Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: And how the tech are you? I've been better? Uh.
Speaker 1: Those who follow me on Twitter probably saw that despite
Speaker 1: all of my careful behavior, being vaccinated and boosted and
Speaker 1: wearing masks and all that, I still managed apparently to
Speaker 1: catch COVID. I feel mostly okay, uh, And I'm actually
Speaker 1: getting a different kind of test tomorrow to make certain
Speaker 1: that this is a truly a positive case and not
Speaker 1: a false positive, because the results I got were very
Speaker 1: faint but within the realm of saying that's a positive results.
Speaker 1: So I'm taking all precautions. Isolated in my house, and
Speaker 1: I dealing with all that meant that I wasn't quite
Speaker 1: ready to have a full new episode for you. However,
Speaker 1: in Seen, I recorded an episode titled hyper Loop and
Speaker 1: the Boring Podcast, which in itself was an update to
Speaker 1: a two thousand thirteen episode titled The Hype about hyper Loop,
Speaker 1: and I figured it was it was time for a
Speaker 1: quick update on what's been going on in the hyper
Speaker 1: loop world since two thousand seventeen. But you know, I
Speaker 1: there's no reason for me to re record like a
Speaker 1: whole episode about hyper loop I have done that, and
Speaker 1: so I thought instead is I would play the two
Speaker 1: thousand seventeen episode and then at the end. This is
Speaker 1: a long episode, but at the end of that I
Speaker 1: will give you some updates about the specific hyper loop
Speaker 1: one company that kind of emerged from all this. There
Speaker 1: are other companies all around the world that are also
Speaker 1: building out variations on the hyper loop design. Some of
Speaker 1: them are so far removed from the hyper loop design
Speaker 1: that I wouldn't even call them that anymore. But I'm
Speaker 1: specifically focusing on kind of the O G hyper Loop company. Also,
Speaker 1: this was this episode that you're about to here. It
Speaker 1: was recorded right at the tail end of my time
Speaker 1: with how stuff Works dot Com, before stuff Media, which
Speaker 1: was like the podcast arm of How Stuff Works spun
Speaker 1: out from the company, and then of course I Heart
Speaker 1: Media subsequently acquired stuff Media. So this is a real
Speaker 1: blast from the past. I listened to a little bit
Speaker 1: of it and I was like, oh, yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen was like. But enjoy this episode from
Speaker 1: I'll be back at the end with some updates I'm
Speaker 1: so enthusiastic in fact, that I'm going to revisit a
Speaker 1: topic that we covered way back in two thousand thirteen.
Speaker 1: That would be hyper loop. Yeah, that's when we published
Speaker 1: the episode titled the Hype About hyper Loop, because I'm
Speaker 1: clever with headlines, y'all. Since that time, we've had a
Speaker 1: couple of startups that formed in order to pour in money, time,
Speaker 1: resources effort to make hyper loop into a reality, change
Speaker 1: it from just this interesting vision Elon Musk had into
Speaker 1: an actual form of transportation. So I thought it would
Speaker 1: behoove us to revisit the topic and see where things
Speaker 1: stand now. Plus I can use the word behoove again.
Speaker 1: That's twice in the same day. I'm recording this. The
Speaker 1: same day I did a live stream about the game
Speaker 1: Dungeons and Dragons on a show called Game Changers. Behoof
Speaker 1: is my word of the day. Anyway, I can also
Speaker 1: talk about a really boring company, and that's what's called foreshadowing. Now,
Speaker 1: before I jump into the latest news, I should go
Speaker 1: back over the history of the hyper loop concept and
Speaker 1: explain not just where it came from, but what is
Speaker 1: the actual idea of the hyper loop and how is
Speaker 1: it's a post to work, and why is it even
Speaker 1: something worth talking about? Well, back in August, that's when
Speaker 1: the world at large learned about the hyper loop concept.
Speaker 1: It's when Elon Musk published a white paper that was
Speaker 1: about fifty eight pages long. And Elon Musk, in case
Speaker 1: you aren't aware, is the entrepreneur behind such companies as SpaceX,
Speaker 1: the private space company, and Tesla, the electric vehicle company.
Speaker 1: This white paper was all about a high tech transportation
Speaker 1: system is kind of a train, kind of like a subway,
Speaker 1: kind of like well, Elon must described it as a
Speaker 1: cross between a hockey table, like an air hockey table,
Speaker 1: and a rail gun, which is a pretty exciting way
Speaker 1: to think about getting from point A to point B. Now,
Speaker 1: the motivating factor for all of this seems to be
Speaker 1: that the state of California had approved a high speed
Speaker 1: rail project and Elon Musk it got his dander up.
Speaker 1: If you were to look at Elon Musk's dander that day,
Speaker 1: it would have been in the up position. Now, that's
Speaker 1: because in that white paper, Musk laid out all of
Speaker 1: his frustrations with this high speed rail project, and they
Speaker 1: really boiled down to two major ones with a lot
Speaker 1: of subsidiary ones. The two major ones was that would
Speaker 1: be that uh, that one. It was incredibly expensive, just
Speaker 1: really a multibillion dollar project, so it was in his mind,
Speaker 1: financially wasteful. Secondly, he argued that out of all the
Speaker 1: high speed rail systems that were in operation or proposed,
Speaker 1: it was one of the slowest. So he said, on
Speaker 1: a per mile basis, it's one of the most expensive.
Speaker 1: On a speed basis, it's one of the slowest, So
Speaker 1: why would you want to spend a lot of money
Speaker 1: to not get anywhere fast? He thought that that was
Speaker 1: an incredible waste of time and money, and that it
Speaker 1: wasn't going to solve the issue you of of of
Speaker 1: speeding up travel between major cities, specifically Los Angeles and
Speaker 1: San Francisco, which are quite far apart. If you're not
Speaker 1: familiar with California geography, you might think, oh, well, those
Speaker 1: are two cities in the same state, but they are
Speaker 1: hundreds of miles apart from one another. It takes more
Speaker 1: than five hours of driving to get between the two.
Speaker 1: So a high speed rail system would be nice if
Speaker 1: in fact it were high speed. But must argued that
Speaker 1: the the one that was proposed was not nearly fast
Speaker 1: enough to be any more advantageous than just taking a
Speaker 1: flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and that there
Speaker 1: had to be a better way. And so he said
Speaker 1: there needed to be a less expensive, safer, faster method
Speaker 1: of getting from San Francisco to Los Angeles or vice versa,
Speaker 1: and that he had the better idea. Now must acknowledge
Speaker 1: that for cities that are really far apart from each other,
Speaker 1: think about a thousand and miles or kilometers or more,
Speaker 1: supersonic air travel is likely the best option, assuming we
Speaker 1: can solve a few major issues with supersonic travel. One
Speaker 1: of those is getting the right airplane geometry to minimize
Speaker 1: sonic booms so that air travel doesn't become massively disruptive
Speaker 1: for the population on the ground. A sonic boom, by
Speaker 1: the way, is when you have uh some mass traveling
Speaker 1: faster than the speed of sound through whatever medium you
Speaker 1: are traveling through. So, in the case of air, depending
Speaker 1: upon air pressure and temperature and that sort of thing,
Speaker 1: if you're traveling faster than the speed of sound, you're
Speaker 1: building up this pressure wave that ends up collapsing in
Speaker 1: on itself after the object passes through that area, and
Speaker 1: that collapse creates this sonic boom. The sonic boom travels
Speaker 1: with the object as it moves through. So if you
Speaker 1: have a supersonic jet traveling overhead, that boom you hear
Speaker 1: is it passes over. It's not just a single boom.
Speaker 1: That boom is actually traveling with the supersonic aircraft as
Speaker 1: long as it is traveling at those incredible speeds. So
Speaker 1: there are companies that are working on building out better
Speaker 1: plane models that can travel at these supersonic speeds while
Speaker 1: minimizing that sonic boom, and they're making some amazing progress. Uh.
