whole thing has to be set up so that,
Speaker 1: you know, you don't have any safety concerns. That's huge.
Speaker 1: The software would have to be as innovative as the
Speaker 1: two idea itself, because you have to be continual security.
Speaker 1: I'm not seeing it's impossible, man, It's just hard. It's
Speaker 1: just hard, that's the thing. And then you know, humans
Speaker 1: have done some stuff that's really freaking hard. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and Muscus sent people into space. So it's not that
Speaker 1: it's not that we're saying that it's impossible to do,
Speaker 1: but you know it, we definitely have to keep the
Speaker 1: challenges in mind in order for us to meet those challenges,
Speaker 1: Like even from the optimistic side, you've got to acknowledge
Speaker 1: it so that way you're prepared to overcome them. If
Speaker 1: you don't acknowledge them, then you're just it's just a
Speaker 1: ticking time bomb. Really, We've got some other things to
Speaker 1: say about high speed rail, but before we get into that,
Speaker 1: let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we've talked about Musk and his influence. We've talked
Speaker 1: about his idea of the hyperloop and how it would
Speaker 1: work assuming everything went as planned. We talked about the
Speaker 1: pros and cons. Let's talk about some of the other
Speaker 1: systems out there. We've mentioned a little bit about maglev trains,
Speaker 1: and I've done an episode about maglev trains, so I
Speaker 1: don't want to go over it too much, but it is,
Speaker 1: like we said, a similar idea, this idea of having
Speaker 1: a train that doesn't actually sit down down on wheels,
Speaker 1: at least not the entire way on. Whenever it's at
Speaker 1: a station, it would be down on the track, wheels
Speaker 1: to the track, and then once it leaves the station,
Speaker 1: magnets would end up creating a repulsive force against one another.
Speaker 1: And they're different approaches to this. There's the electromagnetic suspension,
Speaker 1: there's electro dynamic suspension. UH. There's the induct tracks system,
Speaker 1: which is the permanent magnet passive suspension. There's all these
Speaker 1: different ways of doing it, but essentially the same idea arises.
Speaker 1: You're just using these magnets to push the train up
Speaker 1: over the rails and then to propel them down the
Speaker 1: tracks length uh, and then also to slow them down
Speaker 1: when they get to where they need to be, where
Speaker 1: they can then come back down onto their wheels and
Speaker 1: come to a rolling stop. And these are these are
Speaker 1: also high speed. But how high speed are we talking
Speaker 1: in comparison to the hyperloop proposal. They're not as fast,
Speaker 1: mostly because most of them are not encapsulated in a tunnel,
Speaker 1: low air pressure. They tend to be out among the outside,
Speaker 1: so they still travel at an incredible speed because again
Speaker 1: you don't have to worry about that friction. See, friction
Speaker 1: is not just something that slows you down, it means
Speaker 1: that you're losing energy. Because you're losing energy in the
Speaker 1: form of heat. Right, you're having to pour more energy
Speaker 1: into your vehicle to make it go the speed. You
Speaker 1: want to compensate for the fact that you're losing energy
Speaker 1: and heat. By making it frictionless, not only can it
Speaker 1: go faster, but you don't have to pour as much
Speaker 1: energy into it because you're not losing so much in
Speaker 1: this this heat problem. There are other issues. For example,
Speaker 1: most maglev trains have to use superconductors because you know,
Speaker 1: actually they all use superconductors in order to generate these
Speaker 1: magnetic fields, and superconductors are not cheap and uh, most
Speaker 1: of them, although this has changed over the last couple
Speaker 1: of decades, most of them require being cooled to very,
Speaker 1: very very low temperatures. We're talking just a couple of
Speaker 1: degrees above absolute zero, so, right, and that's not just
Speaker 1: to be clear, that's not something that happens every every
Speaker 1: so often or on a cycle that has to be continuous.
Speaker 1: So you're talking about using something like liquid nitrogen to
Speaker 1: get it down to a certain temperature and then switching
Speaker 1: to liquid helium because liquid nitrogen is not cold enough
Speaker 1: that being said, there are some super colliders that have
Speaker 1: been developed since then, since they started building maglev trains
Speaker 1: that operate at higher temperatures. And by higher, I still
Speaker 1: mean really really cold, just not just not as cold, right,
Speaker 1: So it's not like the deepest reaches of space cold,
Speaker 1: but it's way chillier than it gets in Minnesota and
Speaker 1: the winter cold. So, um, you know, it's not it's
Speaker 1: not something that makes it. It makes it more expensive
Speaker 1: to operate. And so because of the expense of having
Speaker 1: to operate these not just operate them, but also build them.
