Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 150: The Death of Hyperloop

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

wow the pipe dream turned out to be just that, incredible see gareth on RAILNATTER: https://www.youtube.com/@GarethDennisTV buy the shirt: https://www.grimgrimgrim.com/products/well-theres-your-problem-x-grimgrimgrim-diy-disastercore Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

I think Liam you're a little bit quiet at least to me. Oh, yeah. Yeah, let me eat the mic a little bit here Oh, fuck you go. Ah, well we killed Liam not supposed to actually eat it. Oh It's so tasty. Oh Man, can we do a whole one where Liam Liam you're already a sexy MF. Can you do one like that, please? You make me pointy for two hours You make me pointy for two hours. You make me pointy. You like that? I like it a lot. I stole pointy. It's actually one of my greatest shames.

I stole the pointy joke from a friend of mine named David Powis. Shout out to David Powis. An uncredited contributor. I steal a lot of phrases. There's some real gross ones I have, like a euphemism for sex being touching tutors. I give people phrases, but all of mine are just things like things of this nature. Yeah, I think I invented have a nice time. You did. International best friends day. International friends day, yes. Yeah, I try

and do my very best to use suck the shit out of my ass Which is it? I mean, it's my enjoy that so much and it sounds so strange after saying a very strong Scottish accent for it to be convincing Yeah, that's that's my deficit All right, you want to you want to do this? Let's do a podcast Hello and welcome to will there's your problem. It's a podcast podcast. Let's pod. Hello and welcome to well. There's your problem It's a podcast been engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosnack

I'm the person who's talking right now my pronouns are he and him are at go Currently piloting the body of Alice Cordwell Kelly. I guess that makes my pronouns they and them. Yeah, Liam. Yeah, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. I'm the person talking right now. I was joking. Don't actually fucking they them me. No, don't. I'll let you're mad at her.

Yeah, quite unless you're mad at me. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's disgusting. But yeah, we have a guest. We're guest. Oh, he was just about to take a sip of water. Returning champion. Doing a great job of introducing myself onto this podcast. What a lovely time. Come I've come back to spend some time with my dear friends in the WTYP team. Yes, Gareth Dennis. Hi. Hi. I'm here. What are your pronouns? Oh, yeah. My pronouns are he, him. Thanks, Liam. I suck. My pronouns are he, him. We trip everybody up with the pronouns, including, I guess, myself just now. We're all confused. Because of the woke. Because there's also some genuine time pressure, which

as a podcast, we were not very good at like as a collective podcast is as someone who has a long form podcast. I'm not very good at it. And I think, you know, the, the hogs know that you're not very good at it as well. Omsa Besser. So I don't come on to round after and criticize your time management skills. Our time management skills are in the toilet, Alice. They always have been. Alice, you came on and did an episode on time management.

So that's true. Do you remember when we recorded what's it? I always have been Alice. You came on and did an episode on time management. So that's true. Yeah, that's a good point. Do you remember when we recorded was it Bo Paul and then university back to back? Do you remember a mere moment ago where we said we had a time pressure and then we launched a tangent independently? It's OK. I got. I got two and a half hours.

I can make it work. We have 63 slides. I fucking hate this game Literally unplayable what you see on the screen in front of you is a massive impediment to shipping I've always wanted to impede that as a longtime member of the Houthi rebels I was about to say this is this is not Houthi's but it does start with H. It's a hyperloop. Yes. Oh, H is a hyperloop and Elon Musk's turd alphabet.

Also known as Swiss Metro, we'll get there. Yeah. Going to the recent demise of Hyperloop One, we think it's finally to come out and talk about the hyperloop on a podcast. Now, ideally, we would have done an episode on hyperloop earlier, so we could all say, we told you so, but we didn't do that. But rest assured, we've all been thinking it for at least a decade now. I think we've had it in new segments before. If anyone wants to like, you did it.

You had a hyperloop. Did you have a hyperloop video on Do Not Eat? No, it was a regular loop. Yeah, it was a regular loop. Yeah, it was a regular loop Just plain loop. I We've done it on TF a bunch of times. So definitely like in this sort of broader universe. We're very very like anti Hyperloop. Yep. Yeah, I could I I tweeted about it angrily in 2017 So that's my that's my like checkpoint on when I was mad about it from Alice

Aversandham hyperloop Elon Musk finally builds the hyperloop traveling so fast beneath California. Every passenger arrives dead exactly according to plan. Yeah. 13th of February 2017. Nice. Nice. I would say I first got mad at it the first time I saw the white paper.

2013, golly. Braz was a hyperloop hating hipster before it was called. I started hating early. You were born a hater. And my hate has only grown more pure. I'm proud of you. One here that says, I just wanted to make a joke about Peter Teal before he steals all my blood to power the hyperloop.

I forget how good at tweeting. You know, I thought the new the new hyperloop that they're proposing in Canada runs on plasma and on blood. Yeah. But before we talk about the late hyperloop, we have to do the goddamn news. Folks, it's real. It's real and it's weak and it's our enemy. Yeah, the thing you get outclassed by a Subaru outback. The it has come to light that the new all stainless steel cyber truck

needs to be frequently cleaned from any kind of corrosive substance or it may damage the exterior through corrosion. From Alice Aversandum's cyber truck. Actually, nothing. I haven't got any good cyberpunk tweets, which is weird, given that it's the slowest moving, largest, most polygonal target. Yeah. It's like an F117 and you're a Serbian baker. I've always identified very deeply with Serbianbian service to MSL crews. Yeah. First

the Houthis now them. So according to the user's manual of the cyber truck to prevent damage to the exterior, immediately remove corrosive substances such as grease, oil, bird droppings, tree resin, dead insects, tire spots, road salt, industrial fallout, etc. Do not wait until cyber truck is due for a complete wash. If necessary used in a X blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do not wait until Cybertruck is due for a complete wash. If necessary, use the Nadex blah blah blah blah blah. I hate the heck manual convention of referring to it by name, no pronoun. Like do not charge iPhone and less thing. Do not wash Cybertruck and less whatever. But yeah, we've all seen

the videos of this thing, like in the flesh with all of the panels out of alignment, getting its wheels stuck spinning and like a sort of five degree slope. Yeah. What was the coach that was in the crash in the first episode we did together that had like not stainless steel, but it like rusted totally. Yeah, it was good Bradley coaches. Is this the always good Bradley coach of the the the road world? Here's the thing. A lot of people have been commenting that the reason this is happening is because it doesn't have a clear code

But I believe this particular grade of stainless steel will corrode if you clear-coat it just from the clear So that's also not an option these things don't these things don't react well to sort of And these things don't these things don't react well to sort of built in suspenders approach to corrosion prevention. Something here. Don't react well to clear coats. I was trying to do Sean Connery there, but I have to watch my coat. Yeah. So the other thing that strikes me is that like they've got the experience of owning a 1970s Italian sports car where it rains once and you wake up and the suspension is a pile of rust flying up the car. But without being fun to drive and it's the whole body of the car.

Well, I'm a glorious Alfa Romeo. So a lot of stuff really confuses me about this because a stainless steel is, you know, a very resilient material. I mean, that's what they build all the train cars out of here in the United States because it works really good. And here it's just falling apart instantly. Now, I know that Tesla developed their own special kind of stainless steel, they call 30X. Well, there's your problem. Yeah.

Elon Musk has been involved in the design process. I have no idea how or what they did to it. I mean, presumably what they've done to prevent ... So there's something stainless likes to do called oil canning Right where it warps a little bit when it's pressed flat Which doesn't look very good and I guess what they've done to prevent that is sacrifice all the natural corrosion resistant properties of stainless steel Messlergy, you know, it's a series of trade offs. And so they've made every single one of those wrong. Well, the thing is, I believe it is an 18 and eight stainless steel,

you know, 18 percent chromium, 8 percent nickel. They use the other way around, I forget, which is usually pretty resilient. But I don't know how they fucked it up this badly. I mean, fucking Tysol title his biography that to be honest Yeah I found out something about Elon Musk by the way You know he tried on for a while and I'm not making fun of anyone for trying on new names because yeah But you know he tried pronouncing his name Elon for a bit and this video of him

Call it like introduce himself as Elon Musk at a conference and no one buys it. He had to go out to Elon by popular demand. Sure. That was sad. Well, he tried, which is more than can be said about what he did with the hyperloop. But yeah, I mean, so these cyber trucks are all pavement princesses. It's it's it's really incredible what Southern California brain does to you and car design. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing like you can buy the sort of child killing Ford pickup with the sort of massive flat front and it will at least like drive off road. Yeah. As I understand that they're

quite good at that. The OK, the you know, the the truck bed is still the same size as an old Toyota Tacoma, but like you can still put stuff in it and the panels meet. So, you know, you could just buy one of those or you could buy this and sort of have everyone realize that you were a dip. You have the car melt holes in the rain. Yeah. Yeah. I mean that you're a dipshit of the car melts holes in the rain. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're going to drive this to onto like the grass parking lot at the Maryland Renaissance fair. And by the time

you're back, your car will be in pieces like the Blues Brothers car. Maryland, Maryland Renaissance fair and acute observation of where I'm likely to see one of these parks, I think. Yeah. 2024, and Elon Musk has invented all British automotive output from the 1970s. Yeah, all I need to know is that the Cybertruck is more aerodynamic in reverse, which, to be honest, it looks like it might be. Yeah. Yeah.

In other news. Whoa. Whoa. And other news. Boeing Boeing is fucking up because of DEI initiatives causing parts to fall off planes. Yeah, this is We've gone far enough of creating shareholder value just nationalize Boeing Do the unspeakable to all the all the executives on the coast shovel their corpses out into the Puget Sound or whatever to be clear. We don't actually believe that this is the fault of woke right? What's happening is Boeing is fucking up and there has been this like of minor accidents and sort of incidents and stuff and one big not so minor incident of the fucking door coming off one of the planes

But all of the worst chuds in the world are trying to push the idea that the reason this is happening Is because Boeing is doing DEI diversity equality and inclusion like corporate woke And because of that and then you know, it's it's abstracted on a number of levels How far away they want to obscure their sort of conspiracist idea that the Airlines are hiring black people for the first time in history apparently and that's making the wings fall off the plane But that's basically what they're saying. It is nonsense and anyone who tells you it is trying to sell you on becoming a Nazi but It does it is true that the wings falling off the planes

It's just not because of what But it is true that the wings falling off the planes. It's just not because of what? What's funny is that all this Boeing stuff is happening at the same time that that Airbus was like had fire rage through and everyone got off it safely. So Airbus is kind of rubbing its hands together at this point, as Boeing seems to be taking a shit on itself. European excellence, Burger Plane washed. Well, the two recent incidents here are at the Atlanta, a Delta 757 had a nose wheel fall off when it was taking off.

Hey, you know. Yeah. And that's not especially good. See, it's sweet. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And then I forget especially good. Sweet. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And then I forget what the other one was, but there was a plane that was missing. The other one was a Virgin Atlantic plane that was going to fly transatlantic. And as it was on the runway, passenger looks out the window, sees that there's

a bunch of bolts missing in one of the like wing things and tells the stewardess who is like, OK, well, we cannot fly the plane now, I guess, because it's got like 50 bolts missing. Because of work is why it wasn't there another. What was the door with also a door fell like blue? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did this. We did this last episode of the last plane that the door blew off. Basically what this amounts to is Boeing is doing stuff on the cheap and also airlines are not as good at maintenance as they should be. I was about to say, you know, zero fatalities in however many years now, but that's not for lack of trying. No, no, no, no.

Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. Everyone who you talk to who works with, you know, passenger aviation sort of understands that the unblemished safety record is by virtue of a lot of really good engineering applied in some of the dumbest ways possible. And yeah, I mean, some of it does just run down to dumb luck as well. Mason I'm counting on these numbers getting worse because, certainly in Europe, I'm counting on these numbers getting worse because certainly in Europe, aviation and railways are on level pecking in terms of passenger safety. So we need a few biggies. We need to keep us in the dirt to keep you in the work as well. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so they're pretty much exactly level pecking in terms of fatalities for per billion kilometers or whatever. So come on Boeing.

Yeah, that's solid. Oh, yeah. So just for clarity, I'm not calling for a play crush. Legally, you cannot. You heard it here, folks. Gareth wants two 747s to wreck into each other again. I mean, if you're flying a 747 at this point, you kind of deserve what you get. But, um But yeah.

So that's been like some of the operators are putting a little like, is this flown by a Boeing check field on flight to you can search for in case you want to like veto it. In case you only want to fly Airbus, the correct passenger. I'm not going to take a stance that hard on behalf of Airbus. The true proletarian passenger air vehicle is an Embraer because because of Lula and the Lulags, you know? Yes. Do you not do not ask anything about what the Embraer family does? Yeah, maybe maybe an illusion or something, you know, short.

Everyone should be flying short. That's a yeah, flying boats. Yeah, that's it. Maybe a nice dehavel in the otter. Yeah, that's it. Why did I just assume that there was an embryo family? Why did I assume that that was like a name? Sure, there's a dentist.

There's got to be an embryo dynasty. That sounds. No, no, no, It's a fantastic name. Sure. I'm going to butcher this, but it's Empressa Brasileira de Aeronautica. It's the Brazilian Aeronautics Corporation. Oh, well, it was it was nationalized

originally, which again, Lula, do it again. You know. Yeah. Well, that was goddamn news. Sorry, this thing makes me laugh whenever I see it. Yeah. I will not live in the pods. I will not eat a block.

I was trying to do something with this image where the transport tycoon bankruptcy message would pop up down here. But the thing is I left the game running for an hour with a deficit that never came up. So I couldn't take a screenshot. Yeah. But the thing is I left the game running for an hour with a deficit that never came up. So I couldn't take a screenshot. Yeah, I mean, bankruptcy and transport isn't real is the lesson that transport fever teaches you. The worst part was after that hour, the company started making money. I'm very bad at losing money in that game.

This is the thing about transport, you know, it's it's teaching you a realistic lesson, which is it doesn't matter how big a loss you post. So MTA, stop paying your bills. Yeah, stop paying your bills, stop charging fares. Everybody be like Albuquerque. The biggest hyperloop company hyperloop one has gone bankrupt and had its assets sold off to creditors. Oh, no. What does this mean?

We could have gotten some hyperloop shit. Like when they had the Twitter auction, people bought the Twitter swag too quickly for us to get a big wooden bird thing out of their office. But like we could have gotten some hyperloop shit, some pens or something, you know? I put the whole pod in my backyard. Yeah, I want to see this pod up on Cinderblocks in front of a Philly row house. Oh, that'd be really funny. So I thought, you know, the best way to get us to where we are

with the hyperloop being not completely dead, but mostly dead. This first we have to do history. We have It's first we have to do history. We have to ask first we have to do and then a pause. Yeah, crimes me. Yeah. I was ready. I trained me to hit the news drop. We must ask what is a hyper loop?

A fraud. But it's like a it's like a loop, but more so. You know, hyper. It's just my life. Yeah. So I'll sort of the first we have to talk about using air to move trains. Oh, it's become full circle now. Yes.

Yeah. It's what we're finally we've run out of ideas. We're back to the clip show format, you know, sit back, tune out for an hour or so. Remember, it's your favorite. Everyone. Yeah, yeah. They'll never stop. Well, there's your problem podcast. That's because we got a little weird. We're doing this.

We'll be doing this into our eighties until the wheels come off. OK, I'm just going to talk briefly about atmospheric railways. Since there's been trains, there's been proposals to power them by means other than steam one of which is messing with air pressure Yeah, the big suck right yeah exactly the big suck or the big blow Yeah, sorry, you know The first attempt in 1834 the bulky atmospheric railway. That's a piston in a tube 1835 the Paris Saint Germain Railway. That's a piston in a tube. 1835, the Paris Saint Germain Railway that's another piston in a tube. You have a tube, differential air pressure, there's

a piston in it, there's a slot at the top, train goes, right? Yeah, listen to the fucking Atmospheric Railway episode. You can learn a lot about rat viscera. Yeah, and terrified Irishmen. Yes, exactly. There are several people have done animations of that specific episode because it's one of our best. This is remaining optimistic. I think we can hit higher heights.

Yes. So another. So this was done either because they needed to climb slopes. They needed more speed, so on and so forth. But they didn't work that well and steam technology has sort of advanced beyond that, right? Yeah. And so it's worth very briefly saying, there wasn't so much craziness. The idea was taking the power source out of the train, which is what we've done with electric trains, right, with overhead electrification. So the logic here was sort of sound because they didn't have good electricity at this point. But yeah, it ended up with

Ravishra and it wasn't very good. Yes. Another example is Alfred Eli Beech's Beach Pneumatic Transit System in New York City. This was in 1870. It was a new idea. It's a quite cute bug one on the right. Yeah. Yeah. Instead of having a piston in a tube, the whole train is the piston. Oh.

Right? Iran a test track that went 300 feet from Broadway and Warren Street to just past Broadway and Warren Street when men had. And that thin wooden door is the plank between you and eternity. Yeah. It was intended to go five more miles to Central Park. It would be faster than a street car and cleaner than one of the steam elevated trains. But the project was killed by the panic of 1873 because of how the gold standard works, which is to say it doesn't.