Speaker 1: These are include private companies as well as NASA working
Speaker 1: on these designs. So, assuming we get that problem solved,
Speaker 1: Musk says, it's probably going to be the case that
Speaker 1: the most efficient way to travel the most uh the
Speaker 1: cheapest way. Really, it's everything from the amount of time
Speaker 1: you're spending to the amount of money you spend will
Speaker 1: probably be supersonic travel. But for cities that are closer
Speaker 1: together than that but still a good distance away, let's
Speaker 1: say like nine hundred miles around kilometers apart from each other,
Speaker 1: you would want a different solution because with a supersonic jet,
Speaker 1: you would reach cruising altitude, and you would only then
Speaker 1: be able to accelerate to supersonic speeds, but you would
Speaker 1: only be doing that for a very short while before
Speaker 1: you had to descend. You would be essentially be up
Speaker 1: and down so fast that you can't really take advantage
Speaker 1: of the supersonic travel part. So it doesn't make sense
Speaker 1: to take a supersonic flight between two cities that are
Speaker 1: nine miles are closer together. What you could do is
Speaker 1: build this hyper loop system in order to travel at
Speaker 1: incredible speeds between those points. And that's where the sweet
Speaker 1: spot is between two cities that are nine miles apart
Speaker 1: or less, and that they have to be two cities
Speaker 1: where you would typically have a lot of heavy travel
Speaker 1: between the two. There's gotta be a lot of traffic.
Speaker 1: So assuming you have that situation, that's where hyper loop,
Speaker 1: he argues, would make a lot of sense. Again, his
Speaker 1: example being Los Angeles and San Francisco, but any major
Speaker 1: metropolitan areas where there's a lot of travel between the
Speaker 1: cities that are at this distance from one another would
Speaker 1: be candidates for this kind of transportation system. Uh. He
Speaker 1: would want this train sort of hybrid system to travel
Speaker 1: at incredible speeds not quite supersonic. We'll get into that.
Speaker 1: This is a system that that consists of an enclosed
Speaker 1: tube or tunnel, and the air pressure inside that tube
Speaker 1: would be low. It would still be present, but it
Speaker 1: would be low. So you would have these giant pumps
Speaker 1: along the tube that would pump out a lot of
Speaker 1: the air. So you have a very low pressure system
Speaker 1: inside the tube that lowers the air resistance considerably, but
Speaker 1: does not create an actual vacuum, so there's still air
Speaker 1: inside the tube. Must acknowledges that the vacuum approach, though
Speaker 1: very effective, it removes air resistance, UH, would be incredibly
Speaker 1: difficult to achieve from an engineering perspective, because even the
Speaker 1: smallest imperfection in the tube would allow air to leak in.
Speaker 1: You know, if you have an extremely low pressure system
Speaker 1: and you've got greater pressure on the outside, obviously any leak,
Speaker 1: any crack is going to allow air to rush in.
Speaker 1: So he says going with a low pressure system would
Speaker 1: make more sense than a vacuum. Uh, it's too difficult
Speaker 1: to maintain a vacuum within a room, much less a
Speaker 1: five hundred mile long loop of tube. In his words,
Speaker 1: so rather than using something like a mag lev system
Speaker 1: magnetic levitation system in which the train would levitate above
Speaker 1: the tunnel floor using electromagnetic repulsion. Musk was proposing using
Speaker 1: air bearings instead, so this would not be a system
Speaker 1: where you use magnets in order to repel one another
Speaker 1: and that would make the capsule float off the floor
Speaker 1: of the tube. Instead, it would be like an air
Speaker 1: hockey table. So if you're not familiar with these, uh,
Speaker 1: an air hockey table is a table that's got a
Speaker 1: surface with tiny pin prick holes in it, and a
Speaker 1: fan under the surface of the table blows air up
Speaker 1: through those holes. You put a little plastic hockey puck
Speaker 1: on top of the table. The air coming up from
Speaker 1: the bottom ends up making the hockey puck glide across
Speaker 1: the table. So that's kind of the principle he had
Speaker 1: for the the hyper loop concept, except instead of having
Speaker 1: the tube generating this air and blowing against the capsule,
Speaker 1: he thought of the capsule having essentially these pin pricks
Speaker 1: at the bottom of the capsule blowing air down, so
Speaker 1: that would be where the capsule would generate some lift.
Speaker 1: It would also generate left through its forward momentum, and
Speaker 1: at the front of this capsule. He wants. He proposed
Speaker 1: putting a pump a fan essentially, because there's still air
Speaker 1: inside the tube. If you didn't have a of moving
Speaker 1: that air around the capsule, you would run into an
Speaker 1: issue where you're compressing the air ahead of you. As
Speaker 1: the capsule moves down the tube, it's pushing a column
Speaker 1: of air, and if the air cannot get around the
Speaker 1: capsule fast enough, you start compressing it and that ends
Speaker 1: up being like an air braking system. It will actually
Speaker 1: slow down and ultimately stop the capsule pushing against it
Speaker 1: in the other direction. So he proposed putting a fan
Speaker 1: in the front of the capsule to pull air in
Speaker 1: partly to allow the capsule to continue moving down the
Speaker 1: tube at speed, but also feeding into an air compressor
Speaker 1: that then would power these air bearings and allow the
Speaker 1: capsule to maintain lift on the bottom of the over
Speaker 1: the top of the tube flooring. And because you're not
Speaker 1: using wheels, you're not losing a lot of energy to friction. Right.
Speaker 1: You've got a little bit of air resistance that you're
Speaker 1: dealing with, but you're not dealing with wheels running against
Speaker 1: a surface, so that loss of energy to friction is minimized.
Speaker 1: It's still there. You still have some air resistance, you
Speaker 1: still have some other elements of friction, but it's greatly reduced.
Speaker 1: So Uh, this approach, he said, was going to be
Speaker 1: an effective engineering solution to the problem. Um, now, what
Speaker 1: about propulsion. The air bearings provide lift, but how does
Speaker 1: the capsule actually move forward? This is where Elon Musk
Speaker 1: was suggesting the external linear electric motor version of of propulsion. So,
Speaker 1: if you know how an electric motor works, let's use
Speaker 1: a very simple version. You've got, let's say, a permanent magnet,
Speaker 1: and you've got some uh, you've got some electromagnet, you know,
Speaker 1: conductive wire, insulated conductive wire. Uh. We're talking more of
Speaker 1: a dynamo than a motor here. And you move the
Speaker 1: permanent magnet so that it's north and south poles or
Speaker 1: road tating and going. The coil of inductive wire is
Speaker 1: then being exposed to a fluctuating magnetic field that's going
Speaker 1: to induce current to flow through the wire. Uh. That also,
Speaker 1: by the way, generates its own electric field, because you
Speaker 1: have electricity voltage essentially applied to this, uh, this conductive wire.
Speaker 1: He's thinking about the same sort of thing, but in
Speaker 1: a linear pathway. So you've got this, uh, this electro
Speaker 1: magnetic force that is pulling and pushing the capsule. You
Speaker 1: have opposite poles magnetic poles attracting one another that's pulling
Speaker 1: the capsule forward. Then you have like poles pushing against
Speaker 1: each other that continues to push the capsule forward. This
Speaker 1: allows you to accelerate the capsule like a railgun. You're
Speaker 1: using the electromagnetic force to accelerate it in a linear motion,
Speaker 1: so it's going straight. The air bearings are what allow
Speaker 1: it to have the lift. The electric motor allows it
Speaker 1: to have the forward momentum. And this was kind of
Speaker 1: his general idea for the infrastructure. As for the capsules themselves,
Speaker 1: his version of it would seat twenty eight passengers per
Speaker 1: passenger capsule. He had a couple of different models of capsule.