Speaker 1: There there aren't as many maglev trains as you might
Speaker 1: imagine based upon their their initial appeal from the fact
Speaker 1: that they and have as much friction. There are maglev trains,
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of them. Some of them are
Speaker 1: just prototypes. Yes, some of them are just prototypes. And
Speaker 1: and for a while, to be honest, maglev trains seemed
Speaker 1: like they could be a candidate for this. There's this
Speaker 1: joke that you and I have made before off air,
Speaker 1: and that Scott and I have made before off air,
Speaker 1: that there's all this fantastic technology. Man, it's just ten
Speaker 1: years away. Yeah, it's always ten years ago. Whatever you
Speaker 1: always are, you're always just ten years away. Yeah. We
Speaker 1: make that same joke on forward thinking as well. Plug um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so so the magleft trains their top speeds
Speaker 1: maybe somewhere between three and four, right, and so that's
Speaker 1: still significantly slower than what the hyper loop would attain
Speaker 1: assuming it worked the way we think it's supposed to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: big difference being that maglev trains are wait for it,
Speaker 1: real um. So that I think alone gives them some
Speaker 1: bonus points in my book. But also if we if
Speaker 1: we think about the um the the advantages that maglev
Speaker 1: trains have are um in comparison to the hyper loop.
Speaker 1: You have to ask yourself, does do those advantages make
Speaker 1: the maglev trains a more feasible option? You know? Is
Speaker 1: the advantage of extra speed? Uh? Preferable? I think the
Speaker 1: biggest advantage maglev trains have is not, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: in their operation, but the fact that we have proof
Speaker 1: of that it works, right, Like, we know that maglev
Speaker 1: trains work. So therefore that is a huge advantage over
Speaker 1: the hyper loop because that's something that from what we
Speaker 1: understand it should work assuming you built it the right way,
Speaker 1: but we don't have proof of it alright, so Ben,
Speaker 1: let's talk about this other guy. Have you heard about
Speaker 1: Darryl Auster. Darryl Austere might be familiar. Why he proposed
Speaker 1: a system that would be a transportation system. It's a
Speaker 1: steel tube on some elevated structure, like on pylons that
Speaker 1: would use linear electric motors to push capsules at high
Speaker 1: speed across vast distances. Um, might sound a little familiar. Yeah, Hey,
Speaker 1: I didn't want I didn't want to interrupt, but um,
Speaker 1: this this does sound a little bit familiar. Not to
Speaker 1: be a guy living in the past. But isn't this
Speaker 1: just what we've been talking about? Yeah? Yeah, like, um,
Speaker 1: like five minutes ago. Yes, this is exactly it's it's
Speaker 1: called the Evacuated Tube Transport System or e T three. Right,
Speaker 1: And didn't the e T three hit the news and
Speaker 1: hit the public sphere, uh before this hyperloot proposal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well before it. And also Auster, interestingly enough, paid a
Speaker 1: little visit earlier this year two SpaceX, which is Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you know this because we talked
Speaker 1: about at the top of the show one of the
Speaker 1: things must does. Yeah, it's the it's the ancient paths
Speaker 1: to me. Now the top of the show. But the yes,
Speaker 1: this is a very interesting point because this has fueled
Speaker 1: some uh, some speculation. Yes, yes, yeah, I would agree
Speaker 1: that's a good word for it. So the speculation is
Speaker 1: essentially that perhaps either Musk knew about Auster's idea and
Speaker 1: essentially lifted it because other people had suggested that Auster was,
Speaker 1: for lack of a better word, whackadoodle um, or rather
Speaker 1: that his ideas were probably unrealistic and difficult to put
Speaker 1: into practice, he did not get the same consideration or
Speaker 1: street cred that that he encountered much more skepticisms. Right,
Speaker 1: And it's it's possible that Musk is exactly the right
Speaker 1: guy to go to about this sort of thing, because
Speaker 1: Musk has this already has this past of making these
Speaker 1: incredible accomplishments, things that some people might have called impossible
Speaker 1: before he achieved them. So uh, there's some speculation that
Speaker 1: in fact Musk has licensed the technology or the design
Speaker 1: from Auster. And in fact, Auster has said that there
Speaker 1: are people or organizations that are licensing his ideas, but
Speaker 1: he does not go so far as to identify who
Speaker 1: they are. He says that that's up to them, that
Speaker 1: it's their choice to come out and say, yes, I've
Speaker 1: licensed this technology from so and so. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: you see. I think we're being very fair about this
Speaker 1: because the only three things there are three things we
Speaker 1: know for sure. First, the design of hyperloop and et
Speaker 1: three very similar. Second, uh, the Darryl did visit space X. Yes.
Speaker 1: Third uh, Darryl did mention that there was licensing involved.
Speaker 1: But none of that even all of that together does
Speaker 1: not conclusively prove anything. No, it's circumstantial. Circumstantial, so we
Speaker 1: call it. We call it speculation. And I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: ahead and call it interesting. Yes, I I will go
Speaker 1: so far as to say very interesting. I raise your
Speaker 1: interesting with a very um yeah. I think it would
Speaker 1: not surprise me to find out that Musk had heard
Speaker 1: of this and then thought it was a great idea,
Speaker 1: and that maybe together they realized that because the resistance
Speaker 1: that Auster had faced when he was proposing his idea
Speaker 1: to other you know, like essentially outlets were like that's crazy.
Speaker 1: Then Must goes forward and he says essentially the same thing,
Speaker 1: it's crazy awesome. Yeah. So so it's it's possible that
Speaker 1: this is in fact an evolution of Auster's idea. It
Speaker 1: could very well be that it's two people who thought
Speaker 1: the same thing independently. That has happened many, many, many times.