But yeah, these systems all try to solve various problems like steep grades, low speeds, uncleanliness, so on and so forth. With the power of air, none of them stood the test of time, and esteemed technology improved, and then electricity took over as garret's. Yeah, and we have now a solved technology in the form of overhead line electrification that goes to a nuclear power plant that just does. No, we gotta put batteries on it. Battery trains are the future. What about hydrogen? In the same way that firearms are a solved technology, trains are a solved technology. It's fine. We've solved it folks. It's done. Just build it until you invent like some kind of frictionless material or maglev unless you make maglev like really practical or whatever.

Maybe it's fine. A lot of people out there who hear things like 120 year old technology and they think it just means that it's that old as opposed to there's 120 years of development. How many wars did the Colt 45 when, you know, maybe I should try and sell it this way in a slightly more masculine sense and say that the overhead line electrification is the Colt 1911 of trains. There's 120 years of development on that. 125 years of perfection.

It's got stopping power. Can't get that from a new technology. So, incidentally, the plug pneumatic tube train is in a front to God. It goes against everything in my principles as a rail engineer, designing the train to essentially contact everything around it makes me unhappy. It sounds like there'd be a lot of friction, yeah. Yeah. I'll lube up that train. It sounds like there'd be a lot of friction. Yeah. Yeah. So.

Lube up that train. Hmm. I like the late 1800s, early 1900s. It seems like railroads had topped out at about 100 miles an hour, which is faster than anyone could conceivably need to go anyway. I kind of simply believe this. You know, if you, if you, if you, you know, I'm not like a big speed person. If my, if my journey takes more than you know

It takes a long time at 100 miles an hour constantly then fine. It takes a long time. It's a long distance Some people dare to dream bigger. There was this article in scientific American in 1909 By none other than rocketry pioneer Robert H. Goddard called the limit of rapid transit And so Goddard proposes a new use for air pressure instead of having it push the train. The train is propelled by other means inside an evacuated tube, a vacuum tube. This sounds familiar. Yeah, can't have air resistance if you don't have air. But Elon Musk invented it. And Elon Musk wasn't born in the 1950s.

That we know of. That we know of, yeah. So these vacuum tube trains, this is an idea he plays with throughout his entire life. He only gets posthumously awarded a patent in 1950, despite coming up with it 40 years earlier. The idea, you know, it's simple. There's no air resistance in this evacuated tube. The train can go any arbitrary speed limited only by the right of way geometry and bearings if the thing uses wheels, which a lot of early proposals. So foreshadowing there, listeners, limited by geometry.

Yeah, I brought that in your copy books. The geometry being dictated by geography, which is exists, unfortunately, you know, yes There's soils and loams and mountains and stuff Yeah, the in the way in between where you and what you want to go, you know the guys from alt.pave the earth Haven't won yet Kind of like perfect Indianapolis parking lot landscape perfect asphalt sphere Yeah. Perfect asphalt sphere. No, I still think that we need a hard cap of 100 miles an hour in all forms of transit.

If I can't get there in an Antonov AM2, then why do I need to be flying? Then Antonov, I ain't going. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Fuck, Embraer. You know, this is the real shit. I'm flying the crop duster. Yeah. So can't stall. It has nouster. Yeah. So can't stall. It has

no stall. Sorry. The you know, there's incredible speeds here possible, you know, 1000 miles an hour, 2000 miles an hour, 10,000 miles an hour sort of depends on the route, how much you can accelerate. Much even for me. Maybe maybe you're doing it Los Angeles, New York City and under an hour. Maybe you're doing like New York to Paris in 40 minutes. It's this exciting concept that's hard to implement practically given limitations and you know, vacuum pump technology. Perfect seal the whole length of the tube. It no one's built one.

Availability of steel. Yes. No one's built one for reasons. So you know we have a pipe dream. We do a little like shadow boxing thing there. Yeah. We have two technologies that take over for high speed transportation, one of which is air travel.

Boo. This isn't an Antonoff AM2. Very, to be fair, it's pretty fetching. I love it when their engines are tiny. Yeah, this is this is a Boeing 707. This is back when when parts didn't fall. Well, they did still fall off, but it was acceptable back then. Yeah, this was significantly deadlier to fly on.

Like just to retain some sense of perspective, this is way more dangerous. Looks cooler, though. So it's impossible to say if it was good or not. You know, yeah, the comet defeater we've got on screen here to spin back to your previous episode on the comet. Yeah. Ooh. All right.

All right. Good luck. And air travel gets cheaper. It gets more tolerable. The planes go faster. They don't have to refuel as much. Um, so these really, really fast vacuum tube trains, that's more of a niche idea now because they have 100 miles an hour is fine.

And then the other thing is, of course, while researchers in the United States are figuring out the next generation of incredibly high-speed trains, the rest of the world actually builds high-speed trains. This is the real shit, my beautiful, beloved TGVs. Yeah. For the benefit of listeners, I just, in an entirely audio only format, just air pumped and whittled my fingers around silently. That's for everyone's benefit when the picture of the trains appeared. Yes. You show me these early TGVs, I become a goallist. It's embarrassing. I become like a weeb for France,

a weeb, but it's OUIB. I'm like some of the footage they took of those just, oh. Right. Yeah. So it's worth, it's very briefly worth, worth interjecting that what's fun about this, this is their circles back to your APT episode. We're circling back to lots of episodes. I'm feeling melancholic. I've not seen all of you chatty for ages. So I'm just thinking I'm just reminiscing on past times. Yeah, so APT, the development of the APT involved fixing the problem that Maglev was intended to solve. We'll talk about that in a minute, I'm sure. Which was to deal with once you once trains reach a certain speed, they did this thing where the wheels that hunt, they do this thing called hunting, They do that anyway. All trains do that. But at certain speeds, with the technology, the time

in the middle of the last century, they would do that to the point where they'd vibrate vigorously and use a lot of energy to go faster. It's horrible. It's that BBC report where the guy's on the APT and he's saying over the audible rattle of everything around him, It's smooth, quiet and an altogether delightful experience. But it was, well, that's because he was drunk. So a chap called Alan Wickens, Professor Alan Wickens is the guy who came up with, who kind of headed the APT project. APT was a failure, but he developed a thing called

Your Dampers or kind of Modern Your Dampers, which solved the hunting problem for high speeds. And it was that work that enabled everything after the shinkansen. So the first shinkansen didn't employ it. And that's kind of why they were limited to 125, 130 miles an hour. But everything after that used Wiccans as yordampers. So APT might not have worked, but the work of the APT researchers gave the rest of the world conventional steel and steel high-speed rail. So the TGV used the French TGV used the yordampers developed by the the weird white coat boffins Weird sort of search of British patriotism to know that something named as British Lee as Wiccans is your dampers It's always interesting. You look back at all this advanced rail technology, like half of it comes from British Rail because they had a well-funded research department.

Yes, research department. We are research divided. They got money. They had time to invent UFOs. As a result of the time inventing UFOs, seriously, look up the patents, folks. In the time to do that, they also invented a load of really useful shit that we are still using now to this day across the whole global railway. It's quite marvelous. Bring back British Rail. Yeah, bring back British Rail and their

skunkworks, their Area 51 or whatever they had. Yeah, in Derby. Yeah. So, the rest of the world is building high speed rail. You get the Takaido Shinkansen, that's 1964, regular service at 130 miles an hour between Tokyo and Osaka. The Italians are building the Doratissima, right? That's from beautiful trains. Yeah. It goes from Rome to Florence. This is a more modern high speed train here, but the the Ratissima was one of the very first high speed rails in Europe, right? That's 1977. I think the Polish possibly got there first in the official definitions of high speed rail as well. So shout out to the Polish out there. How are you?

Well done. I didn't know that. Where is that? That, Google it. I can't because I'm dumb as shit. I didn't know that. Where is that? Google it. I can't, because I'm dumb as shit, I can't remember the exact name of the line. But when I did my first High Speed Rail in Europe episode about the Selby diversion, apparently I was like, the French and Italians got there first, but actually no, apparently the Polish got there as well. So shout out to the Poles in your High Speed Rail.

I'm always shouting out the Poles. A lot of these early ones in Europe, a lot of the early ones are really modernization of existing routes. They weren't dedicated high-speed until you get to the LGV Sud Est in France that goes from Paris to Lyon. That's 1983, right? Trains are getting faster, much, much faster. They're getting competitive with the airlines.

God, they look good. I have to agree with Alice. These are some of the best looking trains ever. The original TGV are, oh my God. I mean, they set the speed record for a train with a like specially lightened one of these. Like, yeah. And speed, is it like 470? Well, I have to remind myself, 474 kilometers an hour or is it maybe more than absolutely ludicrous speeds? Okay. Not the point that the slightly newer ones, as Alice says, but like so fast and it's on French, beautiful French technology. Yeah. I have a particular favorite, by the way, which is the Tejeve la Poste, because I love a fast postal train.

I love a too fast postal train. And it doesn't exist anymore, because there's no niche for it. Because for some reason, in a time where everyone's ordering shit from Amazon constantly, we can't imagine needing to ship stuff really quickly. But yeah, no, it's just like we'll get to that later. But yeah, it's just like we'll get to that later. Not for 74 kilometers an hour. Five hundred and seventy four kilometers. Now that's three hundred and sixty miles, three hundred and sixty miles an hour

that the steel on steel, LJV S, LJV S has managed with a with a kind of a slightly modded souped up TV. with a slightly modded, souped up TGV. Yeah, they've been in sort of an unofficial competition with the Japanese superconducting Maglev. Yeah. And what's funny is that the... Do you know how fast the Yamanashi Test Track, the Maglev, which again, we'll get there, folks.

Sorry. The L-Nought series has reached 375 miles an hour and the steel on steel has reached 360 miles an hour, 15 miles an hour slower conventional steel on steel. So fuck you, Mclef. Yeah. So yeah, trains are getting faster in Europe, in Asia, not so much in the United States, which is, you know, we have national prestige on the line, right? All these other, you know, these other smaller and poorer countries are developing HSR. The USA needs to one up everyone. And this is where the very high speed transportation system comes in.

Yeah. That very, a real sort of like finger in the eye there. Yeah. So there's this guy, Robert M. Salter. He works at the Rand Corporation. That's the Research and Development Corporation, right? Yeah, I never respected them as much after I found out that the A and the N are just and.

Yeah. He comes up with a comprehensive proposal for a vac train system in America in 1972. And this is a simple matter of thousands of miles of deep crack tunneling across the country with stations at higher elevations, so gravity assists breaking and acceleration. Trains would initially travel at several hundreds of miles an hour on steel wheels, but when Maglev technology matured, they could be upgraded to much higher speeds, right? How can gravity slow a train down that's doing it?

Rabbit ears very high speed. Need a lot of gravity. I presume these stations were 150 meters in the air, like on sort of like an Eiffel Tower type arrangement. Well, here's the other thing you do is that air pressure from the stations could be used to accelerate and decelerate trains. So essentially, as they're going up the slope into the station, you open the air locks and the air rushes out and that helps slow it down too. Right? My God station just farts all your clothes off.

It's just like a little space. It's like a ping-pong and then just all the doors open and it's just stripped nude, but it's rushed bare. You know, this is supposed to be good enough. The train might not need an onboard motor. And this was in Salter's words, the next logical step for transportation. Oh, was it? Yeah. And so this nationwide system is, it was barely on the edge of technical feasibility,

but also ludicrously expensive. I love the concept of that combination. Yeah. But you get to say that it'll make journey times that are just they can make up the journey times though, because it's so ludicrous, they could just make it up. I'm sure we learn a lesson to not pay attention that sort of hoax. Oh, this idea was taken seriously, wasn't really pursued beyond some very high level like technical documents, but it did provide enough breathing room that it could reasonably be claimed that rail is for once in all obsolete for passenger transportation, we should move on to newer technologies. Now, what in fact happened during that same era as we

get the High Speed Ground Transportation Act and America invests in this. Yes. The Metro Line. America invests in this. Yes. The metro line. Oh my God, I love it so much. Like the sum total of the 20th century as we get the metro liner and some track upgrades to the Northeast corridor and everything sort of decays. I love it so much. It's just like a fuck you air. Our dynamics runs into it with a blunt end. They did manage 160 miles an hour in these ones.

Absolutely incredible. It is this on the blue out windows adjacent to it. Yes. One of the first test runs that blew out the windows on a commuter train next to it. Why they tested night now. Make the train pointy, not in that way. Oh, yes. So we don't really invest in high speed rail in the United States

in any meaningful way until California high speed rail. Woo. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, right, being governor of California makes you insane. And every generation, there is a governor of California who wishes to govern as Kaiser Augustus. So Reagan, Jerry Brown, Leland Stanford, probably, I haven't checked if he was governor. I think he was, yeah. And now Gavin Newsom.

And so under that paradigm, you know, Augustus rebuilds Rome as a city of Marble. Gavin Newsom is going to make it possible for you to get from Los Angeles to San Jose in 45 minutes. Yes. Now, one thing that's useful about California high speed rail is the trains say California on the side. So you remember where you are. It's sort of like secession watch, you know, that's another sort of peg towards A24's chud versus woke, right? I always enjoy the I always enjoy. I think there's a fun game to be had when you see what train they've the CGI people have picked to put in their renders. So at the bottom, there's

kind of like a duck at TGP, like an all-stem TGV type thing in the very Dutch-coded high-speed rail in the bottom picture there. The top one, it appears to be one of the Chinese kind of extremely pointy and slightly Zeeman's IC Velarotype. Yeah. It's something like that. Notably lacking a patograph or overhead wire. There was a brief period of time where a few state senators were trying to convince them to do battery high speed trains. Jesus Christ! That moment seems to have passed.

That California state senator is one of the easiest and dumbest people to buy on God's green earth as well. So a long story short about California high speed rail is California voters approve a ballot measure to build high speed rail in California in 2008. They got a legally mandated top speed of 220 miles an hour. There's a lot of drama about construction costs and land acquisition, the correct right-of-way, so on and so forth. Construction takes seven years to get underway. Right now we're projected to get the quote, initial operating segment unquote in the central valley between Bakersfield and Merced in sometime in the 2030s.

Uh-huh. And I've never heard of the singular form of Mercedes was. That's good to know. It's future proof, you know? Also, sorry for completely no selling a Mercedes junk. That was very good. That's right. I deserved it. And, you know, time is money and we like to spend money. So we're spending a lot of time building this. It's capitalism. As I say on, as I've been saying on Real Matter repeatedly related to all sorts of HS2 related stuff. When your entire economy is based on extracting value from the bits around the thing that does a thing rather than the thing that does a thing, rather than the thing

that does a thing itself, of course, delivering actual things like infrastructure becomes impossibly expensive. That's capitalism, baby. Yeah. I mean, this is first and foremost the way to keep a lot of consultants employed and the transportation second, including weirdly, Network Rail, who are the infrastructure operator in the UK, who are one of the major consulting contractors on the California high-speed rail. Network Rail take your Californian vacation.

Yep. Yeah, but the guy who's supposed to be my line manager moved over there, gave up on me when I moved to my new job and decided to shout out to Dave, I moved over to California to work on the California high-speed train. Hard to blame him. When you look at, sort of of like I'm doing you know Permanent way on a sort of wet Wednesday in Middlesbrough. I could be Being beautiful California and that you are British you do not know what this bit of California looks like you've never been to truckie

You don't know it's like yeah sure. Let's do it Yeah, I'll go to beautiful, you know, I'm expecting, you know, San Francisco constantly I'll go to a beautiful, you know, I'm expecting, you know, San Francisco constantly 70 degrees and, you know, beautiful weather year round. And actually, no, I'm here in Fresno. It's 140 degrees and incredible human. I can't learn what climate change means by living in it. Yeah. But you can get the burger. You can get what a burger you can get in and out. That's a good point. Yeah.

You know, California high speed rail project is necessary because as slow and expensive as this, the other alternatives, which were massive airport expansions or massive freeway expansions, sink it to the sea. Or sink it to the sea. They're much more expensive and much worse for the environment. But people still got mad about it, including a rich guy who stole a car company named Elon. Oh my. Elon Musk. Elon Musk. Elon Musk. Elon Musk.

Yeah. This fucking guy. I deserve a better class of nemesis as the thing. This fucking guy. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what there is to say about Elon that hasn't already been said. We fucking dance.

So that's what he he sells cars and spaceships and he renames websites. Yeah, his whole life is based around wanting to getting annoyed about the fact that his he thought he was cool when he was like 20 to name a company X. And then that constantly got taken away from him by him being shit at everything he turns his hand on to. And so he's continued to fail upwards. Yeah, I'd be like if I still combed my hair forward in the mice base way, you know. Yeah, we can both wax nostalgic about the shit we were doing in the 2010s, man. Jesus. Right now, a lot of people think he's bad but back in 2012

this was less obvious unless you were really paying attention. Yeah everyone's still sucking his dick back then. Yes. From Alaservasandum Elon Musk. Yeah. We got here. We're just doing Musk I think that's probably gonna be. That's the safe one isn't it? Yeah. I love that we're all just lightly silently waiting to find out what fun stuff that was starting. Sorry, I have Elon Musk and Grimes playing cards against humanity. Oh, God. That's actually a phenomenally good bit.