Speaker 1: He also proposed a version that would have a slightly
Speaker 1: larger capsules. These would hold up to three full sized
Speaker 1: automobiles and you could have passengers inside the automobile, so
Speaker 1: you could be sitting in a car inside a capsule,
Speaker 1: and that way you would start in your car in
Speaker 1: l a and then thirty five minutes later you'd drive
Speaker 1: out of the capsule. In San Francisco, which would save
Speaker 1: you a ton of time from the normal five hours
Speaker 1: plus of driving. UH. The maximum width for a passenger
Speaker 1: only capsule would be four point four three feet or
Speaker 1: one point three five ms, so not very wide, with
Speaker 1: a height of six point one one feet or one
Speaker 1: point one zero meters, so again not very tall. If
Speaker 1: you're a tall person, you'd be stooping a bit in
Speaker 1: order to move around this cabin. UH doors would either
Speaker 1: be of a goal wing design, meaning like the DeLorean,
Speaker 1: they lift up, or they would be slides so that
Speaker 1: it would allow for easy UH loading and unloading of
Speaker 1: the vehicle. Luggage would go on one of the two
Speaker 1: ends of the vehicle, depending upon where you would put
Speaker 1: the rest of the components, so either in the very
Speaker 1: front or the very back, and the weight of the
Speaker 1: passenger capsule without the interior components just the weight of
Speaker 1: all the external parts would be about six thousand, eight
Speaker 1: hundred pounds or three thousand one ms. And Musk estimated
Speaker 1: the cost for each capsule's exterior to be about two
Speaker 1: hundred forty five thousand dollars apiece. Now, all the stuff
Speaker 1: on the inside, like the seats, the door panels, the restraints,
Speaker 1: the various displays would weigh another five thousand, five hundred
Speaker 1: pounds or two thousand, five hundred ms, and it would
Speaker 1: cost another two hundred fifty five thousand dollars. Then they're
Speaker 1: all the other elements to add to the costs, such
Speaker 1: as the propulsion system components that would be in each capsule,
Speaker 1: the air compressor blades, the air bearings, all of this stuff.
Speaker 1: All of that told, Musk estimated that a passenger only
Speaker 1: capsule would cost one million, three hundred fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 1: apiece and have a weight total of fifteen thousand kilograms,
Speaker 1: And he goes on to estimate that you need about
Speaker 1: fifty four million dollars to make enough capsules for the
Speaker 1: hyper loop system he was proposing between Los Angeles and
Speaker 1: San Francisco. Now that's enough capsules where you would have
Speaker 1: them at either end so that you could have a
Speaker 1: consistent uh service between the two cities on any given day.
Speaker 1: So fifty four million dollars for just the capsules, that's
Speaker 1: not too bad. However, that doesn't include the cost of
Speaker 1: the infrastructure. Will get to that if you were traveling
Speaker 1: on that route, how safe would it be? Well, elon Musk,
Speaker 1: again arguing for the system he was proposing, said that
Speaker 1: there'd be a lot of redundant safety features, including maintaining
Speaker 1: a healthy distance between capsules. So between you and the
Speaker 1: next closest capsule would be a gap of twenty three
Speaker 1: miles or thirty seven kilometers on average, which is a
Speaker 1: lot of safety space to prevent collisions between capsules. Still,
Speaker 1: tons of other safety issues that you would have to
Speaker 1: take into account and make sure we're uh prepared for
Speaker 1: so that way you don't have any massive issues. Now,
Speaker 1: according to Musk, the hyper loop would allow for eight
Speaker 1: hundred forty passengers to travel per hour between Los Angeles
Speaker 1: and San Francisco. Now that number could be increased by
Speaker 1: decreasing the amount of departure time between capsules. He was
Speaker 1: envisioning capsules arriving at a station, unloading, loading up, and
Speaker 1: every two minutes you would have a capsule leave either
Speaker 1: l A or San Francisco. Now that that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that a capsule only spends two minutes per station. You
Speaker 1: would have one station or one capsule arriving at a
Speaker 1: station while another capsule, maybe three capsules ahead, is leaving,
Speaker 1: So you would still have several minutes to unload and
Speaker 1: load each individual capsule before it blasts off and heads
Speaker 1: over to its destination. Uh, these capsules would be going
Speaker 1: pretty darn fast. Musk talks about them hitting speeds of
Speaker 1: seven hundred sixty miles per hour or one thousand, two
Speaker 1: hundred twenty kilometers per hour, which is also known as
Speaker 1: mock point nine one at sixty eight degrees fahrenheit or
Speaker 1: twenty degrees celsius. So you're talking about going nearly as
Speaker 1: fast as the speed of sound, but not actually breaking
Speaker 1: the sound barrier at that speed at those temperatures. And
Speaker 1: again that offers me the opportunity to remind you guys,
Speaker 1: sound travels through the air at a speed that depends
Speaker 1: on other things like air temperature, So you have to
Speaker 1: take that into account when you talk about the speed
Speaker 1: of sound. It's not a constant through all altitudes and temperatures.
Speaker 1: You have to have these other variables in account before
Speaker 1: you can actually talk about the speed of sound, although
Speaker 1: we can usually just assume we're talking about a standard
Speaker 1: temperature when we're usually using that term. Back to the show,
Speaker 1: at that speed, you would be able to make the
Speaker 1: trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco in about thirty
Speaker 1: five minutes, and the high speed rail system would take
Speaker 1: two hours and thirty eight minutes on that same trip.
Speaker 1: So the system that Elon Musk was saying was inefficient, slow,
Speaker 1: and expensive would take two hours thirty eight minutes. Driving
Speaker 1: takes five hours. A plane trip would take a little
Speaker 1: bit more than an hour, like an hour and fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1: So the hyper loop would theoretically be the fastest way
Speaker 1: to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco, assuming it
Speaker 1: works the way Elon Musk imagines. So thirty five minutes
Speaker 1: is a huge amount of time saved going from point
Speaker 1: A to point b. Uh, it would be the fastest
Speaker 1: solution by far. You might wonder what it would be
Speaker 1: like to actually travel inside one of those capsules. According
Speaker 1: to Muss, he imagines that the entire interior would have displays,
Speaker 1: kind of like television displays or computer displays that would
Speaker 1: show a landscape, maybe a model of the landscape that
Speaker 1: you're actually passing through, or maybe it would be something
Speaker 1: else like our space or under the water or some
Speaker 1: other city if you wanted to, Or maybe it would
Speaker 1: just be television, because there's no point in having windows
Speaker 1: your inside and enclosed tube. All you would see is
Speaker 1: the interior of a tube whizzing by at seven miles
Speaker 1: per hour. Using the displays would help you get some
Speaker 1: other sensory input. Uh. There's other interesting questions like would
Speaker 1: this affect your sense of of your your perception of space?
Speaker 1: Like would you feel an emotion sickness due to this
Speaker 1: kind of thing? Uh, that's a question that I don't
Speaker 1: know the answer to you, because as far as I know,
Speaker 1: no one's actually tried it. But it is really interesting.
Speaker 1: Now We've got a lot more to talk about, uh,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to dive into some more details about
Speaker 1: what travel aboard the hyper loop would theoretically be like,
Speaker 1: as well as talk about some of the companies that
Speaker 1: are trying to bring it to life. But before I
Speaker 1: do that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Now,
Speaker 1: I just mentioned about being inside those capsules and looking
Speaker 1: at those displays, and you know, seeing some gorgeous stuff,
Speaker 1: and and that sounds really nice. You would have restraints
Speaker 1: on your your seats because you're talking about accelerating too
Speaker 1: pretty incredible speeds and then eventually decelerating. Now, the ideas
Speaker 1: that you would do this gradually, so you wouldn't be
Speaker 1: experiencing any very powerful G forces. That would also mean
Speaker 1: that the tube itself would not be able to have
Speaker 1: any sharp turns on it, because the amount of G
Speaker 1: force you would experience as a passenger would be too great.
Speaker 1: You would be very much uncomfortable, if not blacking out
Speaker 1: due to those G forces being placed on your if
Speaker 1: you were making sharp turns. So you'd have to have
Speaker 1: very gradual curves to your hyper loop track, and you
Speaker 1: would have to again have this long acceleration and deceleration
Speaker 1: so that you're not placing too much stress on your passengers.
