The Chaser Report - The NEOM Is Coming

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

Ever wondered what the worst idea for a city ever is? Welcome to the NEOM.To lear more about Dom's book, and the upcoming Chaser Annual, why not attend Dom and Charles' book launch event at Gleebooks? More details on that event can be found here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report. It is Dom here. Unfortunately, Charles is unwelled today. So we couldn't record a new podcast for you. So instead, what I'm going to do is, well, I'm going to do what Charles would do, which is plug something. I have a new book out. It is called the Dictionary of Terrible Ideas, and it is chock full of ideas that are extremely terrible. And I have to admit that one of the ideas in the book comes directly from this podcast. Yes, I plagiarized us. One of the ideas in the book is called Neom.

Neom is a giant project in Saudi Arabia. It's their big plan to transition away from being a petro state. And instead, I don't quite know what the idea is, but it's some sort of modern, dystopian, bizarre thing. Anyway, part of it is Neon, this new city. There are a few different elements of it, including this. bizarre giant floating island and they're planning to hold the Winter Olympics at Neom in a few years time. Yes, the Winter Olympics in the desert. But the strangest part of Neon is something called the line. And Charles and I have been absolutely baffled by this since we started seeing ads for it

in our social media feed. The original idea, which has been scaled down for the time being, because reality, but the original idea was for a city that was a hundred and seventy kilometers long in a straight line, something like, I think it's 100 meters wide and 200 meters tall, something like that. If you imagine an endless skyscraper with very fast trains in the basement that lasts for 170 kilometers. That is the idea behind the line. I think you'll agree it's a fitting inclusion in the dictionary of terrible ideas. But anyway, we made an episode back in 2022 taking a good look at this. I also recommend Matt Bevan's episode of the If You're Listening podcast, which has some fascinating history about earlier bizarre Saudi ideas that went nowhere.

But anyway, this is our episode from 2022 about The Line and Neom. Charles will explain the idea and Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi royal and lover of bone sores apparently behind the plan. It's going to be a wild ride. We should do an update on how the plan's fallen over since. But anyway, in the meantime, right after the ads, we will take. you through the inception of this truly terrible idea. Please buy my book. Thanks. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important.

Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. So, Dom. Yes. We call this segment, welcome to the video. But really, in some ways, it should be called Welcome to the Neon. Welcome to the Neon! Neon. The Neonom? Neon.

I have no idea what Neon is. I know what Neon is. Do you know what Neon means in Saudi? Is it another way of beheading people? I don't know. It means future. Oh. And it's also the name of this new city that the Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, MBS, for short, has come up. with.

He's a whole city. It's a bad journalist. Is that what it's thought? It's a new city. He's going to build it in the desert. And, well, let me just ask you, what would you do if you had a spare $720 billion to spend? I think I would bankrupt Elon Musk for the good of humanity. I think just buying all of his businesses off him and just leave him to get on with his

main job, which is impregnating women. Well, you wouldn't be able to do that because actually he's. businesses are worth more than $720 billion. Good God. Anyway, so what would I do if I was Saudi? Yes. I'd probably build the most opposite thing to Saudi Arabia. I could probably buy Greenland and move everything there.

Oh, that's a much better idea. See, because I would have done something like fix poverty or fix hunger or solve climate change, right? No, no. If I was a Saudi prince, I wouldn't get a shit about any of that stuff. So what he's decided he's going to build a city in the middle of the desert. Didn't they do that already? What? Isn't Saudi Arabia already cities in the desert?

No, but it is a new one. A new one, okay. And the whole idea is to, you know, kit it out with all these new technologies that will then be useful in the future for other cities to adopt. Right, okay. And because it's sort of in such adverse circumstances, like this is a city, the idea is to create a city of nine million people in a place that has zero water. Yes. No water whatsoever. So you have to solve the problem of.

how do you give people water when there's literally no water around? And, you know, how do you give people food when there's no water to plant any food to actually feed anything? Yeah, how do you build a city in the worst possible place to build a city? If they can solve this, building an entire civilisation on Mars, it'd be a doddle, you think. So the answer, it turns out, so you know how cities are great because most cities, most really functional cities operate on some sort of grid system. You know, everything's close together. Yeah. And you can just sort of pop, you know,

like if you're in New York, you can pop from Times Square down to Union Square in the matter of minutes and then pop across town to, you know, maybe the meatpacking district or over to the Lower East side or something like that. And it's all packed together. Yes. So the idea here is instead of doing that, what you do is you massively elongate the city. So it's only 200, metres wide, but he's a hundred and seventy kilometres long. Right. He's honestly the case. 170 kilometres.