I hope Elon Musk builds his dumb tunnel only for both entrances to collapse, leaving him trapped underground where only one man can save him. Elon cries up for help and Vern Unsworth looks down and whispers you're a pedophile. Yes, yes. Okay. Absolute, absolute queen of posting shit. I love that. Sorry for doing Twitter review here. It's fine. We're enjoying it. We're looking at a picture of a creep, a sexual offender, abuser, apartheid white supremacist piece of shit. Oh, this is from 2020. Someday we're going to find out how Elon Musk won that pedo guy sexual offender, abuser, apartheid white supremacist piece of shit.

Oh, this is from 2020. Someday we're going to find out how Elon Musk won that pedo guy lawsuit. And it's going to be some James Elroy shit, some American tabloid shit. So weird story. My dad was the guy in charge of that rescue because my dad does cave rescue. No shit, really. And really doxing your own father on podcasts. I've done it in worse places. And so he knows Vern pretty well.

And Vern, so this is why I have personal hatred of this man, alongside professional and other hatred. Vern, a fundamentally good man who literally saved a bunch of kids' lives, was crushed by that lawsuit, as you'd imagine. He was kind of taken for a ride by the big lawyers. He was quite happy to just let it slide because he didn't give a shit about what this prick said. But the lawyers are like, oh, we can sort it out here.

Well, it should have been a slam dunk. It should have been a slam dunk, but rich white guys never lose. And it's crushed Vern. So shout out to Vern. Hopefully he has no profile on the internet because the internet's horrible and he can just enjoy caving again. But screw Elon Musk for a million reasons, but particularly for that. Yes. What was also transparently him being really butthurt? Have I told the story about the fact that Australians nicked his submarine and probably have it somewhere?

Yeah, yeah, you have because he took the fucking submarine prototype to the cave and no one would let him get near the cave because it obviously wouldn't work. Well, he got it into the first chamber of maybe two or three hundred and it obviously just immediately got broken and stuck and the Australians just nicked it. They thought it was fucking hilarious. So they just nicked it in true Aussie style. Come on, man. They are a criminal bunch, though. They turned it into a barbecue, or as they say, an Australia barbie.

Yeah. They're barbecuing a beer fridge on Australia, a Barbie. Yeah. They're barbecuing a beer fridge, one of the other. Yeah. Well, if it's broken in half, they can have both. So anyway, Elon takes a look at the high speed train he thinks is rubbish. He proceeds, he proposes his own system with blackjack and hookers, quote unquote fifth mode of transportation the hyperloop let's let's get old H bomber guy on this on this on this man for it being quote unquote an original

Elon Musk idea yes i mean much like tesla was an existing car company that elon said was his the hyperloop is an existing idea that elon said was his The Hyperloop is an existing idea that Elon said was his. That's a bad idea. There's some differences between the Hyperloop and Vactrain. But we'll get into how essentially they became Vactrains. What's the big idea here? Speaking of billionaires, I see Virgin on here, which means Richard Branson's growing plans have been on this as well.

Man with an island. A man Man with an island. A man who owns an island. Yes. Have we learned nothing about men who own islands? You just leave well enough alone, Richard. Just go. Gotta watch out for those kinds of people. Yeah.

Just off your island. Listen, I haven't said anything other than a true fact, which is that Richard Branson is a man who owns a private island. That's all there is to say. That's right. Okay, so there's not quite a vacuum to... Just beep all of the intermediate bit, please. Yeah, we can either confirm nor deny that Richard Branson is a...

Yeah, we can neither confirm nor deny that he is a British Thai cave diver. There's a pod. It's not a train. It's a pod. It's in the future. Red flag right there. Yeah, whenever someone says pod, you know, it's going to be a bad idea. On to America. I was a tiny child, but I remember saying this of the London eye and I was right, that shit has ruined the skyline in London. One of my most controversial opinions.

Tear it back down. I think it's on the Russian, but correct. Thank you. Yeah. The, you know, anytime I see London skyline, I don't think it's like, oh, we've got a big fucking ferris wheel on a circuit. I think you're including it on things like as if it's a feature. It's a fucking ferris wheel.

Why are you putting that next to the flipping has a has the parliament and the gherkin just like which incidentally is funny because the gherkin you can't see the gherkin from any angle anymore as well, which is funny. It's blocked on the story. The walkie talkie and stuff. I think it's like interesting that like every other city decided they needed a big ferris wheel to afterwards. You know, Glasgow had a tiny one as part of like it was it was

literally a fairground ferris wheel, but they called it the Wheel of Excellence. And they had it in George Square for like six months and then Edinburgh nicked it. And so now I think Edinburgh still has the Wheel of Excellence like seasonally. Incredible. You have like a much smaller one next to it called the Wheel of Mediocrity. Every day of my life I'm riding a wheel of mediocrity. Okay, so there's a pod. It's not a train, it's a pod in a tube, right?

The tube is very low pressure, but it's not a full vacuum. There's a big air compressor here in the front of the pod, right? And that air compressor eats up all of the low pressure air and either ejects it out the back or it puts it through little jets on the bottom, right? That makes the whole thing float in the tube like it's a puck on an air hockey table, right? Okay. Oh, okay. Yes.

Yeah, it's that stupid. It is that stupid, Alice. Yep. There's no motor on the train. What there are, the pod. It's not a train, it's that stupid. It is that stupid Alice. Yeah. There's no motor on the train. What there are the pod, it's not a train, it's a pod. That means it's like when Mark at Thatcher insisted on the trains being called shuttles on the Euro tunnel. Jesus. Yeah. So this thing runs on linear induction motors, right? Which is essentially you have a bunch of magnets

on the track, you have magnets on the train, and those are what propel the thing. It's like a normal electric motor, but instead of being in a circle, it's unwrapped. Come out of the thing with all of your credit cards demagnetized. Yeah, it was refined by a chap from Lancashire called Eric Leithwaite. You find the original video of them testing this on YouTube. Yeah. Yeah. Guy of voices.

Listeners, Gareth is reaching behind him to a shelf on which there is a book here called I'm Holding Up to For Everyone Else To See, Transport Without Wheels by edited by Eric Leithway. Put it away again. I mean, during the little garus connections, you know. I think it'd be, you know, Transport Without Wheels, does that include horses though? Why not? Well, maybe the Vissarot there are.

Horses in the original Hyperloop. Yeah. When they're sucked into the atmospheric railway, yeah. So all right, there's the linear induction motors are not continuous. There's like a pad every 70 miles or so of linear induction motors that give it a little boost, right? Or this is the original idea in the white paper that Elon Musk posted. He'd been playing Minecraft, hadn't he? Yeah, honestly, though. Yeah. Grief. That's how powered rails work.

Yeah, there's a little patch of the little red ones and you go, wee, and then it slows down again. You have to have another one and you have to shove a redstone down and yeah, we've all been there. Exactly. Well, if you're smart, you use a lever that's cheaper. Oh, I, I, man, now I'm thinking about my highly elaborate electrification systems with redstone underneath redstone. Oh man. Now I want to play Minecraft. God. So these pods in the white paper set 23 people, right? And they're supposed to leave every 30 seconds. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That seems stupid. Let's do this. I know the numbers on this, but I have taken trains before in my life. And of those trains, I would say almost all of them have had more than 30 people on them. Yes. And yes, they have more than 30 seconds of separation as well. Yes. Yes. They I have done the numbers on this, Alice.

I'm looking forward to be able to interject with them. And you're right on everything. In the white paper, this is a maximum capacity of 2,760 persons per hour per direction. You know, it's about two subway trains worth of people. 2,760 is about a decent, as I often end end up saying that's about as much as a decent bus service Yeah, in fact not even a decent bus service. That's about as much as a as like a a bus service in Leeds Yeah They're supposed to travel at

760 miles an hour Some of the pods instead of having room for seats would have room for people to drive their cars on instead of having room for seats would have room for people to drive their cars on. Oh, this motherfucker has never built a single thing that he doesn't want you to drive your Tesla onto, into, over or under. Yeah. I love the idea of a 700 mile an hour fireball with a load of Tesla drivers inside it. That pleases me. California high-speed rail has called out several times. Your boy Dave is just working on the surface. You know, somewhere in rural California, here's like the loudest rumbling in the world, traveling very fast underneath his feet.

I'm just imagining all the manhole covers popping up into the air through the flames. Which one is it, guys? It's like that scene in Batman. Well, no, because this was intended to stop your mate, Dave. Yes, it was supposed to defeat Dave. It was supposed to take Dave and defeat Dave and make him homeless. As no one against Dave. Yeah, leave Dave alone. Yeah.

California High Speed Rail has called out several times directly for being expensive and slow in the white paper. Well, this system, the hyperloop will be cheap and fast. Keeping in mind, California High Speed Rail has a design speed of 220 miles an hour, which is basically the bleeding edge of high speed rail technology. Here's the thing. And I often use phraseologies that I've picked up from my favorite podcasts. This is the thing, you can say stuff, and in this case, the stuff is, the mind's faster than yours,

the mind's cheaper than yours, and that's about as much science has gone into it, is the thing. Yeah, and as we'll see, that continues to be about as much science has gone into it. I was about to say, if you go through the old Elon Musk white paper, you see some of the diagrams in there. And if you don't initially understand the diagram, it looks very fancy and scientific.

And if you do understand it, it looks like it was made by a moron. Yep. Yeah. So here's the bait and switch. Elon didn't actually want to build the thing himself. He put it out there as an idea. But unlike ideas for most ideas guys, entrepreneurs ran with this thing, creating a wide variety of hyperloop and hyperloop-esks, it was like the hype in hyperloop, right? It's the Elon Musk distributing this and being like, okay, go do this, go kill high speed rail. Yeah, this is why it's not great to go too in depth on

the technology aspect of it because the fundamental problems here aren't so much technological as because the fundamental problems here aren't so much technological as everything else. Right. If you look at 50 Hyperloop companies, you'll see 50 different implementations of the similar ideas. Now, when this white paper comes out, there's immediately people who want to capitalize on this by doing renders. Wow. The burgeoning render industry of California. This was my favorite part of Hyperloop. And this was really early. I think these are all from like 2014 or so. Oh, it's proper.

Like early days, like render on image type stuff. This is, yeah, okay. Yeah, these are all from Hyperloop technology. No, Hyperloop transportation technology is them. Yeah, those guys, they got in early. And what you can see here is hyper loops obstructing navigable waterways. Me and all my homies hate boats. I love that they, what I love, and this sums up so much about hyper loop is that they've

looked at fancy high resolution pictures of long span suspension bridges. And they've looked at fancy high-resolution pictures of long span suspension bridges. And they've gone, oh, in fact, they've not gone. They've not done anything. They've gone, huh, I'm just going to put a load of low span, like a short span low bridge next to that. And that's fine. I'm not going to learn anything from this high bridge with a long span. That's just their prosthetics, right? Like the city of New York or like... I've heard of the Army Corps of Engineers and I don't recognize their authority. Yeah. The city of New York or the state of New York, the state of California,

aren't going to have any thoughts about me putting this kind of like shitty bridge next to their fancy bridge. Also, not to sort of be the sort of security minded person here, but the single easiest and deadliest piece of American infrastructure to attack instantly by virtue of the fact that you have a pressurized tube connected by a bunch of very vulnerable spans across the water. Yeah. No. And also, bear in mind that you've got, if you, if the morons who are trying to sell this are to be believed rather than the actual science and legislation about guided

vehicles, they're, you know, in a 30 second period, there are like 200 of these in quick, in quick succession. So you split one of these pipes at this thing's going to be spitting pods for about 30 seconds. And good God, the carnage. Whether you do it intentionally or not, if some like Riverboat guy rams his Riverboat into it. Yeah, there's there's going to be. Right, right, right. You're going to have a little bonk from a garbage barge, and it's going to kill 50,000 people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, Philadelphia, we already put the trains next to the children's hospital just to keep them ready. Yeah. And this is where, you know, you sort of look at this and you realize one of the first problems here is anyone who was pushing the scheme did not understand or have a desire to understand something called horizontal construction, right? Well, you dig stuff in a line, like the line.

Yes. Yeah, that's a good question. Is the line horizontal or vertical construction? Ooh, yes. Ooh, yes. Yes. Yeah. But so, you know, there's two types of construction.

There's horizontal construction that's roads, bridges, railroads, so on and so forth, as opposed to vertical construction, which is mostly buildings. I'm doing diagonal construction. I'm trying to do horizontal construction, but I'm doing it really badly. That's like those... Me as one of the city fathers of Pisa. This is one of the fundamental, I think, misunderstandings or mischaracterizations at the core of the Hyperloop proposal is that it's going to be cheap because our guideway

is cheap. This is wrong, though. No. The shout out to Devin. I say that so often either in my head or on Twitter, and it's all, I'm channeling Devin every time. Hi, Devin. Anyway, you know, one of the ideas is, all right,

we have the standardized tube, we have the standardized column, it's gonna be real fucking cheap guys, right? Lol. But here we can see- Every column is bespoke. Every single one requires ground investigation. Every single one is in a database spoke design.

There is absolutely nothing. Okay, you can repeat the cross section, but you're doing a trial hole, you're doing a borehole at every single one of those piles to adjust for the ground conditions. Each one of those will be bored to either to a different depth or to such an immense depth that you don't have to worry about it. Both are very expensive. Hall 811 before you dig. Just them calling it over and over and over. It's our old friend, Sandy Loam, back again, you know, like the thing that's defeating Hyperloop here is ground. Yeah, I think that's another one of the issues with, you know, this is

this is California High Speed Rail in the Central Valley. They're doing a sort of four track viaduct here that I think goes into one of the stations. This terrain is actually, as much as it is extremely flat, it's still difficult to build on just because of the geography of the Central Valley, how it's all these very deep alluvial deposits, right? I was going to say, like it might look, the trouble with flat is that lots of stuff gets, you don't get the nice deposit deposition of mountain areas where it all sorts itself out. When it's flat, it's a load of all the different colored soups all smoosh into each other, and it's all very heterogeneous.

Yeah, and it's also seismically active, and also every 100 years or so, it floods the 20 feet. So there's a lot of problems even with building on the flat, which is what they assume, okay, it's all going to be the same as long as we're building on the flat. You can do horizontal construction, you wind up with lots of different conditions just because it goes so far. Down here, you can see here's the huge right of way they got it clear for Tren Maya, right? Because not only do you need the actual space for the right of way, you need space to work in.

And you're also building over, in this case it's also very flat, but because it's the Akatan Peninsula, it's full of holes underneath. Yeah, full of holes, lemas, sort of like wrap plants. Yes. Jaguars. Subjugate cultures, things of this nature. Things of this nature, yes. So, you know, this all any of these generic guideway designs are cheap until you actually build the damn thing in the real world. And that's sort of how you sell what you would call a gadget bond anywhere, which is something that's not a train and its main feature is it's not a train.

It's like, well, you know, the guideway is cheaper. Well, is it cheaper? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We've never built one, so it's probably cheap. So we don't know. We can mark our own homework. Yeah. Yeah. You know, in this controlled or theoretical environment is cheaper than rail. And then it turns out, actually, if you put two steel rails on some planks and some gravel, it turns out to be even cheaper than whatever fancy guideway you have.

Yeah. Because you stop having to do a bespoke bit of ground investigation for every single column. Suddenly, you can kind of be like, oh, we can come back with a tamper and even that up. Let's just put it on a continuous squidgy beam. That's fine. I ballast with rails on it. Happy days. That's another interesting problem with building in the central valley because it's so flat. There's nowhere to get filled from. I just put it straight on the ground, no problem. Yeah, you put it straight on the ground, but if you've got to go over a road, then you've got to have an artificial dip somewhere else.