Speaker 1: But let's go back to price for a minute. So
Speaker 1: I talked about the capsules and that they would cost
Speaker 1: a cool fifty four million dollars each, But what about
Speaker 1: the tube itself, Well, Musk said it would be several
Speaker 1: billion dollars. He eventually came up with the figure rough
Speaker 1: Napkin figure of being six billion dollars for a hyper
Speaker 1: loop system, but he adds that this would still be
Speaker 1: less expensive than the high speed rail system to California
Speaker 1: had approved. He said, yeah, it's six billion dollars for
Speaker 1: this hypothetical thing I just made up. But it's many
Speaker 1: more billion dollars for this other thing that exists. So, um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's kind of easy to say that
Speaker 1: it's only six billion dollars, only six billion dollars, when
Speaker 1: you have just proposed it and no one said, actual
Speaker 1: build the thing yet. But let's just for argument's sake,
Speaker 1: say that, in fact, it would cost six billion dollars
Speaker 1: to build. Because I don't want to cast aspersions towards
Speaker 1: Elon Musk. I'm just saying that until you build something,
Speaker 1: you really can't say how much it was going to cost,
Speaker 1: not with any real authority. It's only after you've built
Speaker 1: it that you really understand the cost of it. The tube,
Speaker 1: he says, would be made out of steel, and he
Speaker 1: says that you could constructed and prefabricated sections and then
Speaker 1: kind of snap them together, which is being a bit
Speaker 1: flippant on my part. It actually would involve using an
Speaker 1: orbital seam welder to create a seal between each length
Speaker 1: of tube. So you would put in a prefabricated length
Speaker 1: the tube and then you would just seal it to
Speaker 1: the previous one using this orbital seal welder, which kind
Speaker 1: of goes around the entire tube. And make sure that
Speaker 1: they are nice and tightly welded together. And he also
Speaker 1: suggested that these tubes would rest on pylons, so it
Speaker 1: would be an elevated track that would be above or
Speaker 1: really to the side of Interstate five in California, which
Speaker 1: was more or less a direct path between l A
Speaker 1: and San Francisco without too many sharp turns. He says
Speaker 1: that you would have to have a few deviations from
Speaker 1: the highway in order to avoid putting too strong a
Speaker 1: curve in the track, but those deviations would be, in
Speaker 1: his words, minor uh that way, you could avoid putting
Speaker 1: those unacceptable g forces on the bodies of your passengers, which,
Speaker 1: as we have already discussed, would be a bad thing
Speaker 1: to do otherwise. Musk also said that the energy needed
Speaker 1: to power the hyper loop could come from solar panels
Speaker 1: along the top of the tube. Now, according to Musk,
Speaker 1: the panels would be enough be able to generate enough
Speaker 1: electricity to power the entire system and also charge batteries
Speaker 1: that would allow the system to operate even if the
Speaker 1: sun weren't out, so if it were an overcast day,
Speaker 1: which is common in San Francisco, not necessarily so in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. Or if it were nighttime, you can still
Speaker 1: take the system from LA to San Francisco or San
Speaker 1: Francis Cisco to l A, because you'd have enough battery
Speaker 1: power to keep it going. This is one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why he was arguing for this air bearing system.
Speaker 1: He said, the air bearing system would be less expensive
Speaker 1: than a fully electromagnetic mag lev system, and it would
Speaker 1: consume less power than a mag lev system, so you
Speaker 1: wouldn't have to worry about creating a huge drain on
Speaker 1: the existing power grid. You could have it all self
Speaker 1: powered through these solar panels and batteries. Keep in mind,
Speaker 1: Elon Musk again is behind Tesla, and Tesla's big product
Speaker 1: that's coming out aren't really electric cars. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: the flashy side. It's really the battery solutions that Elon
Speaker 1: Musk is behind. So arguing for a system that would
Speaker 1: rely heavily on battery power also serves his interests to
Speaker 1: some extent. In his paper, must argued that the energy
Speaker 1: per passenger using the hyperlop technology would be less than
Speaker 1: any other form of transportation. Travel by airplane would represent
Speaker 1: the greatest amount of energy expended per traveler per mile,
Speaker 1: so he was saying the hyperlop, based on his calculations,
Speaker 1: would end up being less of an energy drain per
Speaker 1: person per passenger than anything else that includes cars, motorcycles, trains,
Speaker 1: any other system in existence would be more energy per
Speaker 1: passenger to get people from point A to point B
Speaker 1: h compared to his hypothetical hyper loop. And I keep
Speaker 1: saying hypothetical and things of that nature, again not to
Speaker 1: disparage the idea, but just to acknowledge the fact that
Speaker 1: without an actual working system, where we're relying upon theoreticals hypotheticals,
Speaker 1: we're not relying upon actual hard data that we can
Speaker 1: look at and say, oh yeah, in fact, the math
Speaker 1: does work out the right way. Uh. Due to this
Speaker 1: low cost of operation, Musk says that you could charge
Speaker 1: a very reasonable price for tickets on the hyper loop.
Speaker 1: His suggestion for a one way ticket from Los Angeles
Speaker 1: to San Francisco or vice versa, would be twenty dollars
Speaker 1: for a thirty five minute trip between the two cities.
Speaker 1: He says charging twenty dollars per ticket for twenty years
Speaker 1: would offset the six billion dollar estimated cost of constructing
Speaker 1: the whole shebang, which is pretty incredible. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: making a lot of assumptions, again that you would have
Speaker 1: enough of a passenger base to be busy and charge
Speaker 1: at twenty dollars, and that you're patient enough to take
Speaker 1: twenty years to pay off this investment. But if it's correct,
Speaker 1: that is amazing. Twenty dollars would be a steal compared
Speaker 1: to an airplane ticket or even a ticket on the
Speaker 1: California Train because that high speed rail train they were
Speaker 1: talking about much more expensive tickets than twenty bucks a
Speaker 1: person for a one way ticket. Uh. Again, without having
Speaker 1: all of the math done, we can't be sure that
Speaker 1: twenty years would be enough time to recapture the cost
Speaker 1: of construction. I don't know if that also builds in
Speaker 1: any potential maintenance costs that surely would come up over
Speaker 1: those times. But he claimed that twenty dollars a seat
Speaker 1: that would do it. A couple of notable companies have
Speaker 1: formed to try and bring this vision to life, and
Speaker 1: one of those is hyper Loop one. So let's take
Speaker 1: some time to talk about this company because it's got
Speaker 1: some stories behind it. So there's an entrepreneur named Shervin
Speaker 1: Pishamar who first talked to Musk in January two thousand thirteen.
Speaker 1: I remember it was August when Musk announced this idea
Speaker 1: of the hyper loop, and they were traveling to Cuba,
Speaker 1: and apparently during this trip, Musk talked about this hyper
Speaker 1: loop concept and Shervin was really interested in it, and
Speaker 1: he even said later on that Musk should go public
Speaker 1: with this idea. So, according to the hyper Loop one
Speaker 1: web page, it was Shervin who convinced Elon Musk to
Speaker 1: publish that white paper and talk about this. After Musk's announcement,
Speaker 1: Servin gathered a team together to form the startup hyper
Speaker 1: Loop one. Now, if you go to hyper Loop one's
Speaker 1: website and you look at this team, it includes some
Speaker 1: names on there. There's Jim Messina, there's Joe Lonsdale, David Sachs,
Speaker 1: and Peter Diamandis. But there's one name you will not
Speaker 1: find on the hyper Loop one website, but he was
Speaker 1: among the founders, and that's the name Brogan bam Brogan.
Speaker 1: So Brogan bam Brogan, formally known as Kevin Brogan, was
Speaker 1: an engineer who worked at SpaceX, and of course that's
Speaker 1: the private space exploration company. He married a woman named
Speaker 1: Bambi lieu In and the two decided that they would
Speaker 1: merge their aims together, so it was kind of forming
Speaker 1: a new name by combining their names. That's where he
Speaker 1: got Brogan bam Brogan, which I think is endurable. And
Speaker 1: he became the chief technology officer for hyper Loop one.
Speaker 1: But then things seemed to go very wrong, and we
Speaker 1: don't know the full story, but we do know about
Speaker 1: the lawsuits, so I can tell you what the lawsuit said.