Speaker 1: It happened, Yeah, it happened with It happened with calculus,
Speaker 1: that happened with lots of things, you know. So we're
Speaker 1: not going to jump to that conclusion, but it is interesting, uh.
Speaker 1: And so you know, there are a couple of other
Speaker 1: things we can mention, like there's some other high speed
Speaker 1: uh technologies that could possibly come into play. But I
Speaker 1: think that that really it's down to the brass tacks, Ben.
Speaker 1: I think we have to sit down and actually predict
Speaker 1: will hyper loop come to pass or is it? As
Speaker 1: you mentioned before, vaporware, get out of my head. You're
Speaker 1: reading my mind, man, because you're right, the time has come. Uh.
Speaker 1: I don't know if we have any dramatic music playing
Speaker 1: in the background, but it's in my head right now.
Speaker 1: Who shall do the honors, sir? You know what I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go first. I'm going to say that we will
Speaker 1: not see this become a transportation between Los Angeles and
Speaker 1: San Francisco because the challenges of making sure that it
Speaker 1: will work properly and navigating those tricky political waters that
Speaker 1: are already so invested in a bullet train uh plan
Speaker 1: for those cities. I just think that's too great a
Speaker 1: challenge to overcome. I think that even if you were
Speaker 1: to prove the technology works, getting past that political barrier
Speaker 1: is a huge, huge task, right, Okay, So to dovetail
Speaker 1: onto that, I am going to also have a bit
Speaker 1: of a qualified prediction, and I I predict, I want
Speaker 1: to be optimistic about this, that we're going to see
Speaker 1: something like the hyper loop in the future. However, I
Speaker 1: don't think it's going to be quite up to the
Speaker 1: specs that we've heard proposed, and I am also skeptical
Speaker 1: that it could be built in California at this juncture.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a reason that Google Fiber went to
Speaker 1: Kansas City, right, right, right, that's my prediction something like it.
Speaker 1: And I will say that the hyper loop proposal is
Speaker 1: in many ways much more reserved than Auster's originally, uh
Speaker 1: than his proposal, because Auster had said that he wanted
Speaker 1: this ET three system to be deployed throughout the United States,
Speaker 1: which means that you have interstate politics to deal within,
Speaker 1: not just within one state. Right, You've got all these
Speaker 1: different states that you have to factor into that consideration
Speaker 1: and that makes it way more complex. So, um, I
Speaker 1: think it was a more modest proposal, if you might
Speaker 1: call it that, than the the E T three, but
Speaker 1: I still think it's not you know, there's been some
Speaker 1: discussion that maybe they could look at building one in Texas. First.
Speaker 1: Texas is also a huge state with lots of nothing
Speaker 1: between some of the major cities, so that could possibly
Speaker 1: be something we see. And you know, I hope we
Speaker 1: do see a hyperloop type system in place. I just
Speaker 1: don't think it's going to be between l A and
Speaker 1: San Francisco in the near future. Yeah, agreed. Well, that
Speaker 1: wraps up our discussion about hyper loop. Guys, if you
Speaker 1: have any suggestions for future topics for tech Stuff, let
Speaker 1: me know. Send an email the addresses tech Stuff at
Speaker 1: Discovery dot com. You can also drop us a line
Speaker 1: on our social networks. You can find us on Tumbler, Twitter,
Speaker 1: and Facebook with the handle tech stuff hs w n ben.
Speaker 1: Where can they find your stuff? Oh? Well, thanks for asking, Jonathan. First,
Speaker 1: I want to thank you and Laurence so much for
Speaker 1: having me over on your show. Uh the places where
Speaker 1: you can find me, well, let's see, you can find
Speaker 1: me on a show called Stuff They Don't Want You
Speaker 1: To Know, which is YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, Twitter. Also, Scott
Speaker 1: and I host a show called car Stuff, which dovetails
Speaker 1: nicely for fans of tech um and full disclosure guys, Uh,
Speaker 1: Jonathan and I hang out and stuff outside the office,
Speaker 1: and we do we do talk about this stuff, so
Speaker 1: you might see our ideas popping up in different shows.
Speaker 1: And speaking of that, one of the things I'm most
Speaker 1: excited to talk about. Uh, one of the coolest places
Speaker 1: to find us is you can see the dynamic duo
Speaker 1: you're listening to right now on brain Stuff, right Johnathan.
Speaker 1: That's a video series and there that's actually a rotating
Speaker 1: set of hosts. We don't actually rotate on camera. We
Speaker 1: could do that. We should try it. Yeah, might get
Speaker 1: dizzy after about two or three takes. But the idea
Speaker 1: is that you can actually see different hosts from all
Speaker 1: the different house stuff work shows pop up on that series.
Speaker 1: And Ben and I often will will take a topic
Speaker 1: together and will will be to host performance for brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: which has been that's been a blast. It's been a
Speaker 1: lot of fun. So yeah, you can check us out
Speaker 1: there as well. So there you go. Guys, and we
Speaker 1: will talk to you again really soon for more on
Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics. Does it, how staff works?
Speaker 1: Dot com