I assume that is why they're using... I assume that is on California HSR there, that I assume that is why they're using the supporting columns for a viaduct rather than just fill. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely one of the reasons. And then other reasons, we'd have to go into a whole episode for that Yeah, I've been storing up a California Hospital rail matter because it's such a To be honest, I feel like more of it needs to happen before it becomes an episode. Yeah All right, here's where I start seal stealing slides from Gareth

about capacity There we go. Oh, yeah, I need to talk here. Right, okay, so I'm spooling up. First of the apologies that all the text is weird on these. These are from Rail Natter in a funny font and that font, not everyone has it because people are normal about fonts. So this is a sketch I did for a Twitter thread I did ages ago to debunk Hyperloop. And it was based on the fact that all the Hyperloop kind of discussions, including that this was that there's like a Colorado sort of study that talked about this. And you look at all of them and that there were two discussions happening about Hyperloop. One of them is as Justin's

already alluded to is the technology itself. They're going, Oh, you know, we're talking about the technology, the vacuum tubes, the switches, all the, and the discussions are like people would get busy talking about, oh, is the technology viable? Isn't it viable? The vacuum, this, that, the other, the other discussion they'd have is, oh, well, this is enormous. If you, if you create high speed transport, there's this enormous demand, this enormous economic benefit of doing that. And this would basically be this circular loop of either the reports talking about, isn't the technology marvelous? Isn't it going to be wonderful when we have high speed transport? And they kept going around and around in circles. And none of them addressed the key issue, which is you will transform

the economic sum total of zero if your technology doesn't move anyone, which is what... Yes. Because it's a pod, That's what hyperloop did Alice has already alluded to this with the there are only 20 people in this thing question mark point, which is the it's a thing called system capacity system capacity is really easy to calculate You you go how many people are in the vehicle? How many vehicles travel through the thing an hour? And yes, that was absolutely right. I've put up the SUVAT equations because this is a capacity question. The SUVAT equations are, if you didn't look at, I don't know if they call them that in

the US, but certainly in the UK, the SUVAT equations are basically the equations of motion based around like acceleration and time and distance. So like s is displacement here in this equation, v and u are initial and final speeds, a is acceleration, t is time. And you can do a whole bunch of fun calculations to work out using this equation, the distance between your vehicles. So if your vehicles are going really, really slowly, then you can have them quite close together because the distance it takes them to stop is short. And so actually the thing that dominates the distance between them stops being like how fast they go and how quickly they break. Why is this? It's because both legally and from an obvious safety perspective, you want to have a safe braking distance between

your vehicles so that if one has a problem, has to break, the one behind it won't cablamo straight into it and result in your massive multi-pod pileup. So you have to have a safe separation. And that safe separation is the distance it takes to or the time it takes for the vehicle to stop plus some tolerances for reaction times of either the person or the technology. So in the case of a train, like the Hyperloop nonsense, their trains are going at like a thousand kilometers an hour or 700 miles an hour, whatever number they've made up off the top of their heads. And so the separation

you're looking at is like minimum about 30 to 40 seconds, minimum. That's quite a short period of time. Great, marvelous. The trouble is if your pods have 20 people in them, then that means that you're moving the grand sum of like two, three, or maybe in a magical sense, 4,000 people an hour. Bear in mind that High Speed Rail, HS2 if they hadn't been, if Sunak hadn't kneecapped it, was going to carry around about 20,000 passengers per hour. So that's quite a lot more. There is another technology that carries this small number of people over long distances at high speeds with large amounts of infrastructure, and that is business jets. So business jets are

probably a lot cheaper and indeed higher capacity to just have a lot of business jets and run them from A to B rather than building the system. So that's the key thing, capacity, system capacity. This thing is a huge amount of infrastructure being built. As Ross has explained, the same amount of infrastructure as if you just built a train. And yet what it's going to do is move almost nobody. This is not a good use of resources. Like your only option here is like, okay, maybe you can somehow make the pods bigger, but that's also going to like increase your curve radius the size of your infrastructure

or horror of horrors, you make them into a train, which is also questionable. Yeah. And there's a lot of fluid dynamics issues with the train getting longer. It reaches a weird German guy's name limit. Which is one of the reasons why the pod sort of idea elevated is because you struggle to actually get a longer thing through the kind of the low pressure environment. Mason You know you're really fucked in physics when there's a long German guy in there. Mason I know. a long German guy. I know.

Yeah, God. But the other thing is that if it looks too much like a train, then people will put two and two together and realize that it's all a scam. So they just get a train? Because all of this, it has to look like pods, because it has to, firstly, has to look like cars to the car people.

But secondly, if it looks too much like a train, it starts breaking the suspension disbelief and you start going, oh, it looks like a train, but it breaking the suspension disbelief and you start going, oh, it looks like a train, but it's wrong and that doesn't make sense. If your brain goes, that's a train but bad, then the illusion falls, right? So that's why these things have to look... They have to have pods. They have to look like somehow they're some magical fifth way rather than just being bad backwards trains. Yes. And I think a good comparison here, if you're more, if you want a more layman's comparison, the amount of infrastructure you're building for the

capacity of the Hyperloop, let's try and convert that to Chinatown buses. So consider this is the Fung Wa bus, which did New York to Boston, New York to Philly, a few other places, right? It has 60 seats. There was also some seats up above for live chickens sometimes. Right? And so, for all this heavy construction and technological development, groundbreaking new technology you're developing

to put in this hyperloop system, you get the same performance as 46 coach buses departing per hour. Instead of high speed rail, build Chinatown buses from Sacramento to Los Angeles. That's exactly what Richard Wellings of the Institute of Economic Affairs wants to do. And I'm not even joking. He has written so many papers saying to replace existing railway lines with lots of coaches. And indeed, we're going to do it out of Marleborn. We're going to do this to Chiltern Mainline. Alice, this will hit you different. We were going to do this. There were genuine plans to do this to the Chiltern Mainline, which was to convert it into a busway with high-speed buses like this. I will not take megabus.

That was an union article. That was an union article of Obama's high-speed rail system being downgraded to high-speed buses. What if we just ran these buses so quickly together that we could hook them together in sequence? And what if instead of a roadway, we had their own sort of like dedicated lane? And what if instead of tracks, it was a road, it was like some kind of like, metal track ballasted with stuff. And what if instead of like tires, we gave them like steel wheels?

I was like, car, Mike, there was a guy, there was a guy who worked at the Kato Institute Randall O'Toole. This is also his hobby horse. All trains should be replaced with buses. Neo liberal bus guys just growing on stuff like. Yes. The thing is, 46 bus departures an hour is a lot of bus departures, but it's nowhere near the limit of bus terminal technology as shown here at the Port Authority bus terminal in New York City, which serves 450 buses per hour at the morning peak.

So what you're telling me is we run this concurrently 24-7 fuck the carbon emissions whatsoever. And we get 10 California high speed rails. Build more buses. Yes. Not seeing it downside, but beyond the fact that the journey takes like seven hours. Like there's so many, like we don't want to get into this, into the pig and shit technology stuff, but they're, they're like, it's not really technology

to point out some of the systemic issues here. Like there are so many points of failure with a system like this. You also, because you're talking about lots of, because each individual bus has to carry around all of its stuff, all of its technology for a relatively small number of passengers, that's a lot of weight. And because it's on tires, it's damaging. You require quite a lot.

You have to build a very strong roadway, which is expensive. The Port Authority bus terminal is very heavily built structure to deal with all this mass. It's not an efficient use of resources, including the expensive bit of transport, which is drivers. How many drivers have we got here for like how many fewer drivers if it was trains? I would assume there's 450 buses per hour. There's 450 drivers per hour. What hopes? Yeah. I hope all the buses have drivers.

You have to do it yourself. Where they're trying to take the driver out of the bus. Good God. Good God. Look inside driverless bus. I stupidly did not use the restroom before starting the podcast. It's fine. We'll refer a bit. We'll refer a bit. Yeah. I mean, so this is the thing, the Chinatown buses in Americanism, I would do this in terms of megabus. And I don't mean to single out megabuses are brand specifically. There are a few of them. The bus with Darrobrin on the back.

Absolutely. Yeah. This is like the real dire shit. If the like train system has failed for one reason or another, then Britain's last line of logistical defence is getting the megabus run by angry homophobic Scottish men. Yeah, that's that's the thing that unifies basically all buses in the UK is they're all run by like two angry Scottish. Yeah. And yeah. So you end up at like, you know, a bus station impressed and at three in the morning up at like, you know, a bus station impressed in at three in the morning, or for instance, you

miss the last train from Edinburgh back to Glasgow, and you need to get back to Glasgow rather than staying overnight. Well, the only thing that does that rather than a 24 seven train service is a bus. And sort of minus circle of hell, you know, I did it once. I got the bus from, for some bizarre reason, mostly probably skin student. I was like, you know what? I'm going to not get the train from London to Aberystwyth. And I got the bus from London Victoria coach station all the way to Aberystwyth. And let me tell you, given that that's one of the, at the time, was one of the least punctual bits of railway line, good God, I would have loved to be on a train stationary in a flood near

Telerdijk loop rather than in that hell bus. Like the bus had air con. It was, you know, it was fine as a bus. In fact, arguably comfortable as a bus. Yet somehow it's hell, long distance bus journeys. Oh my God. I don't know. I just don't know. Get the train. Difficult to get up and walk around, you know. That's it, isn't it? You're stuck in place where as you can stretch your leg, you can go and find a quiet corner

of the coast of Farton. You just can't do that in a bus. Yeah. Bus, long, long distance bus toilets as well. No, thank you. There's a funny idea. Don't go in there if you want to retain your full psychic. Don't go in there if you're as wide as I am.

If you have hips as wide as mine, you want to get back out again, you know, that you're doing a confined space rescue at that point. I'm back. I was talking about. I was talking of returning from the toilet. Yeah. I wonder if the Hyperloop pod would have a toilet in it. Oh, that's what's funny is can you not think it sucks?

Yeah. It fully sucks you out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can spit you into the tunnel. It does the kind of like U-boat thing if you can just sink the Hyperloop pod using it incorrectly. Well, now you have to stay there and plug the hole with your ass until you get to the station. Hey, that I suppose, would that be it?

Is that an enema? No. It'd be a kind of colonic irrigation. I mean, you'd be very clean right the way up through there. Very, very sort of the world record for anal prolapse, you know. Oh, no. Thank you for that sentence. Just getting sort of like Jim Henson all the way out of your asshole.

Call up Guinness for that one. This is the thing I have a way with words that makes people want to listen to the podcast. I, yeah, I even said to somebody that I was going to make them a slutty little elbow. I'm not going to say who I said that to. Two ways of reading that potentially. Did you was it to Justin in anger? Is it my first question? It is actually to read pretty frequently. That was going to be my second question.

Was it to your now wife? Yeah, did you like to marry this person? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, Alice you like to marry this person? Yeah. Sorry, Alice's Jim Henson line. I will not recover from that for the rest of my life. So anyway, Hyperloop alternative one, the Fenghua Chinatown bus fairly easy, much cheaper. But if, you know, we're getting serious about this, we should talk about serious high speed rail. Oh, right. Talking about that. Yes. And the purpose of high speed rail, you got to remember, it's capacity first and foremost. The speed is... Look at this beautiful big shoe looking, motherfucker, right here. Exactly. The speed is useful because you drive modal shift,

but also because you need fewer trains to achieve the throughput the faster the train the fewer The you know the faster it gets between destinations the fewer of those trains need to buy which means you get smaller depots Which means there's lower electricity consumption fewer drivers overall the system works well Obviously there are other benefits of release capacity in the existing network But I'm not going to talk about that because this isn't real matter Yeah, it's one of the counterintuitive things about operating trains is the faster you go, the cheaper it is. Yes. The EU did a very interesting study and it was there. The EU's totally resultless year of rail a few years back. And they did a very interesting study,

they had a genuinely interesting bit of academic work looking at externalities, which is a fancy way of saying, thinking about more than just the cost of building the thing in the first place. And the only mode of transport that actually pays for itself is high speed rail. All the others have externalities like health impacts, pollution impacts, all these sorts of secondary effects, including rail, you know, some of the side effects of conventional rail, that means that the overall cost to a country for that particular transport system is negative. The only one where that isn't true, including aviation, the only one that isn't true is High Speed Rail, which does pay for itself for this very reason. It's a very efficient way of moving people around.

The faster you go, the cheaper it is because the bills can't catch up with you. Right. Especially when you don't pay them. Yeah. Yeah, especially when you stop running TGV La Post. Yes. Yeah. Looking in the mirror and there's one of the like Royal Mail trains also a really sexy train.

There's the class 325. 325. That's right. I love them so much. See. It's got the body of a 319 but the face of a 365. Very, very strange. Yeah.

Or face of a networker. Sorry. the 365 had the funny happy face added in retro Yeah, the network. You came real nerds GB real and out there. You know what I mean? Of course the the old networker my favorite ranks used to get it to school very Like pleasant associations with the you know noise. Um, but yeah Yeah, you look over in the rear view mirror. You see one of those gaining on you, you know But only three days a week. Well is very topical. Yeah, sorry everyone So this is the N 700 series shin canson Has 16 cars it has about a 1500 seats it accelerates to 170 miles an hour in three minutes

It runs 17 times an hour at the peak. Oh, what are we doing? 17 times an hour at the peak. Oh, what are we doing? You know, why? Yeah. That's a capacity of twenty five thousand five hundred people per hour per direction or the equivalent of one hundred and eleven two hundred and thirty seat Boeing seven thirty seven max tens. Yeah, which, you know, discounting the ones that the wings fall off.

Yeah. Or using the hyperloop capacity we discussed earlier, nine Hyperloop tubes per direction. So still less than the full capacity Perlty Authority bus station building. Yes, actually it is still less than the Port Authority bus terminal. Well, you gotta think about it. The Port Authority bus terminal is about the front to God. We cannot stress this enough. Yeah.

Well, think think about think about a rack of 18 hyperloop tubes. And now imagine it having an intersection with another rack of 18 hyperloop tubes. I'm pointing this out to people. I was on the BBC on BBC like BBC's one of their radio shows and was pointing this precise fact out. And I don't think Rory Cathlan Jones, hello, Rory, is giving me my first BBC appearance talking about the bloody hyperloop. Rory Cathlan Jones found this very funny and his colleague didn't quite believe me. And subsequently he said, she owes me a pint because of hyperloop going down the toilet. But yeah, this is the key point to understand. That's such a good

visualisation. Hyperloop pod is about the same size as this train that we're looking at on screen right now, the N700. It's about the same size. Imagine nine or 10 or 11 or 12 of these bearing in mind that the Pod seemed to get smaller as the Hyperloop development continued. So they ended up going from like 20 down to like 18 or something. They started at 40 and then it got smaller and smaller. 20 of these tubes next to each other going across the landscape. Bearing in mind the other point about Hyperloop is that all of the technology is pushing the technology, all the companies pushing the technology, none of them talked about boring this underground. All of them, the business model that they was to do with

them selling air rights question, and having solar panels on the outside of the thing. So all of them have modeled it on an above ground system with 20 tubes to have the equivalent capacity of a high-speed rail system, 20 tubes running across the surface of the Earth. For when you need to get 20 evenly spaced commuters from San Francisco to San Jose. You would have an intersection with these things if there's a branch line and you looked at it, you would enter some kind of lovecraftian psychosis, you know, a cognitohazard if you

looked at that tangle of tubes. Yeah, yeah. I just, oh my God. Yes. Yeah. A brief word of note on the Japanese Shinkansen, the reason these things accelerate so insanely quickly is partly because they have lots of stations frequently together, but also the engines on these things, the motors on these things have only got more powerful. They make them super much like kind of stereotypical Japanese housing. They make these things super light, like to the point where they don't have great crashworthiness. And the reason they do that is because they build the infrastructure such that it has, bearing in mind, it has to be super earthquake proof. They build the infrastructure to have

basically 0% failure rate. This is not a thing we can do in Europe, which is why our trains have to have crashworthiness. But these trains are unbelievably lightweight and they can do that. They've thought of the safety system, they've taken a different approach to what we've taken to the Europe for high speed rail, but the Japanese trains are super light. They have motors that are way more powerful than anything in the rest of the world. And as a result of that, these things accelerate unbelievably quickly. We're talking like a rocket powered shit off a shovel. It's good stuff. And they've never crashed one They've had earthquakes. They've had the track dislocated by earthquakes

But they have a system that is that can detect those sorts of failures. They have infrastructure that's built to last They have designed a system that's phenomenally safe. It's very very impressive Honestly specter world. There's a reason why people still imagine this stuff as world leading because it is, you know, it always amazes me about these things in Japan. No eminent domain, no compulsory purchase, nothing like that. Somehow they still get stuff built. Yeah, people believe in it, you know, that they people really vigorously believe in this stuff. And one of the things I find aggravating is I look at Google Maps everywhere in the world train just invisible on Google Maps, right? Not in Japan, the Shinkansen shows up really like brightly as Shinkansen routes are really

vibrant on Google Maps. This is part of the Japanese psyche. This is a fundamental part of their launch communication. It might be premised on a lot of like alarmingly conservative and often frankly racist ideas, but Japanese social cohesion is no joke. Yeah. You look at our sort of like social discohesion and yeah, it's a discohesion. We're dancing.

Yeah. It's maybe not so good. It's got some downsides, you know. So anyway, this train with massive capacity. I'm not saying we have to be more racist. Yeah, let's not be more racist and have no immigration. There are other ways to social dehesion. I'm saying that maybe one of the ways that we could be more socially cohesive

is embracing diversity, just a thought. Yes. Oh, nah. So this train, because it accelerates very quick, it could make lots of intermediate stops, still maintain a high average speed, serves more people, brings them to more destinations. Now what Elon proposed in terms of capacity was enough for existing travel demand from Los Angeles to San Francisco, you have to factor in induced demand at that point, which Elon does not believe in. So that's why, if you're going to build a real system,

you need this capacity. Shed loads of capacity. You need, yeah, you need, you need Shinkansen and not Chinatown bus. So, you know, yeah. so you need dedicated high speed rail on dedicated right of way. Hyperloop cannot do that capacity just definitionally. Just, you know, going to laws of physics unless you decide we're going to build a tube big enough for something the size of a 737 to go through. You know, I hear me out. We put the Chinatown bus in the tube. I think we do already.

Don't we? Yeah. Yeah. Under the river. Yeah. The Express bus lane on the on the Holland tunnel. Yeah. What if that had no air in it? Is it the Lincoln? It's the Lincoln. The chicken's on the tunnel. The bus die.