Speaker 1: According to bam Brogan and a few of his colleagues,
Speaker 1: things went sour at the corporate level at hyper Loop one.
Speaker 1: So you've got this company that is trying to create
Speaker 1: the actual technology that Elon Musk was talking about. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: according to bam Brogan, there were some shenanigans going on
Speaker 1: at the corporate level. He alleged that the company leaders
Speaker 1: were being wasteful, that they were blowing through investor money
Speaker 1: on things that weren't necessary or that were fraudulent in
Speaker 1: his eyes, and he also claimed that the corporate leadership
Speaker 1: was engaging in Nepa. His m that they were hiring
Speaker 1: on friends and family for things that they weren't necessarily
Speaker 1: qualified for, or that there might have been more qualified
Speaker 1: candidates out there that were being ignored. In favor of
Speaker 1: these folks. He also accused Pischavar of using stock options
Speaker 1: as leverage to get what he wanted from employees, essentially
Speaker 1: holding it over their heads. Uh as both a stick
Speaker 1: and a carrot at the same time. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: these were a whole series of really ugly all allegations
Speaker 1: and accusations. Beam Brogan then says that he and some
Speaker 1: of his colleagues voiced their objections and concerns and then
Speaker 1: they were all met with repercussions. They were met with punishments.
Speaker 1: Beam Brogan was met with a threatening gesture. Specifically, he
Speaker 1: says that Pischavar left a rope nodded in a noose
Speaker 1: on bam Brogan's desk, and there's some security footage that
Speaker 1: seemed to potentially back up bam Brogan's accusation. There's a
Speaker 1: man who you know, they say was pish of our
Speaker 1: and he's clearly holding some rope, although you can't necessarily
Speaker 1: see if it's a noose or not, but still, if
Speaker 1: that is true, it's a pretty ugly move of intimidation.
Speaker 1: It's not your typical corporate behavior unless you're salesperson trying
Speaker 1: to move property in Glengarry Glenn Ross style. Always be
Speaker 1: closing guys, always be closing well. Ben Brogan then said
Speaker 1: that one of his colleagues was fired in front of
Speaker 1: his own family the next day and another one was demoted,
Speaker 1: and that bam Brogan himself was encouraged to take a
Speaker 1: leave of absence from the company, so he responded with
Speaker 1: a lawsuit. Hyper Loop One's response was also accusatory. The
Speaker 1: company lawyer said that the lawsuit was quote unfortunate and
Speaker 1: delusional end quote, and also claimed that bam Brogan had
Speaker 1: been trying to undermine Bishamar and was actually trying to
Speaker 1: do a corporate coup and and change the leadership through
Speaker 1: some other form of corporate leverage. And so there were
Speaker 1: accusations flying on both sides now. In November six news
Speaker 1: broke that the two parties had settled this lawsuit out
Speaker 1: of court for uh an unreported sum, so no one
Speaker 1: was talking about how much money changed hands. According to
Speaker 1: a statement from bam Brogan's lawyers, uh It's said this quote,
Speaker 1: My clients are pleased to announce they have reached a
Speaker 1: confidential resolution of litigation with their former employer and look
Speaker 1: forward to moving on with their future plans end quote.
Speaker 1: Bam Brogan, by the way, recently founded his own company
Speaker 1: called Arrivo, with its headquarters apparently less than one mile
Speaker 1: away from hyper Loop one's offices, So that's got to
Speaker 1: be awkward if you're ever in traffic. Arrivo is also
Speaker 1: in the hyper loop design game, so they're getting in
Speaker 1: that space. According to bam Brogan, his new company has
Speaker 1: a quote unique take end quote on the hyper loop concept.
Speaker 1: No idea what that means. Meanwhile, back at hyper Loop one,
Speaker 1: the company was installing a They installed a fifty ft long,
Speaker 1: twelve ft wide structure called the Big Tube. Now this
Speaker 1: was not a hyper loop to tube. It was a
Speaker 1: testing facility. It was meant to create low pressure environments
Speaker 1: to test things like seals in test tracks, test tubes.
Speaker 1: Not a test tube, but a tube that they were
Speaker 1: testing to make sure that it was constructed properly. So
Speaker 1: it was a testing facility, not a hyperlop tube on
Speaker 1: its own. And the hyper loop one approach doesn't use
Speaker 1: air bearings the way Musk's design did. Instead, it did
Speaker 1: use mag lev as the means to suspend capsules in
Speaker 1: the tube. So they went with the electromagnetic levitation route uh,
Speaker 1: so it requires a bit more power, more than a
Speaker 1: bit more power than the hyperloop one or hyperloop concept
Speaker 1: that Elon Musk was first chatting about back in In December,
Speaker 1: hyper loop one built the APEX Test and Safety site
Speaker 1: outside of Las Vegas, Nevada that would become the testing
Speaker 1: ground for prototype hyperloop infrastructure and capsules, and on May eleven, sixteen,
Speaker 1: the company hosted a Propulsion System Open Air test or
Speaker 1: p o a t POPE or poe AT. In this test,
Speaker 1: a hyper loop sled accelerated to a top speed of
Speaker 1: a hundred thirty six miles per hour in two point
Speaker 1: two seconds. That's an incredible acceleration. The test was to
Speaker 1: see if the acceleration motor would work properly, so they
Speaker 1: weren't trying to accelerate up to top speed. A hundred
Speaker 1: thirty six miles per hour is nowhere close to the
Speaker 1: top speed of what their capsules would ultimately take. The
Speaker 1: company also announced a global challenge to find the best
Speaker 1: hyperloop projects in the world. Hyper Loop one has proposed
Speaker 1: a system that would link Helsinki and Stockholm together, which
Speaker 1: would be pretty nifty, and in August the company began
Speaker 1: construction on the Development Loop or DEVL loop in Nevada.
Speaker 1: This was the first full scale hyperloop test track, and
Speaker 1: November of the first section of the DEVL loop was installed.
Speaker 1: It was called Fixity, and in January hyper Loop announced
Speaker 1: that thirty five semifinalists had been u had been had
Speaker 1: reached the global challenge, so they got down to thirty
Speaker 1: five semifinalists and these were proposals that would link various
Speaker 1: cities together to create hyperloop routes. On March seven, twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: the DEVL loop construction was completed, and on May twelve,
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, the first full scale hyperloop test was conducted.
Speaker 1: On July twelve, twenty seventeen, Hyperloop unveiled a prototype aero shell.
Speaker 1: This is the outer hole of the capsules that would
Speaker 1: be in its system, and it's kind of nifty looking.
Speaker 1: You should take a look at the picture of it. Sadly,
Speaker 1: this is an audio podcast and I cannot show you one.
Speaker 1: On July seventeen, they tested out a vehicle that traveled
Speaker 1: down the full length of the five me DEVL loop track,
Speaker 1: accelerating for three and then gliding the rest of the
Speaker 1: way again at fives you're not going to get to
Speaker 1: your full speed. You just can't, but you can test
Speaker 1: out the various systems to make sure that the concept
Speaker 1: behind them does in fact work. The company wants to
Speaker 1: have three production systems working by one, which is pretty
Speaker 1: ambitious so highper loop one. It's probably the furthest along
Speaker 1: out of all the different hyper loop companies, and it
Speaker 1: inadvertently spawned a second one or Evo, but it is
Speaker 1: not the only one. There are other hyper loop companies
Speaker 1: out there and they're all competing at this I'll talk
Speaker 1: about another one in just a second, called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies,
Speaker 1: and it's really interesting to see people jump on this
Speaker 1: again in an area that hasn't had proven success. That's
Speaker 1: not to discourage them, but it kind of shows how
Speaker 1: Elon Musk has this amazing ability to inspire people to
Speaker 1: take chances without necessarily being able to show that you
Speaker 1: can have a return on them. People have talked about
Speaker 1: Tesla Motors struggling to be profitable while they are clearly
Speaker 1: creating products and people have a strong desire to own them.
Speaker 1: The company as it stands is one of those that
Speaker 1: is always striving or profit but hasn't emerged as an
Speaker 1: enormously profitable company. So for Elon Musk to continue to
Speaker 1: go forward and make these bold proclamations and have people
Speaker 1: not just take it to heart but then pour their
Speaker 1: own money and investments and resources into trying to make
Speaker 1: it come to pass, that's a pretty insanely awesome thing
Speaker 1: to be able to do. Uh I can't convince people
Speaker 1: to give me a seat on the subway, so although
Speaker 1: I find that if I talk to myself a lot
Speaker 1: and argue, I often end up with a seat all
Speaker 1: to myself. But I think that might require that doesn't
Speaker 1: rely so much on charisma as it does just social awkwardness.
Speaker 1: All right, when we get back, I'm going to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about hyper loop uh more, you know,
Speaker 1: the hyper loop transportation technologies, as well as Elon Musk's
Speaker 1: attempt to get into the hyper loop game himself. But
Speaker 1: I really wanted to cover that weird controversy of hyper
Speaker 1: loop one first and get that out of the way.
Speaker 1: We'll come back in just a moment, but first let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: talk about hyper loop transportation technologies for a second. This is,
Speaker 1: like I said, was the other big startup to come
Speaker 1: out shortly after Elon Musk's announcement. Arriva was new to
Speaker 1: the scene, but hyper loop transportation technologies and Hyperloop one
Speaker 1: have been around for a while. So this company is
Speaker 1: also using mag lev technology, but in this case it's
Speaker 1: passive mag lev, not active mag lev. Now that means
Speaker 1: that part of the system, the system that would actually
Speaker 1: be lining the the tubes, is just unempowered coils of
Speaker 1: conductive wire, and so you're not putting any electricity through
Speaker 1: them and are not acting as electro magnets on their own. Uh.
Speaker 1: This method was pioneered by a physicist named Richard Post
Speaker 1: and the concept itself ends up getting a little complicated,
Speaker 1: So I'm not going to dive too far into it
Speaker 1: because it would require almost a full episode all on
Speaker 1: its own. But basically, what you have are these various
Speaker 1: coils of conductive wire, and then you take these magnets
Speaker 1: and you put them in a specific configuration so that
Speaker 1: their polls are lined up in a very specific way
Speaker 1: with respect to one another. And I'm I'm glossing over
Speaker 1: this because again, to get into real details, we'd have
Speaker 1: to dive into physics pretty deeply. If you pass this
Speaker 1: array of magnets over the coils of conductive wire. It
Speaker 1: induces uh a charge to flow through those those coils,
Speaker 1: and that in turn creates an electromagnetic field. The key
Speaker 1: to this is you have to get the capsule up
Speaker 1: to a certain speed before this will happen. But once
Speaker 1: you do get to that speed, then you are able
Speaker 1: to achieve magnetic levitation with a passive system. So you
Speaker 1: don't have to send any electricity through that that those
Speaker 1: coils of wire that would line the the hyperloop tube.
Speaker 1: That means that you're saving a lot on energy. You
Speaker 1: just have to have the right UH systems aboard the
Speaker 1: actual capsule, but you don't have to power the whole
Speaker 1: tube itself, so that cuts down on your electricity needs.
Speaker 1: It also cuts down on the cost of operation, so
Speaker 1: you end up being able to pass the savings onto
Speaker 1: maybe the consumer, or maybe you're just pocketing a whole
Speaker 1: lot of extra profit. But it's a really cool form
Speaker 1: of magnetic levitation. UH. The cool thing about it also
Speaker 1: is that in the case of some sort of problem
Speaker 1: that there is some sort of power loss on board
Speaker 1: the capsule. For example, the the capsule will start to
Speaker 1: coast and it once it dips below a certain speed
Speaker 1: a threshold, then it will not be able to create
Speaker 1: the electro magnetic field or won't be able to induce
Speaker 1: the electromagnetic field from these coils of wire, and the
Speaker 1: capsule will come to arrest on the bottom of the
Speaker 1: tube floor. So in a way, it's kind of a
Speaker 1: safety measure because in a catastrophic failure, the capsules are
Speaker 1: all going to slow down on their own and then
Speaker 1: gradually come to arrest because just by the act of
Speaker 1: slowing down, they can no longer remain above the tube floor.
Speaker 1: Hyperloops hyper Loop Technologies leadership team includes Dirk all Born
Speaker 1: who is a co founder of jump Starter Incorporated, and
Speaker 1: Bebop g Gresta, who is another entrepreneur, and both of
Speaker 1: them have extensive experience and starting and funding ventures, So
Speaker 1: these are people who are used to starting up big
Speaker 1: companies or getting funding for big companies. They have agreements
Speaker 1: with lots of different cities, including cities in South Korea, Indonesia,
Speaker 1: and France. In Czech Republic, In the UH they have
Speaker 1: an agreement with Abu Dhabi UH. There's an agreement in
Speaker 1: Slovakia all to construct hyperloop systems in the future. But
Speaker 1: all of this is really early on obviously, so it's
Speaker 1: the earliest phases of the hyperloop game from that aspect.
Speaker 1: Now recently, as of the recording of this podcast, Elon
Speaker 1: Musk has actually decided to get into this game himself.
Speaker 1: So when he first announced this back in two thousand thirteen,
Speaker 1: he did so as it as an open source project,
Speaker 1: meaning that he was allowing anyone to take this idea
Speaker 1: and run with it and alter it in any way
Speaker 1: they wanted to in order to build the sort of
Speaker 1: systems that he had in mind. So he was saying, look,
Speaker 1: I've got this great idea, but I don't have time
Speaker 1: for this. I'm going into space and putting people in
Speaker 1: electric vehicles and other stuff. Uh. Being an international man
Speaker 1: of mystery, perhaps I don't know. I don't have time
Speaker 1: to get into this as well, So someone else do it. Well,
Speaker 1: now he's saying, you know what, I think I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do this, And he has said that he's getting into
Speaker 1: this as well. And in fact SpaceX has been working
Speaker 1: on building out a tube that would be not not
Speaker 1: quite hyperlop, but is sort of a stepping stone toward
Speaker 1: hyperloop technologies, and they've talked about also building a hyper
Speaker 1: loop test facility in Texas. So part of this involves
Speaker 1: a new company that Elon Musk announced, the TBC Company
Speaker 1: or the Boring Company insert tons of pun jokes here.
Speaker 1: The boring company in this case does not mean a
Speaker 1: company that is uninteresting and we'll put you to sleep,
Speaker 1: although it may also do that. It is talking about
Speaker 1: a company that bores holes into the earth or tunneling purposes.
Speaker 1: So it uses boring machines, machines that bore a hole
Speaker 1: into the ground so that you can build out tunnels. Now,
Speaker 1: they didn't build the boring machines, they bought them. In fact,
Speaker 1: as far as I know, they only have one right now,
Speaker 1: and it is named good And they decided to name
Speaker 1: their machines after literary characters and figures, so Goodo being
Speaker 1: from Beckett's play Waiting for Godot and uh. I don't
Speaker 1: know if that's a commentary about literature, about whether or
Speaker 1: not literature is supposed to be boring. I hope it isn't.
Speaker 1: I was a literature major in college, and I would
Speaker 1: find that deeply insulting. Not that I think Elon Musk
Speaker 1: would really care about that, but still, come on, Ellen,
Speaker 1: be a nice guy. So these machines would bore tunnels
Speaker 1: into the earth, presumably for a either an underground transportation
Speaker 1: system within a city that would not be hyper loop. Instead,
Speaker 1: it would use electric skates. Imagine slot cars. If you've
Speaker 1: ever played with a slot car system where you've got
Speaker 1: these little cars and they fit into a slot. They
Speaker 1: snap into a slot on a track, and then use
Speaker 1: a little controller and you can make the car zoom
Speaker 1: around the track. It's not dissimilar to that. Instead of
Speaker 1: slot cars, you would have these sleds that would be
Speaker 1: attached to this underground tunnel system, and what you would
Speaker 1: do is, if you wanted to travel across town, you
Speaker 1: would drive your car onto a platform of some sort
Speaker 1: that would lower you down onto one of these sleds,
Speaker 1: and then you would put the car in park and
Speaker 1: then the sled would zoom off, So it's like you're
Speaker 1: in a parking space that is moving. The sled itself
Speaker 1: can move through the tunnels, and it can even join
Speaker 1: in two tunnels that have existing sleds already moving through
Speaker 1: it using UH software. So it's essentially like an autonomous car,
Speaker 1: except instead of the car being autonomous, it's the sled itself.
