The Chaser Report - Welcome to the NEOM

Episode Date: July 31, 2022

Dom and Charles don their futurist caps once again for a look into the future of civilisation. Charles unpacks MBS's plan for developing a 170km long city in Saudi Arabia, and Dom tries to get us blacklisted from ever attending as journalists. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to the Chaser Report for Monday, the 1st of August. I'm Charles Firth, Dom Knight. Yes, well done for getting the date right, particularly because the month changed. It can fomics many. Well, but also today is course's birthday. Is it? And it's Pitch and a punch for the first of the month.

And it's Wattle Day today. Really? Yes. Remember? No. I never knew it was water. What did the hell? Well, that's when all the wattles starts blooming from today.

Listen to the Chaser report for irrelevant facts about wattles. And this is when all the horses change age by convention. It's true. Okay, right. So it's the horse's birthday because we don't know what the actual birthday is, which is a bit... Couldn't we look into that? It wasn't it to just standardise it because basically everyone in horse racing

tries to cheat all the time? Oh, what it's for? Yeah, and so they go, oh, this horse was born on this day, whatever. So they just went, no, every horse is born on the first of August, and you've got to actually just, you know, get the procreation working. Because you'd think there'd be a paper trail. There'd be a paper trail of when the horse was actually born, you'd think. Yeah, but back in the 1930s when you were, you know, this scheme came up,

you'd just forge the paper trail, wouldn't you? Okay, anyway, today we have a very special episode because we're doing a bit of an extended episode of everyone's favourite segment The Horse's birthday! No, welcome to the future. Welcome to the future. So let's get straight into it, straight after this message.

None of the medical advice contained in the Chaser Report should legally be considered medical advice. The Chaser Report. Yes, and if you want to avoid ads like that, You can, of course, subscribe to the Chaser podcast for just a few bucks. Few, poultry bucks. A few bucks a month. Cheaper than a coffee with inflation.

Chaser.com.com. You slash podcast. Anyway, so, Dom, yes. We call this segment Welcome to the Future. But really, in some ways, it should be called Welcome to the Neon. Welcome to the Neon. Neon. The Neon.

Neon. Yes. 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. Is it a whole city to behead 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 of impregnating women. Well, you wouldn't be able to do that because actually his 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. Yes. 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 is going to build a city in the middle of the desert. Didn't they do that already? What? Isn't Saudi Arabia already? He's in the desert? No, but it is a new one. A new one. 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. So, 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. 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 would 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 some of 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 170 kilometres long. Right. It is honestly the case. 170 kilometres. Yes. And the idea is that, you know, like it would be very useful.

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 would that work? 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 nine million people. 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. sport 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? Being able to walk in two-dimensional space, being able to walk left and right instead of just straight up and down. This is bizarre. You can only be able... But Dom, Dom, Dom, Dom, Dom, Dom, Dom. Am I 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, it's in a place that's so horrible that you're not going to ever want to live. So people will live their entire lives in this weird 200 metre wide sky scraper in the middle of nowhere.

Now, you sound a bit skeptical. I am very sceptical. Yes, but the lucky thing is, Dom, that, you know, MBS is not just some. 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, right?

He's only committed the $450 billion. How much does it build? What does it build, like, two kilometers? Is it like the light row? 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 I think there's some good renders But it's employed tons of Western consultants In fact, it's become this sort of boom-in

industry at the moment of employing sort of engineers and, in particular, futurists. Oh, how are we not pitching to this? I know. 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, right? 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 a year.

Like, they make good coin, but it's not like... That's not 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... close, it's $800,000.

Oh, my God, because you'd have to go to Saudi Arabia. That's already a lot of danger pay of money. But also, you'd have to not laugh at it. That would be very hard to achieve. 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, Nudmir Al-Nata. The interesting thing about him is he has been known to storm into the work.

workplace and threatened to shoot anyone who doesn't sort of agree with his vision or 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, and 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. So, but presumably they still have this hideous system where women are cloistered away indoors, 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 dystopian hell. Yes, but I think the whole idea is that They're doing it as 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. There's a project that you buy called The World, where basically, if you imagine a map of the globe, if you've got a bunch of ocean right next to a beach, and you reclaimed island in the shape of different countries,

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 boge, al-A, that absolutely enormous skyscraper. They've done all these things, the boj, caliphah, 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 they 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 does Saudi Arabia need satire I mean I think they've got it covered I think there's an angle to be...

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... Imagine how much easier it would be if rather than building it in a straight line, they built it as a sphere. As a sphere.

A bit like the large Hadron... It doesn't have to be a sphere. They build it as a circle, yeah. They built it as a circle. It will take much less of the desert up and it will take less time. is you're going to 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. With, 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.

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 a circle line because it's a really efficient way of moving around. 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 read. I haven't been to Saudi Arabia. Yeah. But I gather that if you'd spend a lot of time there, You'd be pretty keen to build an entire than a city that was in a straight line. But then also, where will the public beheadings 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'll be bang in the middle. Banging in the middle, 85 kilometres either way. Maybe that's what we could advise on, is 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 journals. Engel grinders to dismembered journals and stuff like that. So 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 for $800,000 a year. I'll say all the yes they what for $800,000 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. In many ways, 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 Creator Network. We'll have a normal episode for you tomorrow.

Unless we get that job. Yeah, yeah. Maybe they need someone to advise on Bluetooth in this new city. That's our job.