Yeah, I can't have that. You know, Chinatown bus with the kind of like air bladder on the top, like the old gas powered vehicles. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these. So let me get to the point. We have this thing

called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks, you get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash wtyP pod. Do it if you want.

Or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. There's always one thing that irks me about this is the stations for these things. What am I looking at here? Where are all these people going in and coming out? Where are all these pods stacking up? Like what's going on? It's all renderite. It's all weird curves.

And I mean, we did Art Deco. I mean, Art Nouveau, I like a weird curve, but like when it's done with some degree of intentionality. Well, yeah, exactly. It's always like totally absent absent like the actual circulation of the vehicles and the people. Like there's just there's there's no discussion of what these stations are going to look like. I would guess they would look more like the Port Authority bus terminal. Yes.

Yeah, like the one in the bottom right hand corner, but just like multiply that by four. So that it takes up like, you know, like like a hundred blocks. Like a fidget spinner. I like the one on the top right with the like absolutely no sort of separation of one of those pods goes off the rails. Question mark. It's just going to wipe out everybody. I would imagine I would imagine you, you know, you would you would get the hyperloop out to the Hyperloop terminal and you'd wait

in a queue for like 35 minutes to get to the platform with any of these designs. There's just no capacity here for having a pod come in. It doesn't have to be. It comes back to the core point, which is that all this has to do is look vaguely plausible, right? That's all these pictures have to do is look vaguely plausible to the layperson. That's all these renders have to do is make it seem like it's legit. And whilst for all of us, we look at these things and laugh.

For unfortunately, the vast majority of people, and in fact, no, the people that count, which is tech journalists, they see this and think it looks legit because it vaguely looks like city skylines. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's gonna be able to transport in, I assume 400,000 passengers per hour, whatever is happening underneath this roof. Yeah. So, you know, we just have to believe. All right, I stole more Railnatter slides. Let's talk about the companies. Let's talk about companies.

This is fun. This is fun nonsense because there are so many of these. So the first thing we're going to talk about this group of companies that invented a made-up trade association called Hyperloops Association. As I said in Railnatter, this is not me blowing up their logo to like make it all choppy. They actually have a choppy logo on their website despite being like tech nerd people. Anyway, you suck guys. Hyperloop, let's start with Hyperloop.

I know, right? It is. So again, apologies for the typeface situation. I should have sent Roz Applebury. It's a bit like Liam, you get mad at Roz for hard drives. I should be getting mad at Roz for not having a font that no one has on their computer. Yes. Hyperloop One here, as we all know, this used to be version of Hyperloop One. It was founded in 2014, the year after the alpha paper, based in the USA. The last real update was in November 2020, the year after the alpha paper, based in the USA. The last real update was in November 2020, and its current status, as we all know, because that's why this episode is happening, is liquidation. The MOT FUNK.

The MOT FUNK. It's gone. It's been mined for assets. And this is important because this is the only company that actually shoves some people through a tube. Two people. And they didn't look very comfortable about it, even though they're very high-paid executives in the organization. In fact, they looked a lot like they didn't want to be in there. I mean, and they brought them up to 107 miles an hour in a 500 meter tube.

Wow. And then they slowed them back down again, and then they left the tube, and that was the crude hyperloop test. RIP. Yeah, slowly, over time, it transpired. What's funny is that within months of that test, they made half their staff redundant. So it went well. Because this is the thing. I don't want to dwell on this too much because we need to close the episode within four or five hours. But it touched reality. This is the problem with the hyperloop

stuff. As soon as it touches reality, people realise it's stupid as shit. So this video went out and it actually just got, like they put out all the comms for this and it got pilloried. It got absolutely slammed including by finally the tech journalists caught up and actually realized, oh, this is shit. This is just shit. And everyone realized and it burst the bubble. And as a result of that, because all these things exist as is a load of is vapor. There's a reason this stuff gets called vaporware. It exists as just noise, just hype. As soon as it touched reality, these two people touched reality and the whole thing, the bubble burst. And all their share price disappeared.

All the investors were like, oh wait, this is shit. And it died. Or rather it didn't die as Ross is about to press another button. It pivoted. It pivoted. It pivoted. I will note, it's not vaporware because it's an evacuated tube. There's no vapor in there. It's actually less than that. Well, eventually, they pivoted to, okay, maybe this passenger hyperloop stuff is going to be impractical.

So we're going to do something more stupid. What if you need... I like you talking about this so much, Roz. I love it when you talk about freight hyperloop. What if you needed a 40 foot container of something instantly? Now- TGV La Post, clearly. The list of people who need a 40 foot container of something instantly is like limited to people doing like, I don't know, human smuggling. I don't understand. I mean, if you are shipping large volumes of cargo

that need to go somewhere quickly, right now, you don't do it in a shipping container. You do it in a 53-foot dry van or whatever the equivalent in Europe is. You do it with a truck trailer, right? I just realized how big a 40-foot container is. and I've just imagined a TGV hauling one of these on a flatbed, and I'm going to be thinking about that for the next several hours. So the idea of the cargo hyperloop is you're shipping these containers around at hundreds of miles an hour. But if you're shipping containers inland, usually they just came off a boat from China or Europe

Which took several weeks So You're Shaving off a couple days from the schedule that several weeks you do the last mile really, really, really fast. Really quick, yeah. And chances are you're shipping it inland only a few miles to a distribution center where everything is... Yeah, no one is like a railroad spur and absolutely no one has a hyperloop spur, so it's going to go on a truck again. Yeah, it's going to go back on a truck.

And since it's a container, you've got to worry about the container chassis, which are a horrible perennial problem with people shipping containers. That's again, that's why the 53 foot dry van is nice as the wheels on it. You've got to build some kind of container terminal that can handle one of these coming in every 30 seconds at a billion miles an hour, at a billion miles an hour into like and then take it out, put it on a truck and get that truck out of the door in time to then be ready for the next one. Yeah. And I mean, we sort of have that at major ports. You have the automated overhead cranes that run on rails. And it drops them onto a train. Yeah,

it drops them onto a train. Or you have the thing where five trucks line up at the end of the thing. But all the drivers have to get out and hold a button because it might accidentally drop a container on the cab because it's automated. Those things are pretty crazy. They're very, very high capacity and they're very efficient, but you have all these tail saves. Do all five drivers have to hold one button because that sounds very intimate, if so. No, there's five separate buttons. Oh, that's the fiction bubble. Yeah, that's a shame.

Yeah. On the other ones, someone might five separate truck drivers. Otherwise, someone might stay in the cab and get crushed by a container of soybeans. Yeah, you have all this incredible efficient technology, the automation, the cranes, the weird relationship with organized labour at the port, all this good stuff. And you get your containers onto the train. And then it goes onto the single track with short loops section of line from Felix Stowe to Ely, which is where almost all of Britain's stuff comes from. So you get the most sabotageable infrastructure. No, do not do this.

Do not do this. British Transport Police mortarplatoon will hunt you down. You could have something that gets the containers there much faster, but at a much lower capacity for no reason. So this was the secondary idea, let's do hyperloop cargo. And they found out no one actually wants this. Yeah, this I mean, this is already an idea like they're trying to find a niche for it now that it's fallen through on passenger freight. And what's funny is that the only people who care about freight are freight people. And all the freight, unlike passenger stuff,

where lay people and just regular people go, I move. That's a thing. People do nothing without several hours of spreadsheets. They play football manager for fun. They frighten me. So those, the idea of pivoting from passengers where you have, you know, millions of stupid people who think, oh, that's actually a thing. And to pivoting to freight where everyone is a maniac. A guy called Thorsten, who has never been a second late or early for anything in his life. They're going to Lafayette of town. And that's exactly what the new investor after Virgin

ran away. DP World, lol, tune into all previous trash features. DP World then decided to invest and then immediately decided to disinvest, hence the demise of Hyperloop because funnily enough, Freight was an even dumber idea than passenger Hyperloop. DP World being Dubai ports, not the other kind of DP. No. So, Roy, I don't know, Roy, if there's anything more you want to say about this. I love it when you talk about Hyperloop cargo. I, all I can say is I don't, I don't understand.

I, you know, I think there's people, people are too obsessed with containers. When a lot of stuff doesn't go in containers and in fact, shouldn't go in containers. Bring back break bulk, bring back the longshoreman. Yeah. Or now this may be hard to work if you've if you've got a longshoreman to like fill it with, you know, fill it with the longshoremen. Yeah. Now, this may be hard to work if you've got a lot of longshoremen to like fill it with, you know, fill it with the sato as a way. Just sacks, yeah. Like a green carrier hyperloop pod. The thing that's wild is since there's so much excess capacity heading back to China,

that we've gone back to like 1880s methods of handling cargo, which is, you know, you have a container and you put a plastic sleeve in it and then you fill that with bulk soybeans, right? As opposed to having like a bulk soybean freighter, which, you know, is what you would have done in like the 70s. Yeah. You know, we're back to grain doors like on old fashioned boxcars 70s. Yeah. You know, we're back to we're back to grain doors like on old fashioned boxcars. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so yeah. So that's the end of Hyperloop one. Bye-bye. Yeah. Hyperloop one. Bye-bye. And then we land with the other. So these are kind of in in in in

like order of ish, sickness. How many we're going to blast through here, and we're on slide 26 out of 62. So, well done. You better believe I'm going to pick up some speed, don't worry. You're making that damn date. Thank you. So, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, founded even earlier, 2013, again, USA, founded by...

In fact, they're all, again, listen to the trash feature that Roger's on, where there's so many weird little guys involved in this. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies had a weird little guy. So, Hyperloop One had, what was his name? He recently renamed himself to something else, which is also kind of funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah, hold on.

Bam, bam, brogany, bam, bam. Yeah, Brogan, bam, Brogan. That's the one. Brogan, Bam Brogan. I should make fun of people. He changed his name to Brogan Bam. I mean, changing your name to something silly is only cool when the name is cool or you're trans. Correct. So, this was this, the guy involved in hyperloop transportation technologies was Bebop Gresta. We're going to touch on this guy later. Those words used possibly more accurately than I intended them to be. Current status of hyperlink transportation technologies, they have made two mock-up pods. They've had a test track in France rejected and they've run out of money because they've

merged with some other organization like some weird fund. So they're dying. Bye-bye. I hate to say the Brogan Ban Brogan left acrimoniously with them. Oh dear. Bad HR. Yeah. Yeah. Bad. Bad. HR. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right.

So next one. Let's go. So from the USA, we must head north to Canada. Canada. 2015. We had a thing called Transport. Found it. This is a funny name. This is this is a fact on the rail matter, people in the chat made the joke that this sounds like actually quite a good podcast for trans people.

I was thinking that you come out the other station when you take the transpire, you come out the other station a different gender. Based in Canada, of course. Based in Canada, of course. Yeah. Based in Canada. Found in 2015, its last real update was none ever. It's done so many little press releases about nonsense. This is the one that Rose was talking about on TF about. Anyway, but I'm not going to stop TF referencing.

Basically, this one is talking now about plasma question Technology for power They also seem to have sort of since hyperloop one went bankrupt They're trying to disassociate themselves from hyperloop technology even another doing the same thing You're like, oh, no, this is our own thing You know, it's like that the the comic where you know the the I made this and then the other person takes and is like, I made this. And then that was Elon Musk with the VAC trains. And then this guy is doing that a second time. Yeah.

And it's got a little bag of plasma attached to it though. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's, it's better for than sale on solution. So they're they're grifting, they're just grifting, they're doing, they're managing to have like credulous journalists still publish their nonsense as if no one's ever heard of Hyperloop. So you can go back through and look at transport news articles from like local Canadian news, kind of regional Canadian news. And it's weird. It's written about as if Hyperloop has never exist as if people have never heard of it. Really strange, but you know, part of the problem. Right. Let's jump forwards again. So that's the real transport to it.

part of the problem. Right. Let's jump forward again. In the past, let's leave transport to it. So 2016, heart hyperloop. We have to go to the Netherlands. Hi, guys. It's heart hyperloop. And the last real update from heart, to be fair, was October 2023, because we are entering the grift loop. Forget hyperloop. It's the grift loop. Do you know what's a good organization to get loads of cash out of? I see it's flagged right there. Oh yeah, it's the European Commission. It's the EU.

Hooray! Hooray. Let's take millions of euros from the EU to do stupid shit. I missed that. I missed when that was us. You know, I missed when you... We could do that. Yeah.

I mean, this is the thing, right? You travel around Europe and you see like a sort of like a pig pen in Poland that has a big like funder does a project of the European Union Pig Shit Development Agency thing on the front. And you're like, I missed that. We have grifts. We have perfectly serviceable grifts. And we've robbed ourselves of the opportunity of building money out of Brussels. Our entire country is based on grifts and flim flams. We would put great for this stuff. Anyway, yeah, heart type of loop. They've managed to grift, they put, they stored some pipe in a goods yard, a literal good yard.

I think I've done that too. On the border. Hahaha. Hahaha. Hahaha. Settle down. Hahaha. Hahaha.

I don't know if that was a comic effect. Yeah. On the, on the, the spray bottle's coming out bottles coming out. On the outskirts of Ghent, I think there's like some like just goods yards or some rail goods yard ironically, because there's always a railway. And there's just some pipe being stored there by this company. They haven't actually assembled it in any way. And they've been given 12 million euros of cash for that. I mean, the thing is to the EU, this is less than nothing. You can write to the EU with a letterhead you made yourself and be like, can I have

15 million euros? And they're like, yes. And as we'll see as we go through these companies, correct. That's exactly what you could do. So this company, so okay, they've got their millions of euros, but in an indication of their health, they're merging with another company, which is Zelleros or Zelleros. Because we are going to Spain. This is a Spanish company that appears to have hijacked the Extinction Rebellion logo for confusing reasons. Founded in 2016, based in Spain, the last real update from

these guys December 2022. So again, kind of some... When I'm saying a real update, by the way, I mean that something that it's not a grifty render-right announcement, it's like some actual thing has happened on their website. Current status of Delos is that they have one mock-up. They have one small pipe, same at all for a cool 15 million euros of EU cash. This is my 15 million euro pipe. I just got 15 million euros of cash for just for a pipe in it. Quite spectacular. I've put pictures in for this because I want to show some things. So, two pictures here. On the left, you have what looks like, to be fair, quite a snazzy-looking

sort of studio type workshop thing. This is the kind of thing that 15 million euros off the EU buys you is a little. Exactly. And what it buys you is buying all the stuff off the last incarnation of Jordan F1 team. No shit, really. I mean, not literally, but they basically what they've done is literally taken this stuff. They bought a load of stuff probably off like auction from the last low tier F1 team that failed. Because all of this stuff is just stuff they've bought and arranged in a room. None of it makes any sense.

We're going to put a gun to a steiner in a tube and accelerate him to relativistic speaking. You think they have like a drill press or something? The only thing that's actually doing anything here is the laptop charger plugged in. That's the only thing that's actually doing anything. And you might think, oh, but wait, there's like a jet engine ass looking thing in the middle. That's surely something. They're doing something with that. It looks very nice. No, all that is, is a plywood mockup with a screen in it with some seats inside that looks like what a pod might. No technology. It's just a plywood mockup. Small as well. So it's a scale model. I think it's like

to have. Yeah, it's like half size type situation. But even though it's half size, you can see in the picture next to it that it's only got like six seats in it, even though it's a shrunk mockup. Spectacular. Anyway, so that's what they're asking. They got a fancy room. Yeah, it's a very fancy room. I mean, it's a fancy room or it's a manure silo actually, because I'm pretty sure manure silos are built in the same way with

the King posts and the sort of concrete slabs. I think actually based on this gradient back here, the whole thing is a green screen. Yeah, it's not real. It's not real. It's not real on a sort of second order of abstraction. Exactly. Right. Next, because here's what they've actually got. When I talked about their small pipe, that's what it is. I was expecting like at least a big wide pipe, but for like a really short, sort of like a, you know, girthy pipe instead. It doesn't even have any sort of thing to fit a vacuum pump onto it. It's literally just like a weird small model mock-up type thing.