Speaker 1: It's programmed to know where you want to be dropped off,
Speaker 1: and it picks you up, takes you through the tunnel system,
Speaker 1: drops you off wherever you need to go, and it
Speaker 1: can do so at a very high speed, at least
Speaker 1: according to Musk's design, like a twenty miles per hours,
Speaker 1: so pretty fast. And again this is for intercity travel
Speaker 1: from one point in a city to another. And the
Speaker 1: reason for this, Musk says, is to alleviate traffic issues.
Speaker 1: He says, there are only two solutions you have to
Speaker 1: alleviating traffic ultimately in big urban centers, and that is
Speaker 1: either to go up in the case of flying cars,
Speaker 1: or to go down in the case of tunneling. And
Speaker 1: he says, by tunneling, you can create this whole three
Speaker 1: dimensional transportation system that can get you anywhere within a
Speaker 1: city super super fast, uh, avoiding street traffic. So it's
Speaker 1: an interesting idea. Well, that was what the boring company
Speaker 1: was supposed to be. But he also said, oh and
Speaker 1: also you could if you wanted to, you know, dig
Speaker 1: hyper loop tunnels. So remember originally he had talked about
Speaker 1: hyper loop being a tube on top of pylons, but
Speaker 1: now he's all so talking about the possibility of building
Speaker 1: a hyperloop that would be subterranean. You would go down
Speaker 1: a couple dozen feet, and then you would dig a
Speaker 1: tunnel to UH to house this hyper loop tube and
Speaker 1: you would go through that way. He says that you know,
Speaker 1: this would be less expensive than other tunneling companies, largely
Speaker 1: because he's thinking of building one way travel tubes, so
Speaker 1: instead of it being a double wide tunnel, it would
Speaker 1: be single wide. He says, they would have to be
Speaker 1: only fourteen feet wide compared to your standard tunnels, which
Speaker 1: are twice that length, and that would speed things up
Speaker 1: and make them less expensive. By speed things up. I
Speaker 1: think he's talking in relative terms because your average boring
Speaker 1: machine moves slower than a snail's pace. And that's not
Speaker 1: an exaggeration, that's legit. They actually move slower than snails move. Now,
Speaker 1: Elon Musk wants to use this potentially to build this
Speaker 1: hyper loop system, and he tweeted not long ago in
Speaker 1: that he had received quote verbal approval and the quote
Speaker 1: from the White House to build out a hyper loop
Speaker 1: system that would connect DC to New York City and
Speaker 1: also potentially connect other cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia within
Speaker 1: this loop. So verbal commitment isn't a contract. There are
Speaker 1: lots of other layers that any sort of agreement would
Speaker 1: have to go through before you could actually build out
Speaker 1: such a system. We're talking state level, we're talking city level,
Speaker 1: county level. There are tons of different layers that stand
Speaker 1: in the way of building out the system, and a
Speaker 1: verbal agreement doesn't really hold up as anything really firm.
Speaker 1: So we still have a long way to go. But
Speaker 1: if Elon Musk has his way, he would end up
Speaker 1: building out this system on the East Eastern seaboard, and
Speaker 1: you would have a way of getting UM Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: To New York City in less than an hour going
Speaker 1: more than six hundred miles per hour on one of
Speaker 1: these hyperloop trains. UM Obviously, we're still in the early days.
Speaker 1: Back in when we talked about this the first time,
Speaker 1: it was all very conceptual and no one had really
Speaker 1: built anything, not even a testing facility. Yet today we
Speaker 1: can say that there are testing facilities out there and
Speaker 1: they're showing some promising results. We still don't know exactly
Speaker 1: how expensive it will be to build out these systems,
Speaker 1: or how much interference or or resistance they might encounter
Speaker 1: at a political level, there haven't been enough studies on
Speaker 1: the safety of such systems or potential environmental impact. I'm
Speaker 1: still curious to find out about how all these systems
Speaker 1: will be powered. If Elon musk system can in fact
Speaker 1: be powered by solar power, if he does a subterranean version,
Speaker 1: is he going to align the upper level with solar
Speaker 1: panels to power this hyper loop or will it in
Speaker 1: fact draw its electricity from some other source. We don't
Speaker 1: have any details for these to answer these questions as
Speaker 1: it stands, so I'm sure assuming that tech stuff is
Speaker 1: still alive and kicking in the future, when hyperloop either
Speaker 1: becomes a reality or is abandoned altogether, we can revisit
Speaker 1: this again and talk about what did happen, what didn't happen,
Speaker 1: what went right, what went wrong. I can say that
Speaker 1: I want it to succeed. I want this to be
Speaker 1: something that works. I want to see cities connected in
Speaker 1: this way where you can have very fast, convenient travel.
Speaker 1: I want to see it at a price where the
Speaker 1: average person could in fact take advantage of it. If
Speaker 1: it's twenty dollars a ticket ends up being a reality,
Speaker 1: I think that's great. A lot of people have suggested
Speaker 1: that perhaps the expenses would be much greater than what
Speaker 1: what's anticipated, and therefore the price per ticket would be
Speaker 1: way way higher, which means you ultimately create a transportation
Speaker 1: system for rich people, and rich people, while they can
Speaker 1: afford to take it, there's not enough of them to
Speaker 1: support an entire transportation system on their own. You have
Speaker 1: to have something that can have the volume of passengers
Speaker 1: needed to keep it going with that flow of revenue. Ah.
Speaker 1: Otherwise you're just gonna have a very expensive toy that
Speaker 1: ends up getting a little bit of use out of
Speaker 1: the gate, and then overtime winds down because there's just
Speaker 1: not enough financial support. Even if all the technology works,
Speaker 1: the economics might not work. And that's the interesting thing
Speaker 1: about tech is that sometimes all your parts are working
Speaker 1: just fine, it's just they're not working enough. I've got
Speaker 1: a lot more to say, but before i get into
Speaker 1: the next part, let's take a quick break. All right,
Speaker 1: Let's do a where are they now? Run down on
Speaker 1: some of the that we chatted about in that episode
Speaker 1: and something we didn't really chat about because their stories
Speaker 1: had not yet begun. In two thousand seventeen, with regard
Speaker 1: to hyper loop, brogan bam Brogan, I mentioned they had
Speaker 1: the company Arivo. Well that that's no more. That's how
Speaker 1: quickly things can move in this space. Um. In seventeen,
Speaker 1: I was talking about a brand new company, and in
Speaker 1: twenty two that company is long gone now. Arrivo initially
Speaker 1: landed a government deal in Colorado and proposed conducting a
Speaker 1: feasibility study for building out a hyper loop like transportation
Speaker 1: system in the city of Denver, and it would use
Speaker 1: pods rather than like train cars. And the description usually
Speaker 1: said like you would drive up onto what would effectively
Speaker 1: be a sled that would hold your vehicle, and you
Speaker 1: would travel through the system in your vehicle on this
Speaker 1: sled which would levitate above the the track. So you
Speaker 1: drive your car into one of those pods and then
Speaker 1: get whisked off to your destination, for example, the airport,
Speaker 1: and you would avoid traffic congestion along the way and
Speaker 1: get there in minutes. But by the end of one year,
Speaker 1: after the episode you just heard had been recorded, or
Speaker 1: EVO ran out of money and shut down, and you
Speaker 1: might wonder what kind of progress the company had made
Speaker 1: on that whole building out you know, a test track
Speaker 1: and conducting a feasibility study Well, the answer to that
Speaker 1: is that no construction ever broke ground on a test track.
Speaker 1: The company was not able to complete its feasibility study,
Speaker 1: and Wired reported that there wasn't even evidence that the
Speaker 1: company had created a proof of concept model at any scale,
Speaker 1: So it just didn't happen. Now that being said, I
Speaker 1: don't think it was a hoax or a scam. For
Speaker 1: one thing, the government deal was for two thou dollars.
Speaker 1: Now that is a lot of money. If you were
Speaker 1: to offer me two hut dollars the little cash and
Speaker 1: what would pop up in my eyeballs. But for a
Speaker 1: tech startup, it's nothing. Two dollars. You've burned through that
Speaker 1: in a month. You can make way more than that
Speaker 1: if you were trying to hustle a scam by peddling
Speaker 1: it in Silicon Valley, if that was your goal, If
Speaker 1: your goal was to scam people out of money, you'd
Speaker 1: make way more money doing that. So I really do
Speaker 1: think this was a sincere effort. It just it fizzled
Speaker 1: out once the challenges of actually building these things out
Speaker 1: in the real world became more apparent. Now I recently
Speaker 1: saw Bam Brogan's name in another news report, this one
Speaker 1: was from tech Crunch, which was published an article saying
Speaker 1: that the former Hyperloop Technologies co founder is serving as
Speaker 1: an advisor to a startup called Craft Aerospace, and Craft
Speaker 1: Aerospace has proposed the construction and operation of a fleet
Speaker 1: of vertical takeoff and landing aircraft meant to transport people across,
Speaker 1: you know, relatively small regions such as between Sanford go
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles, So essentially kind of filling that same
Speaker 1: niche as what hyper Loop was being pitched as um
Speaker 1: fascinating technology. By the way, their vital technology uses a
Speaker 1: totally different approach than say the osprey, which is a
Speaker 1: good thing because the osprey is not very reliable. But uh,
Speaker 1: that's for another episode. So folks are still trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how to get between the Bay Area and
Speaker 1: La La Land efficiently. That appears to be like the
Speaker 1: metric that we use now. According to his LinkedIn Bam
Speaker 1: Brogan is currently involved in a company called Jicks Jocks.
Speaker 1: That's j I x j O X Jicks Chocks Design
Speaker 1: Group in fact, and that company has described on LinkedIn
Speaker 1: as a company that quote designs and builds rad objects
Speaker 1: for the human experience. We design and fabricate with innovative
Speaker 1: technologies and using state of the art processes, materials, and codings,
Speaker 1: often in applications outside of what they were created. Four
Speaker 1: love rad, Live rad stay rad end quote. I could
Speaker 1: not have made that up if I tried. I did
Speaker 1: try and go to the company's website, but I got
Speaker 1: a too many requests error, so I I don't know anyway.
Speaker 1: As for the company that was formerly known as hyper
Speaker 1: Loop one and even before that hyper Loop Technologies, uh,
Speaker 1: the Virgin Group, Richard Branson's company formed a partnership with
Speaker 1: hyper Loop one and the company rebranded as Virgin hyper
Speaker 1: Loop one, but in it rebranded again, this time becoming
Speaker 1: Virgin hyper Loop, though some journalists still call it Virgin
Speaker 1: hyper Loop one, which is interesting. But by that time
Speaker 1: Richard Branson had had joined and then subsequently left the
Speaker 1: board of directors, so he came and went. The company
Speaker 1: conducted several test runs of its technology, including some with
Speaker 1: actual passengers inside a train. Now, they did not get
Speaker 1: anywhere close those to the top speeds that the hyper
Speaker 1: loop was, you know, being touted as capable of, Like,
Speaker 1: there wasn't anywhere close to six hundred miles per hour,
Speaker 1: but they were demonstrating that it could work with people
Speaker 1: and that they would be safe. So that did happen,
Speaker 1: but it's not been a smooth ride for the company.
Speaker 1: Rob Lloyd, who had served as the CEO for hyper
Speaker 1: Loop for three years, left to be replaced by a
Speaker 1: guy named Jay Walder. This happened in two thousand and eighteen.
Speaker 1: Walder left the company in early one, apparently due to
Speaker 1: some disagreement between him and presumably the board regarding company strategy.
Speaker 1: Josh Gigel, who was an original hyper Loop Technologies engineer.
Speaker 1: In fact, he talks about being a co founder of
Speaker 1: the company that he was one of the original team members. Uh.
Speaker 1: He became the new CEO in early but he stuck
Speaker 1: around his head honcho for less than a year. He
Speaker 1: left the company in October of one, meaning that at
Speaker 1: that point the last original co founder of hyper Loop
Speaker 1: had left the company. Raja Narayanan is the company's chief
Speaker 1: financial officer and is serving as an interim CEO. Other
Speaker 1: executives who have bailed on Virgin hyper Loop include Sebastian Vigneron,
Speaker 1: who headed up product development, Brian Gallmer, who was the
Speaker 1: head of engineering, and Aaron Kearns, the head of operations.
Speaker 1: They all left. It's generally not seen as a positive
Speaker 1: sign when several top executives leave your organization. Uh, but
Speaker 1: you know, I don't have any insider information on what's
Speaker 1: going on with Virgin hyper Loop. According to The Telegraph,
Speaker 1: Virgin hyper Loop rep has said the company currently plans
Speaker 1: to concentrate on supply chain logistics rather than serve as
Speaker 1: a passenger transportation company. Now, that seems like an odd reversal,
Speaker 1: considering Hyperloop not so long ago was really promoting its
Speaker 1: passenger tests and it even released a concept video last summer.
Speaker 1: And I think, like June about what it would be
Speaker 1: like to travel as a passenger aboard a future hyperloop train.
Speaker 1: But maybe the passenger plans are just on the back
Speaker 1: burner for now, and it may well be because of
Speaker 1: the various administrative and legal obstacles that stand in the
Speaker 1: way of building out full infrastructure for passenger transportation. I
Speaker 1: think this is yet again a great reminder that you
Speaker 1: can create technology that technically can do what you wanted
Speaker 1: to do, Like you could find the technological solutions to
Speaker 1: achieve your goals. But it's possible that you know, that's
Speaker 1: just a tiny sliver of the effort you're going to
Speaker 1: have to do in order to bring your vision to reality,
Speaker 1: that all the restless stuff ends up being way more
Speaker 1: difficult than you anticipated, and that even though you've solved
Speaker 1: some of the technological, you know, challenges, you still have
Speaker 1: everything else to deal with, like regulations and laws and
Speaker 1: environmental studies and all that kind of stuff, and that
Speaker 1: that is where you're gonna encounter incredibly difficult challenges uh
Speaker 1: to overcome. You know. It's it's all that stuff. It's
Speaker 1: infrastructure is hard, right, It's there's a reason why it
Speaker 1: took decades to build out infrastructure that we still rely
Speaker 1: upon today. And you know, we we end up spending
Speaker 1: huge amounts of money repairing ancient infrastructure rather than building
Speaker 1: out new stuff because we know it's hard. It requires
Speaker 1: enormous investments in time, money, and effort, and not every
Speaker 1: company is really up for that. Now, that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: I think that Virgin hyperloop is never going to be
Speaker 1: transporting people, or that some other hyperloop based company isn't
Speaker 1: going to do it either. It may very well happen.
Speaker 1: I just think it's a case where people are learning
Speaker 1: very hard lessons along the way. All Right, I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed that update to an episode. I hope all
Speaker 1: of you are well. I'm doing as well as I
Speaker 1: possibly can. I'm actually out of breath. So fun times
Speaker 1: with COVID. If you have any suggestions for future topics
Speaker 1: of tech stuff, please reach out to me on Twitter,
Speaker 1: uh the Handles, text Stuff hs W. Maybe you just
Speaker 1: want to say hi and say I hope you get better.
Speaker 1: That would be great too, because I gotta tell you,
Speaker 1: isolating in a single room sucks. But hope you folks
Speaker 1: are well and I will talk to you again really soon.
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