Yes. And the idea is that, you know, it'd be very useful if the place that you need to go is, you know, just across the road or something like 200 metres way. But most of the time, you will have to... Wouldn't you need to go 50 kilometres to the barber? Yes, exactly. How will that work? So, and so what, it's called the line.

So this city is going to be called the line, right? Yeah. And it's 200 metres wide, 170 kilometres long. And it's a skyscraper the whole way with a mirror. Like the walls of the city will be this ginormous solar-powered mirror type thing. And there will be a massively high-speed sort of central monorail system because we know how great monorails are. Enough for 9 million people.

That will, yes, because there are no cars, there's no streets, there's nothing. It's just the only way you can get from point A to point B is using this sort of public transport system that goes for 170 kilometres. This is the thing that's baffling to me. I'm all for public transport, I'm all for like building things closer together. It makes a lot of sense. But you know what's a better idea than this, Charles? Yes.

Being able to walk in two-dimensional space, being able to walk left and right instead of just straight up and down. It's bizarre. But Dom, Dom, Dom, Dom, Dom, Dom, Dom, Dom, Dom. I'm not buying the vision. You're ignoring one key detail, which is, this is built in the middle of an inhospitable desert. You're not going to want to go outside. Right. Like, that's one of the key design features is you don't, like, this whole.

It's in a place it's so horrible that you're not going to ever want to leave. So people will live their entire lives in this weird 200 metre wide. skyscraper in the middle of nowhere. Now, you sound a bit skeptical. I am very skeptical. But the lucky thing is, Dom, that, you know, MBS is not just somebody who just throws $720 billion at the first idea he comes across.

Right. Instead, he's due to a pilot phase. It's just the first phase is all he's committed to. And that is just going to cost $450 billion. Just as a proof of the concept. He's only committed the $450 billion. How much does it build? What does it build like two kilometres?

Is it like the light row? Do you get a little test track? I don't know what it gets him, but he's not so imprudent to just throw all $720 billion against the wall. Look, look, I don't know. One of the key problems this project, because it's been going for a while, has come up against recently. I mean, they've done quite a few videos showing off how gratitude. I think there's some good renders.

But it's employed tons of Western consultants. In fact, it's become this sort of boom industry at the moment of employing sort of engineers and, in particular, futurists. Oh, how are we not pitching to this? I'd love to work out how comedy will work. You know how, no, like, for years, because Dom and I both know people who call themselves futurists, right? And they actually make good coin.

Oh, they make a lot of money. They go around the world and they just sort of talk about the future. They say things like, the jobs that your children will do haven't even been dreamt up yet. So the thing... That's actually something we know. That is literally... That is literally...

But the thing is, like, an average futurist earns about, you know, $150,000, $200,000 a year. They make good coin, but it's not like... That's not sadist. Saudi coin. It's not Saudi coin. Guess how much the starting salary of any consultant or engineer working on this Neon project is?

I presume it's a million dollars because... It's too close. It's $800,000. Oh, my God, because you'd have to go to Saudi Arabia. That's already a lot of danger paying money. But also, you'd have to not laugh at it. That would be very hard to achieve. Thank you for your patience.

Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. The Chaser Report. Less news.

Less often. So the first thing is, there's a new guy running this project. His name's, his Royal Highness, Nudmi Al Nata. The interesting thing about him is he has been known to stalking. into the workplace and threaten to shoot anyone who doesn't sort of agree with his vision or doesn't get whatever task they're working on, finish that date. So the average amount of employment that these people who are on 800 grand, a million dollars a year sort of salaries, they last for about nine to 12 months.

But the problem is, and this is why it's sort of hard a little bit to talk about what's going on there is they all have to sign non-disclosure agreements on their way out the door. So as to not laugh at it. Yeah, exactly. Yes, and because, because one of the key problems that they've been facing is that it's actually illegal to say no to various members of the royal family in Saudi Arabia. So if a perfect example is they wanted to build a 200, and there was an interview in Bloomberg with the engineer who came up with a $200 billion solar field, right?

And it was all commissioned. They go, okay, we're going to build $200 billion worth of solar. I mean, that is one thing in the Middle East could actually legitimately be used for. It turned the whole thing into a massive solar collector. Yes. And it might actually do something useful. And then the royal, I think it was MBS, then said,

oh, but we want this much energy out of it, some amount of energy. And they went, well, that's not technically possible. And they shot them. Well, they didn't shoot them, but the whole project collapsed. And they stopped the project because no one was able to say, no, you can't have that. And everyone was too scared that it wouldn't. Okay, so clearly this thing isn't going to be built. There are so many problems with this.