That's why. Just what's going on here. Proof of concept. Man can create pipe. So let's let's jump. Let's let's leave the loss behind because, you know, I didn't like the vibe of this very small kind of like, you know, Spanish industrial estate, because it's like this is exactly the way that you get money out of the EU is you are in an EU country, you're in an

underdeveloped region economically, and you go, do you want to invest in, you know, northern Poland, fucking, you know, southern Spain, southern Italy, whatever. And the EU is like, yeah, love that love to what are you doing? You're like, building a pipe. Looks like it looks like the top gear technology center. Yeah, quite something. So next we're going to talk about Nivomo, who used to be called

I put in Poland. We're talking about Poland. This one's great. This one's fantastic. This is so good. So I see some more EU stuff on here. I see some like. You talked about Poland. This one's literally correct. This one's fantastic. This is so good. I see some more EU stuff on here. I see some like industry awards. Yeah, I put in some industry awards

because it's like, you know, the grift is real. The big circle jerk of like money, you know, just people who think they're great patting each other on the back, you know, B2B magazines getting all happy with each other. Right. So, Fandom 2017 based in Poland, formerly Hyperloop Poland. The last real update, quite recently, September 2023, because these guys have done the clever thing. They're a bit like Ros was saying about TransPod. They've given up on Hyperloop and they've given up

on, well, ish, given up on Hyperloop. But they are riding on its coattails to kind of, while I'm reading the slide, I'm doing the worst presenter thing anyway. Sorry, everyone. I've got into bad habits. Right. These guys, basically, they're pushing something that's even funnier and more stupid. So next slide, please. I just want to point out here, the best Polish hardware startup to watch in 2023. Yeah, some of those guys invented the screen door. No, they beat the guys who roughly like have the amount of labor required to screw in a light bulb. So this is off their website. They're trying to basically get investment for an idea that's ultimately as stupid as hyperloop, arguably even more stupid. Once again, they're like,

look, you take this train that has comfort capacity, and what you do is you turn it into this small coffin sized ass thing that looks like the Glasgow subway. It's an easy translation. And then also, so what it's saying is, but what you could do is carry Hyperloop pods on the existing railway. Ooh, I'm pretty sure this was in the previous. What? This was in Railroad Tycoon 2. The maglev that worked on existing rail. Some of the stupidest shit ever. I'm so bad.

So let's have a look at the next picture, which is from their like video or their website kind of pitching what this thing is. So what they're saying is you build a load of additional kind of moderate infrastructure on the existing track. So you add a load of extra bits and pieces, including this big, long maglev strip that goes down the middle of the track, which by the way, will not work for stars. Where does any of your signaling system go? Because lots of that relies on Belize's in the forefoot. But anyway, so that's the last use, use, use phones or something. Hand signals, baby.

Use phones or something, exactly. Use an app for it. So they've done this little test track where they've carried, well, this thing, this like bomb disposal robot ass looking thing here. It's just quite rubbish. So what is the actual, so let's go to the render. Everyone, you've all been waiting for the render.

Let's get the render up. Let's get the transport fever loading screen ass renderer. Here is a transport fever ass loading screen. But with what looks like a shiny tampon riding on the near track. This is funny for a variety of reasons. Firstly, why do we think that we have to limit speeds of trains in the first place? Well, in case we go too fast. Women's uteruses will fall out. Women's uteruses. Exactly. People's uteruses will fall out.

That's wokeness right there. Yeah, that's what it is. You can't even say that. You can't even remember too late. Using inclusive language. Yeah. Using inclusive language appalling. If we didn't have DEI,

we could run every train at 400 miles an hour. Exactly. Yeah, no. Oh shit. So this thing, it's like, once again, it's like the people designing this thing don't understand the actuals. The reason trains have to go slower is either

because there's a train in front, it has to go slower so it doesn't catch up. Right, I've solved this. I've solved this. Back of every train, right, there's a red light. Instead of that, you put a sick ramp, you just perfectly jump it, easy. There was a system developed for that in the 1800s.

Oh my God. That was seriously considered. I can't say a fucking thing about a train without you going. By the way, in Lithuania in the fucking 1790s, one guy filed a patent. I'm the only person who knows about it. So two reasons. Number one, because other trains are around. Number two, because of curvature, you can't like having fancy new technology is not going to change the fact that

you have curvature on a railway that limits speed because of the comfort of the human meat bags inside it. So this thing, what's it going to do? Okay, on the various sections of short straight between curves that exist, and some of them maybe, you know, you maybe get a mile of straight, five miles of straight in an extreme situation, but you get a length of straight and it accelerates up to a bit faster than a normal train would then has to slow down again to regular speed to go around the curve. The trouble is even doing so, it's then caught up with the regular train in front. So it has to slow down anyway. So what and to achieve this nothing, you've invested in a huge amount of additional complex and an intrusive infrastructure on the existing railway. It makes absolutely no sense and it's fucking hilarious. So next

slide, please. It has no capacity either. One thing I want to point out is this has been tried before. Oh, yes. Yeah. Here's the German rail zeppelin. What if we put a big propeller on the back of a passenger car? All right. Yeah, it worked. It also had the potential to turn people on the platform into a fine paste. Don't worry, this is going to happen to me when I stand on any platform. And so it could go very fast, but then it had to slow down around corners. Since it was a propeller, of course, it didn't accelerate very fast. And then we weren't satisfied with this, so we did try it again in the United States. The M497 Black Beetle, which is a butt RDC with a jet engine on top from a B36. This is the same concept fundamentally.

It's the same concept. When it comes right down to it, except that this actually has some amount of crash worthiness. Yeah. Whereas the giant tampon does appear to just be made out of carbon fiber, which I look forward to the shards of carbon fiber separating all my various internal organs from each other with pinpoint accuracy. There's purely nothing new under the sun. Yeah. Yeah. It's talking of which, SwissPod. SwissPod is fun because it does precisely what Ros just intimated. So let's talk about SwissPod. Founded pretty recently, actually, they were

really late to the party, just like the Swiss often are, very late to the party, have date with what's going on in the world. Staying on a boat of nice and cold. They still have all that gold in their bank account. Fucking shit. Excuse me. Women's suffrage. That's it. So hello to the Swiss. You have lovely trains. Actually, I have a lot of time for the Swiss people. That's because they don't have DAI. Exactly. Yeah, they so the non DAI Swiss, the last real update from this thing sadly, though, is very short lived because the last real update was in July 2021. And they built a site, a nice circle in the kind of the yard of their campus building.

They're like Switzerland loves building large circles under things. They do. They do. Under, over, next to big circle, or in this case, a small circle made out of drainage pipe. And they got 3.5 million euros of EU cash in the process to do so. How the fuck do they do that with Switzerland? Not in the EU, do so. And here's a nice happy picture. And here's a nice happy picture. It's not in the EU, is my question. Well, indeed. But this is because the Swiss Regional Development Fund can tap into European Commission money for projects that can feed into the EU. Why the fuck can't we do that?

Sorry. Not against you. We're trying with Horizon, aren't we? We're trying. So, here's some nice happy pictures. There you can see it's just a little circle. It's quite a big circle. It's quite a big circle. It looks like fun, but fun in the way that you could probably get a hamster to run around

it and not much more. I don't know. The trouble with it being an infinite loop is I don't know how you put things in it. The Europe, please let us waste your money. Oh, well, you just have to disassemble it, take one of the segments out, and then you have the perpetual hyperloop. You're just on it. Exactly. Like, anyway, it's weird. But they're all very happy doing a little yay in the middle of their nice circles. That's good. I'm glad they got 3.5 million euros of EU cash for that. What's funnier about SwissPod is that they call themselves the natural inheritors of, next slide, please, the Swiss Metro. Yeah. Oh, I remember this. We've talked about this before.

Swiss Metro is what Elon Musk directly... This is what HBomber Guy should be doing the video about Elon Musk on, is that Elon Musk very directly stole the Swiss Metro concept. And you can see that a lot of the Renderite people also stole the Swiss Metro concept when they created their renders, because this picture created by... I like, let's face it, two really old retired guys. Yeah.

Like, using, like, what was it? Using Bryce 3D, there's a deep cut for any of the 3D. Yeah, this is a very old company. This has direct continuity with the Rand Corporation version of the idea. You know, it's, this is the actual inheritor of the VAC train heritage. You notice it is an actual train as opposed to a C. I can see that there are multiple vehicles in there, which is partly the reason why it couldn't work because of the long German name principles. So there we are, Swiss Metro. So the Swiss pods say they're the inheritors of Swiss Metro, even though they're not because Swiss Metro dash NG still exist

and still say they're going to create their own hyperloop. But we're going to ignore this. So there's Swiss Metro shout out to their comedy late 90s website. I love it. I love it. A logo that uses clip art just makes me so happy. Next slide, please. Next slide please. Right. OK. So that's sorry that this concludes our first group of hyperloop people. These

are the big hitters as it were. They're the big players. Now we get into the weeds of the real. Okay. Oh yeah. Let's start by talking about China. China. China. Yeah, and Cacic or the God, I have to try to remember what the acronym stands for the Chinese Aeronautical and Science. It's like an Aeronautical company from China founded in this company founded in 1999. They were not doing hyperloop stuff in 1999. Basically, my belief science and industry corporation. Thank you. Thanks, Alice. That's a lot of stuff. They're China's largest maker of missiles. Good for them. Hurray. Thanks, Alice. That's a lot of stuff. They're China's largest maker of missiles. Good for them.

Hooray. Well, that's why they've done it. So basically that's kind of the reason the reason this they've done a hyperloop thing, which is they've only done one hyperloop thing. And if you go to the next picture, they've created a test track and a pod. My belief is that this is basically just so that China can say they have a market presence in Hyperloop just in case it does become big. I don't think they've actually done anything. Yeah. So you just have like a state directed thing of like taking your current of Lockheed

Martin and being like, do some bullshit and call it a Hyperloop. Exactly. That's what I believe this is because this test track is, it looks like it's basically just like tent material stretched over just like probably a normal maglev test track that they probably have somewhere kicking around. Yeah. They got like that maglev they put on display a while back and I don't think it has a test track for it. They just say they have it. Yeah. And they are doing, they are doing some stuff with, they're talking about

doing some stuff with high speed test tracks for maglev as well. But again, I think it's a little bit of a like, we look like we're doing this, but bear in mind, China had the battle of Maglev versus conventional rail and conventional rail absolutely won. Pretty thoroughly won that one. 10s of kilometers of it in like a decade. So that's China. Let's let's let's move on from China and we're going to go to Germany. We are going to Germany. And get me off the ride. Yeah. This is this.

Now this one has Tums in it. You won't get in the trash. The Tomhype Loop. Yeah. Tomhype Loop. Yeah. The thing that I my stomach experiences when I eat a Jollabee hot chicken sandwich. Tommy Hurt. Yes. And so this is one of the wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Is it Tom because it's Technicius University at Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Is it Tum? Because it's Technicius Universitat Mun... Mjönken. Yeah, I've heard. Ah, for fuck's sake. Okay, of course it is. So this is like lots of the hyperloop, kind of these sort of pseudo companies, is that they come out of venture capital wanting to exploit the cheap labor of PhD students to create a load of IP and patents that they can then license. That's kind of the other background. So mainly Hyperloop is to stop California Hospital Rail happening, but also it's a

secondary grift of venture capital trying to create IP off cheap labor, i.e. gullible students. Yeah, two of them have done a few things like this. I've seen some of their weird walking machines along the same lines of like, yeah, we got a lab to do this and it's some good press for us I guess when I was at Drexel I was on a formula SAE team and you know when hyperloop came around they started the the Drexel hyperloop team and What they did is after they moved the formula SAE team into a new building then they gave half the lab space over to hyperloop

Proceeded to do nothing. He was deeply involved in the crimes of the Nazi regime. Drexel's fucking probably, yes. Yeah. Fuck that score, man. Oh. It's fun to go to Civil Engineering School while the Civil Engineering School is being dismantled. So the current status of these guys, they have a mock up and they got some very gullible regional ministers and prime minister to come and stand with a shovel in a car park next

to some dirt that appears to have just been laid there. Cool. I'm kind of strange. They just like laid some dirt out for them to stand next to next to a render and they haven't actually built anything. The render is a pod on a scissor lift and a tube. Now you can barely even call that a tube. That's just, I mean, it doesn't go anywhere. It's a segment. It's a short segment of pipe. Is that Marcus Serta in the middle there? I think it is. Jesus Christ.

It quite could possibly could be. The sort of paramount leader, the Kim Jong-il of Bavaria. Yeah. Yeah, I think it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's all, the other thing is like, it's all these happy gullible people who are involved in the process, standing in the background. Like lots of young, bright things. This is another thing that aggravates me is that you get all these bright, young things, like these kind of corporateyy but well-meaning students across the world, including in my my form University in Edinburgh, getting involved in hyperloop stuff and thinking it's the future and not putting their bright happy enthusiastic

minds into rail stuff. This is a lot of human capital has been wasted here. There are lots of reasons that hyperloop makes me very angry. But the Bavarians... Sorry, it sounds like they're like getting addicted to heroin. April not even once. Yeah, the variants. Bavarians can get very mad at me for everything that I've said wrong and mispronounced. But the one thing I do know about Marcus Serta, if that is, in fact, him,

is that he has he did try to have a Bavarian space program as an announcement. So just build a train, build a fucking train. We're going to have the first roads in Germany. The first beer on the International Space Station. I think of a variance. I've been listening to because I have a bizarre obsession with Werner Herzog. I've been listening to him read out his own sort of memoirs, which is great. It means I have Werner Herzog in my head. That's really good for the Herzog.

Yeah, he's a remarkable man. I'm just imagining like what Werner Herzog say about the hyperloop, because he has thoughts on everything. He has thoughts on like the most niche television, you trashy television. He's watched it somehow and will have extensive thoughts on it. Yeah, this is part of the like the CSU, because the CSU is like separate from the CDU. niche television, trashy television, he's watched it somehow and will have extensive thoughts on it. Yeah, this is part of the like the CSU, because the CSU is like separate from the CDU. I might have those the wrong way around. So he has this little Bavarian fiefdom and one of his ways of like sort of propping it up rather than, you know, to try and stop voices drifting to the AFD or whatever is a huge amount of investment in aerospace, thus the space program. And

thus also this and a lot of that is being like funneled through the technical university of Munich. So this is all this is deep Bavarian conspiracy shit that's happening here. And on top of that, I'm just thinking about how you pronounce hyperloop if you're a German, like you're coming back to like, keep it low. Keep it low. This man is personally investing half of the GDP of Bavaria into keeping all the exhibits at the Deutsche Museum running all the time. The only museum I've ever been in where all the interactive exhibits worked. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That and the weird that and the pump they must use to make the weird wave in the English garden where everyone does surfing. Anyway, that's a good one too. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Let's move on quickly because there's nothing quick about me going through these slides even though I hope there would be. Founded 2016, we're talking about Delft Hyperloop here. Again, it's a university situation. Higher education. Hi everyone. Actually, the Netherlands, I situation. Hi, Retro-tation. Hi, everyone.

Actually, the Netherlands, I used to listen to a Netherlands drum and bass radio that was so good. And their drum and bass was excellent. And it was really funny because as with so many European radio stations, they'd be like, in Dutch, you'd be like, who do you hear? Do you hear that?

Fuck yeah. Do you hear that? Do you hear that? I used to love that shit. It was so good. Anyway, right, moving on. So honestly, I actually have nothing bad to say about Delft Hyperloop other than the Hyperloop shit, because honestly, it's just a bunch of students just like tinkering and vibing and presumably taking extensive

a kind of recreational drugs. And you know, who's to who's to say whether that's bad or not. It's good to rip off universities. Someone who did that extensively to Temple University. I mean, let's keep moving. Oh, Ross, you found a graphic of Arrivo. OK, it was so funny. So I don't know much about Arrivo because this feels like a thing from DOOM eternal. So they Arrivo were founded in 2016. They're based in the USA. I don't think there was ever an update ever.

It's a bit like a transport situation. They've never done anything real. They were liquidated two years later, but Ross is found information about one video And I got a still from it here The idea is they take a highway lane and they make these ultra-fast Sleds that go on them and then you drive your car onto the sleds and then it goes really fast drive your car onto the sleds and then it goes really fast. Well, just before or after. Exactly. Was this before or after Musk did boring company? I'm not sure.

The funniest thing about it. I would laugh so much if Musk stole his idea for the stupid, you know, his idea that lasted what, like 18 months or something of the stupid little skids, little tea trays with the cars on it. Because that disappeared. If he copied this, that's so funny. I think this was slightly afterwards, but the funniest thing is they do all this renders and it's like, okay, here's the ramp where

you go on the Arrivo. And it's like on one side, the cars drive off the pod and it disappears into the ground. And then it comes back up the other side, flipped around somehow. And then you drive your car and it's so fucking, it was, and it accelerated so quickly, it was just, it was hilarious. It was, it was like, I love the shit. Anyone would like accelerate so quickly that the brakes on the vehicle would fail and it would just leave a row of vehicles behind to get skidding. And it would get pancaked into the ceiling if you stick by the one behind.

I love that. I love that. That's such a good fit. I'm a little bit confused as to why it's enclosed at all. Are they going to try and like, okay, I hope your air conditioner is set to recirculate. We're going to evacuate this too. It seems a perfectly vacuum sealed vehicle. Can you imagine it with Teslas with their panel?

Just how much people can suck there. Your cyber truck, you know. Yeah, you get bloated out to huge dimensions from the rubber suck. I love that. All right, you got it. Hope your journey is less than three minutes. You may lose some IQ points. Just stunning. I love this. I need to get this render. I need to find it. I love this so much.

Remember to exhale as it depressurizes. Oh, God. It almost gives me nightmares. Oh, I could grief. Right. Okay. Let's go to question mark logo. Yeah. Or DGW hyperloop. And founded in 2015 based in India, because India had to get involved in the grift. Last real update, never. And its current status is that it's a website. Cool. As with a lot of these, it's a website. That's all it is. And if we jump

to the next one, which is beautiful. Fantastic. So, so, we make it a pizza in a vacuum. So, I have to talk about the fact, let's first, Hyperlip Italian, right, founded in 2020 when a guy who we've already mentioned called Bebop Gresta probably did some, legally,

what I'm about to say is humorous conjecture, some sort of shenanigans with his staff probably, I don't know, he was an annoying prick. So the quite non nefarious reasons could have been why he's split off. This thing doesn't exist. It's not again, it's just a website. But we have to if you took you took Richard Hammond and stretched him. Yeah. I was thinking just if I was thinking if you rocket fired a kilo of cocaine into Ed Norton. Anyway, people, I've met this guy in person. He's a prick. He wore a very large scarf, not that I necessarily hold that against people. So brief story.

I once went to... I once drove to Milton Keynes because I couldn't get down on a train in time. I drove to Milton Keynes and on my way to Milton Keynes, by the way, for a hyperloop conference that I intended to ask... I was the only person asking searching questions there, so I'm glad I went. On the way to this event, I was side-swiped by an HGV on a roundabout. The story sounds like something I made up. Ross, you made this up in a TF episode as a joke thing about a stupid place and a daft thing happening on an episode about hyperloop.

And I was like, Ross, I haven't told you about this story. Why regale a precise thing that happened to me? It was horrible. Thankfully, I was in the smoke. We did the spot in Mindmeld when meld when we were going down the stairs at two Liberty Place. Oh yeah, that's true. We did spend a lot of time with each other running down to the stairs of a literal skyscraper. It's fine. We'd had a lot of alcohol and everything was good. So, yeah, this guy. So thankfully, I was in the smart car and I literally bounced to safety as this HTV hit me and it just knocked the wing mirror off of the poor smart. So fuck

you, HTV driver. I love that car. Anyway, thankfully it survived to live until we got rid of it and got a panda instead. That's a different story though. Bebop Gresta. So here he is. Let's go to the next slide because we have to talk about the Hyperloop guys. This is just me doing a Google search of Bebop Gresta and this is why Hyperloop exists. This is just me doing a Google search of bebop Gresta. And this is why the hyperloop exists. This is another reason why hyperloop exists, which is to make this kind of guy have a book and able to talk at the World Economic Forum. I hate this guy. And he was so I asked him several searching questions to which he had no responses, obviously, because there's nothing in his head.

The thing is, Garth, you're like the most affable guest that we regularly have. Like all around lovely man, you are legit beefing with this guy, which is such an indictment of him. I'm interested in the Hyperloop book because like, what does it say? It's like page one, it didn't work. Yeah. What I don't know about, you know, GoFundMe scams. I learned.

Honestly, I don't know how you could write. I'm currently writing a book spoiler alert about a legitimate thing. And it's very hard to write multiple tens of thousands of words. Writing a book about a thing that literally doesn't exist, genuinely impressive, except that he probably got someone to ghostwrite his book about made-up stuff. So wonderful. Anyway, so the Google search of him just shows all these... What's funny is, do you know the picture in the previous slide? That's the picture on his website.

He actively has decided to put that picture on his... Oh, my God. Anyway, I guess it's... He's got bebop.com. Oh, I want bebop.com. Oh, he's got a second. Yeah, to be fair. Oh, it's the he's got he's got bebop.com. Oh, I want bebop.com. Oh, he's got a second to be fair. It's the Patreon so we can get bebop.com. Anyway, I think of the pictures, the Google search of his picture

isn't just because I have personal beef with him, but it's because I think it sums up how much of a flim flam hyperloop is quite nicely. It's sort of modern day Lyle Landley. Are we done with this guy? We're done with him. Let's get rid of him. Let's take him off our screens. See a space cowboy. 2015, we're talking about Logolous Genesis Hyperloop. 2015, founded in the USA.

No real updates ever. It didn't have a website and it's gone now. I like this company a lot. There's like a boutique. There's like an actual Hyperloop working in someone's backyard. The guy is they only have a phoneique. There's like an actual hyperloop working in someone's backyard. The guy is they only have a phone number. Yes, it's like a low bar. It's like a low bar on when they only have Facebook pages.

It works like sort of software development where some guy has built a functional hyperloop system just for his own amusement. It works and he's the only one who knows about it or uses it. And it's called like Ron's hyperloop and hyperloop is misspelled. This one actually works somehow. Yeah, exactly. I run this company on the side. Yeah.

He runs some of the last stretch limos in the US. Right. Next company, please. This one might be familiar to people. These motherfuckers. These pricks. These pricks. Who got bored, did too much Ketterman, allegedly, and then bought a bunch of airsoft gun shells. It's like a star CS something airsoft gun body.

Put a little tiny bullshit flamethrower in it and sold those to the most soy-faced people imaginable. Incredible. So, what's funny about this is that it was, Boring Company was founded in 2017 based in the USA and in relation to its Hyperloop activities, its last real update was somehow in August 2013 because the Boring Company is one of Musk's weird things that he created. I don't know, I don't actually know what the origin of the Boring company is. Is it actually a spin-off from SpaceX and Tesla or is this something else he just faked? It was a spin-off from SpaceX because he thought, maybe I can

dig a tunnel under the property so I can get to work slightly more quickly. That's the one. Yeah. So not a single thing this company has done at all is basically they've done nothing. The boring company has done nothing in terms of hyperloop, of course. We're ignoring the flamethrowers and we're also ignoring the buried queue of Teslas in Las Vegas. I don't believe they've done anything substantial with increasing the speed of tunnel boring, which is supposed to be their big white whale. That was their big thing, yeah.

Exactly. which is supposed to be their big white whale. That was their big thing, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And keep in mind, it's not a flamethrower if it doesn't throw the flame, which requires napalm. Oh, so it's just a flame. It's just a Bunsen burner on a stick. Oh, okay, it's a sideways Bunsen burner, yeah, I can understand. Yeah, and I think, oh, actually, you've, usefully, nicked my neck slide as well,

which is good because the background, the person who's done a lot of good digging on the background to this and really dug into the specifics of not just like us being conspiratorial and saying, ha, ha, ha, Elon Musk did this to undermine California high speed rail. But no, Paris Marx, they've written a superb, you know, just, you know, all around fantastic, first to follow and keep up with in terms of tech stuff. But Paris has written a really good blog digging into the detail of exactly what Musk was thinking when coming up with this stupid idea and why it was. So send everyone over to Disconnect and Paris Marks' blog. They've written a really good piece. We should have them on the show sometime.

Exactly. Yeah. Actually, likewise, Railnarrer should have had Paris on. Sorry, exactly. Yeah. They're actually, likewise, Railnarr should have had Paris on. Sorry, Paris will pest you some point. Yeah, exactly. And listeners, you'll be thankful that I'm now going to shut up. OK, this is back to my own original part of the podcast rather than from there's your rail problem, NASA. Yes. It's all together. We do have to ask, OK, we've discussed the hyperlip is a grift. All the companies are failing. It's all together. We do have to ask, okay, we've discussed Hyperloop as a grift, all the companies are failing.

It's really funny. Is there something that is a contrast to this where people are actually developing new technology in like a methodical, practical, serious way? Well, you can make it look way more like a shoe, apparently. Yes. So I think the contrast here would be the true ocean constant in Japan, right? Which it's, I know, I know Gareth has some criticisms of this thing, which we'll get to in a second. But this is this is a superconducting maglev train

that can go 300 and whatever miles an hour. They've done literally 50 years of reachers and development to make this thing work. Extensive testing on full-scale test tracks. It's finally partially under construction except for a weird bit in the middle where there's some NIMBY issues. This is an extremely expensive, extremely risky project that requires actual massive investment in horizontal construction. This is not the guys in the shed sort of situation that hyperloop companies are or aspire to

be. You know, if you're actually like, okay, we're going to build something that surpasses conventional rail, you're going to put some time into it and you're going to put a lot of money into it. And even this thing has problems. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, the good thing about this is, Roger, you're absolutely right. This is kind of what this, like practically, Hyperloop might look like if it was a real

thing, if it didn't have all the problems we talked about, because it has all the challenges of its linear infrastructure, its horizontal infrastructure, exactly. And even in this picture, you can see its on stilts, which means it's had heavy infrastructure work done. This is a massive civil engineering project. The length of tunnels is spectacular. It's already billions and billions of US dollars over budget. It's a decade plus delayed. It's likely that it's not going to open until it's supposed to be opening soon, but it's like I'd be surprised if it is running before the, you know, before the 2030s, the

mid 2030s. It's slipping back. But the reason, even if you park all that to big complex infrastructure project, the reason that Japan is progressing with this isn't because they're sick of conventional high speed railing anyway, it's that they've built out their high-speed rail system. They've built it out. They've built as much as they can. The next thing has to really be a bypass for the high-speed rail. That's why they've put a punt on Maglev. There's some early discussions about this, there's some logic behind this being more earthquake-proof than high-speed rail as well. The reality is, I don't think that stands up so much because the existing high-speed rail has shown itself to be pretty bombproof on an earthquake perspective.

This is just about providing a bypass for the bypass, and it goes through mostly just underground. It's one huge, very, very expensive tunnel. Yeah. And the trains are really big. They're really, really fast. You know, this is a it's very, very expensive to build. And it's also four times more energy consuming than conventional high speed rail per passenger seat. And you got to have like liquid nitrogen cooling on the train because it's superconducting maglev. It's kind of a little like prestige flex, though, to do. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, genuinely, given the capacity

on the existing high speed rail lines is a massive and B maxed out, you do need something like this. Yeah. And the kind of question was, do we build another conventional high speed rail? Just do the TGV thing and put another deck on all of the shingles. Yeah. Well, the trouble is this is the They're saying this, they can't because all the tunnels were built super early in the history of high-speed rail, which is why the trains, all the Japanese high-speed trains have such stupid-looking noses. I might have said this in a previous episode. If I have, Hogs, shout at me, I'm so sorry.

That was sort of part of the design philosophy, as we have smaller windows and it's able to handle the differential pressure more easily. They do have some double-decker Schincansons, but they're phasing them out, I think just because they got to put elevators on them, which is annoying. And also they run on a low-deck time system as well. They run on a system that's almost like Metro timetables,

but for high-speed rails. So they don't really have time to load up double-decker trains. It's like hurling myself into the train and then just sort of dealing. Oh, they're beautiful though. Yeah. I was like hurling myself into the train and then just sort of dealing. Oh, they're beautiful though. Yeah. I mean, absolutely stunning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, all of the Japanese trains,

okay, apart from a couple of ducky duds, the majority of the Japanese high-speed fleet is stunning. It's interesting that this thing isn't as high capacity as the trains are not nearly as high capacity as the mainline, you know, conventional rail equivalents. They don't carry as many people. There's a lot more kit on the train than a conventional high-speed rail train as well. So they're definitely shortcomings. This is a technology that has shortcomings compared to conventional high-speed rail. But yeah, as Ross says, it was kind of like, well, we're kind of playing around on top of an existing fully saturated, very effective high-speed rail system. So what the hell?

There's a couple areas where they may have shot themselves in the foot. Like, you know, this thing is because it's superconducting magnets, there's all these intense magnetic fields around it, which means in these, these weird shielded boarding corridors. And like, also, they may be implementing credit cards. Yeah. There may be some kind of extra security about boarding it because everyone loves to have security on trains these days Sort of negates the whole you know the the the advantage over airports show me the shingan since what team hold on I'm gonna Google this really quickly Google it or put it into being a I or whatever. Yeah, it may not even be that much faster than the

Nozami shinkansen to go from Tokyo to Nagoya. It probably won't be really worth it until it gets to Osaka. That's going to be a long time from now. But yeah, we're talking the 24s at the earliest, like the late 24s. So I've looked this up. I've looked this up and I'm going to save this image for Devon so they can phase it in. I'm going to put a link in the Zencast to chat here.

So J.R. East did a like terrorist attack drill, I guess. And this is their police unit. It is four guys, all of whom are in just regular like cop uniforms. And one of them has my favorite piece of police equipment in the world, the grabby pole where... Have a grab. I thought so. was my favorite piece of police equipment in the world, the grabby pole. Where? Have a go. I thought so.

Initially, I thought that was like a comedy cartoon fishing net. Yeah, no, it's also quite funny. This is literally, there's quite a dark history too, because I believe invented in China in order to like restrain and put out people who are setting themselves on fire to protest the Chinese government. But yeah, the deal is that you just like, if a guy has a knife or something or he's, you know, he wants to fight you, just grab him with the pole and pin him against something and then just wait until it chills out or you can get him on the floor.

Like dark, but also kind of funny in a dark way. Yeah. But this is you know, this is this is what it looks like when you're developing this new kind of high capacity rail technology. When this is finished in 20 years, they'll probably have worked even more of the bugs out. We might have a room temperature superconductor by then and they can get rid of the liquid

nitrogen system. Who knows? You live in the ocean. Yeah, exactly. This is, if you're actually trying to build something new, this is the level of development you need. Now, what has resulted from Hyperloop being the technology of the future? Even though it didn't work. I mean, it has given an excuse to kill a lot of high-speed rail projects. Not the main excuse, but one of them.

Yeah. Fear, uncertainty, and doubts. I remember watching your original loop video, which continues to be an inspiration to me, because it's very, very good. And yeah, it's good. Even if it hasn't directly stopped or slowed down projects, it's created, it's contributed. Alice is sending us more pictures of Traycoss. I get into the cop hole. It just happens to me. There's nothing we can do.

If I send you this one, You can flash it up as well. And the like it might not have been a singular reason, but it has contributed. I make myself sad. Think about HS2 again. It's contributed to this wider feeling of, oh, well, maybe, you know, it's added to, you know, a bunch along with like the Green Party of England and Wales and the IEA and TPA and also Rishi Sunak going, hi, guys, I'm getting a job application for California. Along with all this stuff, it's. It's like your mate Dave, he just wants to work in California. You know, everybody wants to get out of the out of Britain and like work in

California with a son. Yeah. And then you realize you're in the acres field. Yeah. I think that's just punishment for Rishi Sunak. I think we should like install him in Chino, you know? There are a few places I'd like to install. Yeah. Um, on some train tracks might be a good start. In Minecraft parody, redacted, etc.

On those like Redstone train tracks. Yeah, on some. Exactly. Yeah. Minecraft, Parody, Redacted, etc. On those like Redstone train tracks. On some Minecraft tracks, yeah. So yeah, it's contributed to this weird pullback from High Speed Rail that we've seen. In the USA, I think it's fair to say California High Speed Rail has sort of been kind of stalling

and tripping over at shoelaces, even though big sections of it are still being built. And obviously in the UK, we've just smashed our face into a brick wall and got rid of all the important parts of HS2. Yeah, I mean, it's not even gonna go to used to now, apparently, which my God. Yes.

It's common. Yeah. I mean, it's funny, because anyway, that's another episode, isn't it? But at some point you'll do the HS2 episode and you'll find, and if I'm still alive, then we can go there. That one will be about 25 hours long.

Yeah, we'll start recording it in the anyway. Yeah, that's what we have to do as a live episode, I think. And then that way that'll keep us keep us a hard hard and fast. You guys do not go anywhere. Come to London. We'll do an episode with Gareth live. Oh, yeah, that's it. It's a threat.

Yeah, we could stretch from me on notice, you know, live from a national railway museum. Oh, that'd be fun. Oh, shit, we could go there. I mean, that would actually be awesome. We should maybe take this one offline. That's a very good idea. Anyway, hogs, you're on notice for that one. Anyway, right, so from the cab of the mallard. cab of the mallard. We prefer that. That's a haloton, to be honest.

My little heresy. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I prefer the cute, the Q one, actually, because I'm a maniac and I like ugly things. But anyway, that's another story. Yeah. Explains why you keep coming on the podcast, you know? Yeah, I mean, this is a situation where, you know, it's another one of those

miracle technologies that's just around the corner that maybe if we just wait for it to show up, we can not invest all the money, you know, it's up there. Hyperloop is up there with like carbon capture and storage and like driverless cars, driverless cars, true generous of official intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. Battery freight locomotives. Room temperature superconductor room temperature

superconductors. We have a couple of times nuclear fusion. And nuclear fusion might be moving along a little quicker. Right now. It's off is we will sound like idiots on but like yeah, the rest of them are just let's let's list all technologies right now and see which ones were canceled. Screwdriver. Not real. It's not real. It's head.

Well, well, well, it's that machine that cuts plastic in fun shapes. Oh, 3D print. It's a cutter. Yeah, that's fucking bullshit. The laser car, it's taken investment away from people. The scissors. It's a machine. Oh, I love a sandwich.

Can't beat that. Electric screwdriver. Elizabeth Carter, it's taken investment away from people. This is a film. Oh, I love a sandwich. Can't be. That's a screwdriver. The Makita battery powered coffee machine that James Hoffman did a video on. Yes. Like the guy really, really sexy voice. Yeah. So, but, you know, we still keep throwing money at this.

Here's another one I stole from Gareth. Darae. Yeah, I told it, I told it up the nut. Just from what I could find, I told it up how much money the EU has given the Hyperloop shit, and that's 54 million euros. Yes, pocket change, you know, it loses that down the back of the sofa.

I will say that. You know, we're also still trying to fund it in the United States. According to News 5, ABC News 5 in Cleveland, they're still trying to do the Hyperloop Transportation Technologies test track in Cleveland. Oh my God. But they're not though, are they? There's just the same journalists repeating the same credulous bullshit.

Oh wait, this is January 31st, 2023. Excuse me, I forgot that the year changed. Also, that it's not January 31st yet. Incredible. It could have been. It might be when this goes out. Just baffling. This is one of the things that's incumbent on us, right? I don't know we're going to get to the point of what have we learned here. One of the things that is incumbent on us is if we can, particularly for local journalists who are writing about this shit, kind of reach out to them and say, do you want some more content to put into your content farm? Why don't you have a conversation with me and I'll explain why this doesn't work.

And that's kind of what I did. So I have converted the whole BBC tech team into anti-hypolyp people, partly through Rory Kephan Jones actually being quite a good tech journalist and seeing through this bullshit immediately, and partly through this bullshit immediately. And partly through me being very annoying on Twitter. All right, I got a drop off. All right. Almost.

We lost to Liam. No worries. Talk to you guys later. We love you. Love you too. Bye, Liam. Bye. Bye.

See, we turned our time pressure. We were so close. We were so close. Anyway, right, yeah. If you can find yourself a pet journalist and convert them against type of that's my call to put a call on a journalist, you know, trying to journalist. And I guess another question is, does this vac train technology have a future? You and I disagree on this,

Ross, because you kind of think maybe in the distant future, it does. Yeah, distant future, 100 years from now. I think, you know, Ross, because you kind of think maybe in the distant future it does. Yeah, distant future, a hundred years from now, I think, you know, eventually, okay, you're going to build a 10,000 mile an hour transatlantic tunnel. It's just the logical thing to do. Long times. We don't have enough materials on this planet to do that. That's the problem. We have to do some like asteroid mining. Yeah, we have to do asteroid mining down. There's a load of increasingly large dominoes required before we get to this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do it at some point, I think. But you know, doing all that shit, why do we want to get around Earth that fast?

And also, why wouldn't we just be doing like suborbital bullshit? You know? Yeah, I think so. I mean, my inclination is that for those longer distances, you're still from a resource perspective and an energy perspective, you're going to end up creating artificial fuels for regular ass jet aircraft. That's the other thing you wind up with. That's another huge technology like money pit is synthetic fuels. It is. It is large amounts of bullshit, but I reckon it's closer to reality that we do that.

It's much like the room temperature superconductor, it's one of those things where it's almost all bullshit. But if someone does it, we can just kind of dust our hands and figure out all the things we fucked up. Doesn't matter. Solved them. Bost it. Easy. Yeah, if you figure out like something, if you figure out like fusion power and then you can, you know, you develop processes that just use a shitload of energy but can otherwise extract iron from dirt or whatever, maybe you can make this work. But that's a long time from now.

We're talking distant future, not immediate future. I suppose part of this, people challenge me on like, when I say a very strongly asserted that the driverless cars will never exist. They say, well, the technology is moving on and needs some bounds. And at show will, and I go, yeah, but have you noticed like there's a bigger world out there? I suppose I think the way that our civilization exists and functions is going to change so radically by the end of this century that we're just not going to be thinking about this stuff for a couple of centuries afterwards. Yeah, not even to be a pessimist about it, but if you wanted to be a pessimist about it,

you could be like, this is like a Mayan guy in sort of like 1500 being like, listen, our calendar technology is getting better and better and better. It's like, okay, sure. But like, that doesn't really make us more resilient against the sort of existential threats that might make it irrelevant. I don't know. The Mayans are more resilient than the Aztecs and the Incans. They're still around. Oh yeah, for sure. You get to the point where even if you don't go full pessimist, we're going to have to pay so much attention to resource management that this stuff is going to be kicking this novel technology stuff way back

into the long grass. It requires a huge amount of investment, which there's a lot of money flying around, but like in a very sort of undirected way and fundamentally like wasteful way. And what I'm saying at this point is of course to bring back an old favorite climate Stalin. Hey, you know, you gotta you gotta I mean, if you reorient it, if you reorient the economy so there's not one lever that's instant interest late rates, you might you might have more useful investment of money into infrastructure. Climate Stalin. You might have more useful investment of money into infrastructure.

Climate Stalin. We don't have that. Yeah, and it was, you know. Climate Stalin. I don't know why I said it like that. Climate Stalin. Climate Stalin. Climate Stalin.

What if it was climate Trotsky? Interesting, but then it gets ice picked in the back of the head by the climate. Yeah, I don't think that would work, yeah. So yeah, this is not technology then it gets ice picked in the back of the head by the client. Yeah, I don't think that would work. Yeah. So yeah, this is not technology that you should be necessarily pursuing now, particularly not in the form of Hyperloop. It'll regular high speed rail. And we're going to have, you know,

airliners for a long time. Yeah, they remain, frankly, they remain for long distance flights. They, they, you know, they don't get me wrong. They are carbon horrific, but they remain the most resource efficient way of moving those long distances because the carbon that you'd need to invest, the carbon emissions from building across the Atlantic tunnel, if you ignore the fact there's not enough steel to do so. Put me on a sailing ship.

I don't care if it takes three weeks. Nuclear shipping. Nuclear shipping is a big one. The Savannah back out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I believe the Chinese are working on a nuclear container ship right now. Yeah. Genuinely based. Yes.

But, you know, we'd like to see some more conventional high speed rail. Then you can worry about very, very fast trains that go arbitrary distances at arbitrary speeds. But for the for the most part, this has just been a large amount of bullshit that has sunk money and time into attention. Yes. Another crucial resource of which we have stolen almost three hours of yours. Yes, exactly.

We had to leave them late for an evening date. What did we learn? Don't... I guess we learn not to do it again. Like... Yeah. Don't drive to Milton Keynes. Yeah. Drive to Milton Keynes. Exercise some control of your finances, European Union.

Goddamn, yeah. So send a guy out there to look at the pipe, because however... Even if you like fly him out first class, it's going to like cost less money. And to go out there, look at the pipe, be like, this is bullshit, pay him a living wage and like an executive level salary to write a report saying the pipe is bullshit, and then you don't give them the money. Then you just gave them without doing any of that. I mean, you are literally right.

The theme there is employ better government advisors. Universal bureaucratic income. Eventually, everyone will work for the EU at some level, and we will go around inspecting each other, and everything's going to be fine. Yeah, you gotta move. It's all due after the room temperature superconductor. Move engineering in-house.

Yes. Be more like Japan, but not in any of the bad ways. Put me out of work in source all engineering functions. Seriously. Be like Japan. Try to tell buses. Build a weird gun. Yeah.

Build the Port Authority bus terminal and pave the earth. Yes. Be like Dave and move to California to work on a speed rail. Don't move to beggars field. Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Hello, Liam, Roz, Alice and guest. Liam has gone slightly wrong. We've lost him. We've lost him. In an unexpected way.

Yeah. This story occurred while I worked for a retail printing company that was shortly thereafter acquired and is today a national retail chain of printing and shipping offices, image attached. Okay. Nobody has a printer anymore. Yeah. I used to work in a print shop and yes, exactly. As it is with many companies, shortly before they are gobbled up, the best days were in

the rear of your mirror. Staffing was inadequate. Training was haphazard. Safety was truly an afterthought and equipment was put to the limits of its usefulness rather than being maintained and repaired when damaged. Uh-huh. I used to work for an engineering office that did not have its own plotter. I had to walk down the street to the printing office to get everything printed. It was a fucking hassle, especially since AutoCAD never gets the print right the first

time. No, it really never does. It always ends up, oh, fucking hell no. That's why I use microstation. Even microstation can't get it right. I got annoyed once. So I worked for Atkins and they had a machine that folded drawings for me, which if you're That's why he's microstation. Even microstation can't get it right. I got annoyed once. So I worked for Atkins and they had a machine that folded drawings for me, which if you're

a track engineer is very useful because our drawings are fucking way too long. I moved to another company and they didn't have it. You had to fold your own drawings like an animal. Shocking. I hated it. The problem when you work at a small, tiny little engineering firm that does not have its own plotter is that if you screw up the print and you bring it back and you look at it, then not only are you mad at AutoCAD, but then your boss is mad at you for wasting money. It's like, no, it's the software. It's the software that does this. It's totally unpredictable. You have a job code for that, you, it's the software. The software does this. It's totally unpredictable.

You have a job code for that, you know? Fucked drawings. Fucked drawings. It's nobody's fault except AutoCADs. They should pay us to use that software. Exactly. At our site, we had a large number of 1990s-era rolling cabinets between six and ten feet long. Oh, those are so dangerous.

The most notable feature of these as fit their age was the doors. They were failing. The cabinet located right next to our drill press had one door fully removed. It was not repaired, replaced or discarded as those involved doing something, capital D, capital S. Everybody's job and nobody does it. Yeah. Yeah.

Instead, it was simply leaned against the side with jagged torn metal hinges sticking straight out. Cool. I mentioned the lack of maintenance. This was a common issue under the longtime shop manager. The boss. Fortuitous naming there. Yeah.

To be fair to the guy. It's a non-desypeterminism. Yeah. To be fair to the guy. To be anonymous in determinism. Yeah. To be fair to the guy, I learned more from the boss about dealing with the public, customer service and how to work quickly and efficiently under pressure than anyone else in my life. But to paraphrase Walt Whitman, the boss was large and contained multitudes. Uh-oh.

First. We don't like multitudes. Down with multitudes. Oh, first don't like multitudes down with multitudes. First, the boss was right about everything and refused to accept he was mistaken about anything. Yeah, you can any kind of like management tyranny position that allows you to do that. Yes. This was a problem giving that he was a real weirdo. He once brought up.

Well, let's not start throwing stones here. He once brought up in casual conversation that not only was the moon landing fake, it was impossible due to radiation from the Van Allen belt. Oh, dear. What followed was an hour-long shouting argument between us, after which we didn't speak for a week. That's really funny. You just go in the print shop with your like

AutoCAD drawing to get your AutoCAD thing printed and it's two guys yelling at each other, right? You don't know shit about the fucking Van Allen belt. Honestly, honestly, from the times I went into that print shop in media Pennsylvania, they had nothing else to do most of the time. I imagine it must have happened more often than you would think. In media Pennsylvania, Lassen for in the middle of Pennsylvania. Yes, it's not in the middle of Pennsylvania, it's in southeast Pennsylvania. Fuck.

Oh, it's... Maybe it was in the middle at one point. It's like in media Pennsylvania, but like in the same words, in you know, you know like you walk in on the Van Allen belt thing Yeah, the boss believed that allergies and asthma were fake and mocked sufferers of both Okay, it was also Yeah, as that's fake He was also certain that the cigarettes he smoked openly on the production floor were good for him. They finally invented it.

They invented it. Yeah. Yeah. The boss was also ex-army and fond of things like bypassing safety features. Yeah, all of this tracks now. Yeah. Yeah. Bypassing safety features on equipment like laminators or printers and working through

being tired, sick or injured, which brings us to the incident. We got to get out of this culturally, you know, don't fucking carotia yourself. It's better for everyone, including like you and the productivity of the organization for you to take the time off when you're sick. Yes, yes it is. Absolutely. I mentioned the drill press. For those not in printing, a print shop uses a drill press to drill holes in documents. Most commonly this is three holes for inserting into a binder. But there are less common but still used other arrangements. I was changing out the bits for the drill press when I fumbled one and it fell into

the dark space between the press, the nearby cabinet, and a broken door which jetted out a sharp bent metal hinge on which while reaching for the drill bit I proceeded to tear a sharp six inch plus long gash into my forearm. Oh, I don't like that. I yelped and I said I gotta go. I immediately ran to our first aid kit and realized quickly a couple gauze pads were not going to cut it and I needed medical attention.

Yeah, that's going to cut it and I needed medical attention. Yeah, that's going to be like a suturing situation. Yeah. The boss had other ideas and proceeded to explain loudly on the production floor in airshot of customers and co-workers that, one, I was being a pussy, I guess, by bleeding so much. Uh-huh. I mean, I suppose that might be accurate in a certain way. Yeah, well, what were you being a person like? We can't know. Yeah. Two, I would be fine if I went outside and quote, rub some dirt on it. Motions.

That's not that. Probably. Yeah, I was best. You know, probably probably avoid avoid Tedness. Three, those prints I were working on were not going to drill themselves. I let him say his piece and told him I was going to a clinic, drove 20 minutes to the company, approved medical office, and several dozen or so stitches later I was good as new. Youch.

That's a bad cut if you needed that many stitches. That's a lot of stitches yeah right key I wish I could say the store had a renewed focus on safety later that year another co-worker almost strangle himself by getting his tie caught in the roll laminator which had its safety guard bypass with a ballpoint pen. laminate your co-worker. And because it was easier to change the role that way. The boss left the year or two later due to differences in management philosophy with our new owners. The boss did whatever the fuck he wanted when he wanted to. I mean, sort of look well on my stripes so we know more after me sort of moment here. A bygone age of American management tyranny.

Yes. Yeah, he's sort American management tyranny. Yes. Yeah, he's sort of management Ronan. Yeah, basically, yeah. Like we've done the sword hunt and now the management samurai are bureaucrats. Yeah. He opened an independent coffee shop six months later, stole half the major customers and then went out of business after a year. I am saluting right now.

He really did become a Ronan. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he did a murder suicide pact. Thanks to you guys for the great content and to all listeners, printing is still good, trees will be here forever, trash isn't real. Yeah makes sense. Yeah That was safety third Our next episode will be on cheer noble doesn't even have commercials before we go It's called rail natta and you can find it on youtube. It's really good. I've been on it

We have I've been on it too And have. I've been on it too. And we presented half of an episode of it today. Yeah. The other half is Garrett's. Yeah, if you enjoyed this episode, you've already half enjoyed Realnatter. So go and finish it off. Round out.

Exactly. You gotta go to Realnatter on YouTube and only half the episodes are easy to find because some of them are live streams. Then got to go on the channel and look. Oh, it's very irritating. I know. I'm so sorry, everyone. Most of them are live streams. So it's actually really hard. It's very difficult to find the podcast. It's not your fault. I wouldn't recommend it.

YouTube's fault. Yeah, that's it. No, Alice was on and made me buy this watch that I'm wearing right now. Oh, the Mondays. Yeah, which is a nice one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I've told you that before. It was a fun episode. We talked about watches and time. It was fab. I was ages ago now. Oh, the Mondane. Which is a nice Mondane. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I've told you that before. It was a fun episode. We talked about watches in time.

It was fab. I was ages ago now. I've done bloody 202 of those as of tonight. 202 episodes. Every single week I've done an episode since I started it. Insane. What an idiot. Actually, I finally got my Mondane back.

Oh. Because this thing is the one train watch, you know, yeah, and we all have mundane watches now. Because it's very nice. What are like a ball engineer or train master yet? Subscribe to the Patreon. The Patreon. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

No, yeah, very well. I think we'll subscribe to the Patreon. We can all buy nicer watches and then build HS2. Exactly. No, yeah. When people subscribe to the Patreon, we can all buy nicer watches and then build HS2. Exactly. Everyone, yeah. We do need to, I mean, we said this last time, didn't we? We do need to get the Patreon on just buy, just like Gorilla buy, Gorilla build HS2. No, I have plugs, which are, listen to Kill James Bond and Trash Future, but Kill James Bond in particular, because, oh my God, I'm, I'm I know so you got I think I told myself when I was shopping in St. Brits that if I was going to appear on an episode I would tell you which is that I'm

loving your Euro spy stuff even though you guys are getting sick of doing them. They are so fun to listen to. They're honestly such good. It's so much fun. Thank you so much. So everyone should listen to Kill James Bond. It's brilliant. It's getting me through as I have it as my weekly shop listening.

So I go around Sainsbury's with my Nacio friends and listen to that. It's lovely. I had a funny from the Zardaz episode I thought of and I forgotten what it was. Oh, that episode is so. I mean, also that film, I just did not expect what ended up. I didn't expect it to become good. I was like, this is going to be funny crap. And it was ended up being like a seriously profoundly interesting sounding film.

And a good episode. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I'm I'm liking this sort of new ending of the show. We just praise me for 10 minutes. This is the mutual admiration society. Thank you. So does both of you, you know? And also Liam's not here. Liam, you're not here and you probably won't listen to this because we're three hours in,

but I love you so much. You look so beautiful at your wedding. It was lovely. Liam, it was, it was, so there we go. So there's some Liam love that Liam won't listen to because he's not going to listen to three hours of episode. Who, who, who listens to the podcast that they record themselves? Oh, not me. I start listening back and I start realizing when the

glossel stops have slipped back into my accent. We did the KJV episode on the Spy and the Green Hat and I developed a new complex about the way in which I say hat when I'm not thinking about it, which is just hat. The hat, the hat, the spine, the green hat. Yeah. The glow stops quite. Yeah. It's South London, yeah.

It's South London, yeah. There's a thing to think about this episode, though, although it took three hours, we got through slides at twice the rate we usually do. Incredible. Guaranteed of some kind of catalyst for this the rail not a way is 400 slides in 40 minutes Anyway, I'll stop saying things and I love you all I love coming on listeners. I love you all too I'm in a happy mood. I'm also very sleep deprived because of baby reasons. I have a child All right. Well in that case what we should say is well that was bad cast was thanks for coming. Yes. Bye everyone