Where do you begin? The first one is that it seems to preserve all the toxic elements of Saudi life. You've still got to deal with this absolutely heinous, murderous, royal family. Yes, yes. Although I do note, Charles, that in this future version of Saudi Arabia, They've solved the whole issue of women not being allowed to drive because nobody's allowed to drive. No one's allowed to drive.

But presumably they still have this hideous system where women are cloistered away indoors. It's just that everyone will be cloistered away indoors in the skyscraper because no one would want to go outside because it'll be the desert. So they're essentially preserving all the worst things about the society in a new weird 120 kilometre long skyscraper. Just hoping in hell.

Yes. But I think the whole idea is that they're doing it as much, much to develop the technology to do it. And then the idea is that Saudi Arabia will then become a sort of technology hub. Oh, and everyone will want to copy this idea of the long line of city. How did you do this ridiculously long city and make it work? Well, because this is quite funny because you've got to take this in the context of what's already happened in the Middle East, which is that places like Dubai and Qatar have already spent

massive billions of dollars on stupid ideas. They've already built like giant reclaimed islands. You know that project, The World, where they reclaimed islands. No. So there's a project that's a thing you buy called the world where basically if you imagine a map of the globe. Yes. If you got a bunch of ocean right next to a beach. Yes.

And you reclaimed island in the shape of different countries. Yes. That's what it is. So you can go and... Can you go to Australia? Yes, you can go and build a little house on the weird little replica of Australia. And they've done this several times. How big are we talking?

Oh, it'd be probably 20 kilometres wide or something. Like it's a giant... They've got all these... giant reclamation projects. And that is still a less stupid idea than the line, right? Yeah, because at least it's sort of three-dimensional. Yes, at least it gives you an island, which is actually a nice thing to have, rather than a horrible giant mirrored skyscraper.

But they've already done, like, the giant boj, al-Arab, that absolutely enormous skyscraper. They've done all these things already, the Bush, Khalifa, all this stuff. So to come up with an idea that is so weird and dumb and expensive, that the people in Dubai and Qatar haven't done it already. Like having a World Cup in the middle of the desert in air-conditioned stadiums is a really stupid and expensive idea. And that's happening later this year. Yeah. So look, Dom, the final thing that I want to discuss is how do we get in on the grift? Well, that's a very good question.

What are we going to do? Like, does Saudi Arabia need satire? I mean, I think they've got it covered. I think there's an angle to be brought in. It's an entire city that's been constructed on the satirical idea. I think you could just basically charge a lot of money to tell them that there's such a thing as a curve. So I think that's,

because imagine how much easier it would be if rather than building it in a straight line, they built it as a sphere. It's a circle. It doesn't have to be a sphere. They built it as a circle. They'll take much less of the desert up and it will take less time

because you'd have a hub and spoke arrangement, which is a much faster way to get from point A to point B. Or hear me out. a grid-style system. Hang on a second. And, you know, maybe you could asphalt various bits of that grid so that people could have their own transport and go from point A to point B using, I don't know, some sort of vehicle.

A private vehicle. Yeah, private vehicle. Or you could have, I don't know, like public vehicles, like let me call them buses. You could have trains. Trains. And you know that just about every city in the world has, like, like a circle line because it's a really efficient way of... Yeah, yeah.

That might work. You can also have different levels up and down. You can have a regular city. I mean, that could work. Yeah, or you could just fix up the current city, like re-ed. I haven't been to Saudi Arabia. But I gather that if you'd spend a lot of time there, you'd be pretty keen to build an entire city that was in a straight line.

But then also, where will the public beheading? happen in this new scenario because you need to have a particular point in the 120 kilometre long for the beheadings with swords which is such a feature of their society it'll be the centre won't it it it'll be bang in the middle bang in the middle 85 kilometres either way maybe that's what we could advise on is that how the beheadings how to do the beheadings yeah okay I mean they've probably thought about it already well yeah but also it's not just beheadings is it it's also like getting those oh dismembering journal Angle grinders to dispemper genos and stuff like that.

But there's a lot to do. You know, we wouldn't lack for work. And also, I'm all right with not saying no. I can say yes. I can be a yes, man. It's basically $800,000 a year. I'll say all the yes they want for $800 grand a year. Yeah, yeah.

Look, it does sound as though it is the stupidest idea ever conceived. Yes, but the weird thing is it doesn't involve Bluetooth. So I'm really confused. Anyways, this is the least impractical edition ever of Welcome to the Future. Yeah. Thank you, Charles. Our gear is from Road. We're part of the A-Cast Crater Network.

We'll have a normal episode for you tomorrow. Unless we get that job as future. Maybe they need someone to advise on Bluetooth in this new city. That's our job. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. Fizz is 100% online.

so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca.