Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 156: The Ultimate Urban Circulator

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

do you like PODS? follow marcus on twitter: https://twitter.com/marcuscnelson WE HAVE A MERCH STORE NOW: https://www.bonfire.com/store/well-theres-your-problem-podcast/ 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/

Is everyone ready to go? Does everyone have everything ready? You already hit the fuckin' button, dickhead. Yeah, I know I hit the button, but that doesn't mean that, like, Devin couldn't edit out the first part of the podcast before, everything is... Okay, anyway. Markus, is your recording going? Uh, yes, I have Audacity on.

Okay, okay, in that case, yeah, we're all good. Uh, hello. Welcome to... Well, where is your problem? It's a podcast about engineering disasters, with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak, I'm the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he, ahem, okay go. He, ahem.

He, ahem. Yeah. I'm November Kelly, I'm the person who's talking now, my pronouns are she and her, yay Liam. Yay Liam, hi, I'm Liam McAnderson, I'm the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he, him, and we have a guest! Yes, hello! Long time listener, first time caller, I'm Marcus, my pronouns are he, him, and that's illegal now where I come from, but y'know.

We'll get into that. We will. And we're looking at a box with some wheels. Oh, she's beautiful. Yeah. Little, sort of glass-enclosed toaster. Yeah. Yeah.

I actually quite like the way this looks, I'm not gonna lie to you. This is, I'm gonna check my notes here, the future of transportation, they're so confident of that, that they made a whole video to tell you that it is the future of transportation, they're so confident of that, that they made a whole video to tell you that it is the future of transportation. And you can tell, because all the people whose salaries depend on that being the future of transportation, say that it is the future of transportation. ALICE If it's not the future, why does it have all the cool circuits on the side?

JUSTIN Yeah, it's got hexagons, that means future. SEAN Well, I mean, I guess this one can't be the future, because the company that made it is bankrupt. Oh. Well, that was quick. That might be the beginning of where your problems are. Yeah. Getting hauntology.

This is a lost future. Yeah, so, I feel like you need some kind of voice filter and some John Cena intro music to say this, but today we're going to talk about Jacksonville's ultimate urban circulator. ALICE Whoa! LIAM Are you blown away, Nova? Are you fucking blown away by this? Whoa!

ALICE I fucking am! No one in Britain is naming anything as cool as the ultimate urban circulator, let alone designing a little molecular logo for it. SEAN Yeah, in fact the molecular logo is what you're supposed to call it, the U2C. ALICE Oh, that's way less elegant. SEAN You get it? LIAM That sucks.

SEAN Yeah, that's not as good. I think they need to lean into it. ALICE Yeah. I would sooner say that I was getting the circulator, you know? The circ. Yeah, I know this is about engineering disasters, and I will say this is, I guess, an impending disaster, technically? Oh, we do those.

We count those, yeah. We do count those, great, great. It's too far in motion to prevent at this point. This is like an imminent train wreck. And we'll get into how. ALICE We will. ALICE Like, the last one we did that was an impending train wreck turned out not to train wreck on time, because we said that the Mexican navy was gonna kill AMLO, and then they didn't

kill AMLO. LIAM They did not kill AMLO. They came close. LIAM Way to hold up your end of the bargain, dickheads. Yeah. But before we talk about the ultimate urban circulator, we have to do the goddamn news. Wait, before you do that, can you do Sunday, Sunday, Sunday in that voice? Sunday, Sunday, Sunday in downtown Jacksonville, the ultimate urban circulator. Beautiful, thank you.

Appreciate you. Appreciate ya. The ultimate news. Well, you'll never believe it, but the country has once again suffered a tremendous loss. Yes, it's very sad pictured here, the country is in mourning as OJ Simpson's funeral train winds its way to our nation's capital. So the thing is, when OJ Simpson died you reacted in the exact same way as when you found out that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, we just weren't recording at the time. We were not recording, no. There was no record of that, y'know?

No. You can pretend. You can open up the 9-11 episode and play that bit right now on your own YouTube. No one has to edit it in or anything, we don't need that. Anyway. Yeah, OJ Simpson, famously... Famous comic actor, football player, not murderer, legally. ALICE Legally not a murderer, yes.

ALICE A quittative murder. And wrote a book about how to be a murderer, though. LIAM Only guy to ever rush for 2,000 yards in a 14 game season, there's something to be said for that. ALICE He was really funny. I've seen the Naked Gun movies, he was really good in them. Like, people critique those performances, but I thought they were good. And yeah, also did not murder his... what, girlfriend?

X-Wife. X-Wife. This is the issue with OJ, is that, y'know, I'm old enough to know who he was, but young enough to not remember the fiasco over the trial. SEAN He was, yeah, the trial was like 94-95, and then the civil lawsuit was like 97? ALICE Yeah, my favorite tweet that I saw about this was just a guy, sort of like, faux-realization going, he wasn't really trying to get that

glove on. SEAN I will say that OJ Simpson was an absolute bastard in his personal life, and I don't have anything positive to say about perpetrators of abuse, and he'll pay for it at the gates of hell. ALICE And, you know who his lawyer was? Was... Robert Kardashian. Patriarch of the Kardashians. So, yeah. A real legacy there,

you know, from doing some of the scummiest legal work going in Los Angeles County, which is saying something. ALICE It's incredible to see the class structure reproduce itself. You know? ALICE Yeah, you know, the Armenian SSR tried to uplift these people, but what can you do? And... JUSTIN What are Alan Dershowitz's kids doing? ALICE Does he have kids? JUSTIN He might not.

ALICE Hold on. We're gonna look into this very strongly right now. And by that I mean I'm gonna Google it on my phone. You can't Google Alan Dershowitz's without getting some of the things that he's said. Um. Yeah, he's three kids. He's three kids. One is a film producer, one is a professional actor, and one is a lawyer for the WNBA.

So good for all of them. I guess. ALICE Yeah, other than being derch, yeah. ALICE Yeah, I guess so. And I mean, you can't choose your parents, right? It's like... ALICE What a derch bag. Ah, ah, ah.

ALICE You go back for the holidays and you're like, so dad, what's up with you? And he's like, I am railing against everyone on Martha's Vineyard who is cancelling me merely for the crime of saying many, many heinous things. And he's like, that's cool, I did like a play, or whatever, I did some like, WNBA litigation. You know? And he's like, let me tell you why I don't believe pedophilia's a mortal sin, now. Get the charts.

ALICE But yeah, no, I mean, the OJ trial and then like civil lawsuit and also the white bronco chase and things such as this, many of our listeners will be too young to know what any of these are, and maybe I don't want to explain them, y'know? Because maybe, shut up. Y'know? Yes. The, uh, the glove didn't fit so they did acquit.

I mean, what else can you say? Just, one of the, like, all time pieces of jury shenanigans. To be like, this glove is slightly too small for his hand, and it was found at the scene of the murder, therefore he didn't commit the murder, because he can't fit into this glove. It's beautiful. ALICE I think the real story adjusts that the LAPD was too racist to prosecute the crime properly.

ALICE Yeah, legitimately that was it. And also the sort of thing at issue was, is being insanely rich and famous enough to get you off a murder charge, even if you're black, in an insanely racist justice system? And the answer is, yeah. At that point. JUSTIN Apparently. ALICE Yeah. Well.

RIP to the juice. In other news... ALICE Also, his victims and uh, many people, yeah. Which probably- LESLIE Many people affected by him, yes. ALICE Yeah, some more stuff came out since he died, where it was like, yeah, fucking Bob Kardashian showed up at UCLA with a suitcase full of money to make some obligations go away kind of thing. ALICE Yeah, I saw that too. We should... He's dead, right Robert?

Not Rob Kardashian. The dad. Yeah. He's still- ALICE Is the dad not Robert? ALICE No, the kid's also Robert, dude. It's real fucking weird. But the dad...

The dad- ALICE Not as weird as giving all those boy's daughters K names. That's... ALICE Yeah, I just... Ugh. Courtney Kim just, ugh. Courtney Kim Chloe Robb. I also can't type, so I fat fingered this and typed in Dobber of Kardashian.

Yeah, he is dead, he has been dead for like 21 years at this point, so I think we can safely... Dying of esophageal cancer. We can safely defame Robert Kardashian, yes. JUSTIN It's the United States, you can defame anyone. ALICE Yeah, that's... I've been spanked the last two. JUSTIN Oh, JK Rowling, for instance.

ALICE Yeah, JK Rowling is a... not a p***hole, she's a Holocaust denier. Whatever. JUSTIN Let's wait a little bit for that one to come out. ALICE Keep it in! Keep it in! I don't give a s***, I'm in America, baby! This is the only good thing about this country!

This company is registered in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I have to share a country with that woman, please, I'm begging you. Stick to bleeps. Oh, God. So, uh, in other news, Israel blew up one of Iran's embassies, or consulates, and Iran has now reversed the usual bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran, into Israel being bomb bomb bomb bombed by Iran. Yeah.

Not very effectively, but that was kind of the point. No, it was like a 2% effective rate or something? Well, they didn't kill anyone. very effectively, but that was kind of the point. No, it was like a 2% effective rate, or something? Yeah. Well, they didn't kill anyone. Which, if you look at that as being on purpose, is pretty impressive. And the whole kind of run-up to this, which was like very heavily trailed, it was like very heavily warned, everybody knew what was gonna happen well in advance, and the whole time the Israelis were like, preparing preparing for it because the Iranians

were going to everyone involved and being like, we really don't want to have to do this, don't make us do this again for real, you've put us in this position where we're obliged to lightly bomb you, you know, just fucking draw a line under it. And of course the Israelis don't want to draw a line under it, they want to bomb Tehran about it. And of course the Israelis don't wanna draw a line under it, they wanna like fucking bomb Tehran about it. ALICE No, they wanna nuke Tehran. They do. And as we know, whatever, what is it, the Samson Protocol?

Which is just a... ALICE Yeah, the Samson Option. JUSTIN Listen at that, that's a rumor, though. ALICE Yeah, although I mean- SEAN RIDDLE The rumor that's real, but a rumor. I feel like with nuclear ambiguity all you're ever gonna get is rumors that, like, Mordecai Venunu, you know? But yeah, essentially, Iran and the US being the adults in the room, have put Netanyahu at the kids' table.

Unfortunately, he is at the kids' table with his nuclear weapons. And he doesn't like it very much. JUSTIN Last thing you want is someone at the kids' table with nuclear weapons. And he doesn't like it very much. JUSTIN Last thing you want is someone at the kids' table with nuclear weapons. This is a sure way of turning things- ALICE I'M GONNA MAKE THANKSGIVEN GO SO PORALLY! JUSTIN Yeah, this is gonna turn the Fourth of July into the Fourth of Shit for sure. ALICE Do you think we're gonna make it to the Fourth of July? Interesting. Yeah, so no one knows what the Israeli retaliation's gonna be, the US and its allies are trying

to lean on the Israelis to be more sensible about this, but fucking good luck with these assholes. Right, they have... it's irrelevant, largely. I mean, the other thing too is, I'm really tired of Joe Biden doing the leaking statements telling us how disappointed he is. It's like, alright man, what are you gonna do about it? And he's just like, nothing! And it's like, okay, well I'll just go fuck myself then.

It's a variation of that tweet, right? Where it's like, Biden is always like, I'd like to know who the president of Israel is, so I could have a word with that guy. I am just, I feel pretty confident here that probably nothing is gonna happen. But the issue is that I'm also consistently wrong about foreign policy all of the time. So... ALICE Yeah, I love you to death, but yeah, absolutely. SEAN Yeah, that's not good.

ALICE Yeah, so, we'll see. In the meantime, what has actually functionally happened is that there's been like a very very expensive firework show, as you've seen here, where Israel and the US and France, Britain and Jordan for some fucking reason all sort of like shot down these like drones as they came in. Which, cool, you know, clearly this was an attempt to be like, we have satisfied our own sort of constituency here, please just let it end there. And we're gonna see how this escalates. Probably not well, is my opinion.

Meanwhile, the genocide continues apace, by the way. So... Oh yeah, they're still doing that. I've been surprised at seeing the death toll still hover around 30,000, it feels like they're just not able to count anymore. That's literally it, it's like, at a certain point, the mechanisms for recording this stuff break down. Yeah.

I mean, Biden's big thing was that he was able to increase the number of aid trucks and reopen the arrest crossing and stuff. Yeah, exactly, right. Wow. That's... that's... that's nothing. That's shitting in my hand. And a lot of the stuff, when it gets to the Israelis who had to actually do it, it turns into, you know, let's not and say we did.

Right. You know, we tell Biden that we're letting in X number of trucks, and then the trucks go in half full, or whatever. It's breathtakingly cynical. But as it has been from the start. So, you know, plus ça change. You know, if you were hoping for any kind of, like, outrage, in a genuine sense, from Iran or from Hezbollah, well, no.

They're regional actors and they have the commensurate interests and alignments and sympathies, but like, yeah. I think we're well and truly in the realm of geopolitics, and it turns out that geopolitics is something that sucks, because it's about considering the big picture when the small picture is, y'know, genocide. Yes. Surprise the trucks can get in at all, there's no roads left. Um, yeah. Yeah.

Know that we're thoroughly bummed out. Well, since we're thoroughly bummed out, I would call that a successful... section of the goddamn news. ALTIMATE NEWS. Yes. So, Jacksonville. Hey Marcus, are you still with us, bud? I am.

I just didn't have much to add. I'm so sorry that we stunned you into silence with all of our horrible takes. Yeah. It might be like that. I've heard worse. I'm from... Marcus, tell us about Jacksonville. It looks beautiful. Yeah, I'm stunned that you found such a good picture, especially a recent one, because

there's supposed to be like, in every news thing about Jacksonville, there's like this big orange building, like the middle of this picture that got torn down like four years ago and like no one's taken new pictures. So, do that with B-roll of the Sixers, whether we're on national television, they'll show B-roll from like 2017, it's like, we have a bunch of new buildings! Show them! ALICE I think this is a funny insult to any city,

to be like, yeah, something happened in Berlin today, here's like, uh, his file footage and it still has the wall in it, you know? LLOYD Yeah. But I mean, on the bright side, you guys have more buildings than you had before. That's crazy. But, uh, let's see. This is the 10th largest city in the country. I don't know if you want to believe that, but you're supposed to.

It's home to big corporations like CSS. Yeah, American Family Railroad. The guys who killed OJ Simpson. Yeah. We forgot to mention they did derail the Tropicana train two days ago. Yeah, this was the joke that we were gonna do in the news that we forgot to do. Oops. The big train full of oranges.

Well done, OZ. Great work. But yeah, they're buildings actually to like, the left of this picture, so you can't see it. But there's you know also a big fountain there. That spot where that building used to be they were going to build like a big skyscraper and that just got cancelled like a couple weeks ago because money. And to the right we have our football stadium which you know you also can't see in this picture which actually leads me to the next slide. I've been there.

I went to see the Gator Bowl there. It was a nice idea. What is a Gator Bowl? It's one of the annual college football bowl games, it was between Notre Dame and South Carolina, and the hated and feared fighting Irish beat my beloved Gamecocks. Your beloved? fighting Irish beat my beloved Gamecocks. Let's see what else is going on. Well, speaking of that. That's all I got.

That's right. Till we die. But you have the upper right there. Yeah, we have an NFL team that we're about to spend a billion dollars probably to not lose. Oh, Jesus. Nice. Because Florida, unlike a lot of other states, like, the state doesn't give any money to

football stadiums, which some would argue is a good thing, but it also means that, like, now a city has to find a billion dollars for football. Yeah, who your football team is shaking down does not really, like, make as much odds when everyone is as obsessed with football. LIAM Right. It's called the National Football League, the government should just fund it. So true. Nationalized Football League.

Yeah. Nationalized Football League. LIAM Yeah, some other contextual things here. So like I mentioned on the left side, you have the biggest city in the world, because in the sixties, you know, the time where like cities were already starting to kind of crap themselves. They had the bright idea of like, let's just make the city and the county like one thing. Right.

They call it consolidation. So the picture down there is of the mayor hanging with whoever that lady is, with their New City Limit sign. It's pretty hot, but like, probably statistically insanely racist. So. Yeah. Florida in 1968, I mean, I don't know. Yeah.

And then on the bottom right, you know, we like trains here, I think. So that is what it used to be. And could be again, could be again, the train station, which was at one point the largest train station, like, south of Washington DC, and it used to be like, that's how you would get to Miami when you decided to go on vacation there. ALICE Nice building. And you pass through here on your way to your sort of, like, billionaire's doomed Florida Keys railroad.

LIAM Exactly, yeah. here on your way to your sort of, like, billionaire's doomed Florida Keys railroad. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. For like that 20 year period where you could actually do that. Yeah. 15 miles. This was the northern terminus of the Florida East Coast Railroad. Correct, yeah.

Yeah. This entire main hall is still here, the platforms are all gone, and there's a convention center there now. Yeah. Well, it might not be there forever, cause they're talking about moving it, but... Jesus Christ, Jacksonville. In classic Jacksonville fashion, can't really figure out where to move it, so they're still talking about that, but...

Well, they only have the 826.5 square miles to decide. Yeah. But you don't want to put it in the couple square miles that are downtown, generally. Of course, which spot of that you want to pick is like, it's been a thing. ALICE It's just really funny to kind of, on a legislative basis, be like, the city is extremely large, and then not do urban sprawl about it. SEAN Oh no no no, there's urban sprawl, don't worry about that.

There's plenty of urban sprawl. We'll get there. ALICE One unit per acre. In some parts, yeah. Yeah. But to talk about the 60s, we can go to the next slide, actually, because there's this glorious moment, this glorious era of the great society, right? When Lyndon Johnson is president, it's this whole thing that, we're gonna build a high speed rail on the top right, and we're gonna do rapid transit instead of commuter rail, and

we're gonna have these cool low-floor buses with too many wheels. And... I have no fucking clue what this is. Everything is gonna be cool, everything is gonna look like that kind of puppet-based animation. Like Thunderbirds or Captain Scarlet, and do not ever ask me about Vietnam. ALICE Yeah, there's nothing happening over there,

don't talk about that. SEAN Yeah, don't worry, your train's going too fast to see it, so don't worry about it. ALICE You can get your beautiful train from your house to your office at Dow Chemical, where you invent napalm too. And then don't worry about what we do with it. This is called the Great Society, right? Yeah.

And connecting all of it is on the bottom right, the people mover. Right, you're gonna be able to hop on this little thing, and just ride it around, kinda. It's the way of the future. Way of the future. It's cool. Way of the future. So you know, we built some of those, on the next slide. Oh yeah.

Right? You know, we do the Washington Metro, we build a BART in San Francisco, but you know... It was sort of quite cute how American Grey Society transit associations are like, often given first names. Bart and Marta, you know? Bart, Marta, uh... Yeah, Marta, you know? Bart, Marta, uh... Yeah, Marta, you know. People are looking for baby girl, Scepter.

Yeah, beautiful name. Atlanta getting the consolation prize because Seattle couldn't like, figure it out. We love that. But yeah, so you know, we build a lot of this like, big transit in a lot of these cities, and kind of the golden is like, because these metros are doing the whole commuter rail element, essentially, they're longer, they go faster, the idea then is that once you're in the downtown, you probably need a smaller thing. To get them to your office.

That's Richard Nixon! I didn't even notice it! Yeah, it's just right there. Yeah. E cryptid. Was there a single normal looking photo ever taken of this man and his wife? No. I'm not sure it's possible.

These great society metros, these are... some people call them rapid rail, because unlike the traditional subways they extend way deep into the suburbs, a lot of them are sort of semi-automated or fully automated. Well, most of them are semi, I'll get to that in the next slide. And they are, you know, they're very different from the traditional subways, just in sort of how they operate,

how fast they go, all this sort of stuff. Which leads us to, I think something, which may be useful to discuss before we get to the second component of the system Which is train automation. I've heard of this Yes, so there's something called ATO Automatic train operation. I want to make a distinction here between a word autonomous and then automatic, right?

So like autonomous has sort of come to me in every type of system that's like automatic in any way, but it's kind of different, right? There are stages, right? You know, an autonomous vehicle, there's this big beefy computer, it takes in lots of information from like cameras and radars, does a whole bunch of machine learning bullshit.

They actually have a cool word for it. Sensor fusion. Oooh. That's not real. Sexy. Yeah. So, you get your computer doing this sexy sensor fusion, and then it like, drives you into a lake, or whatever.

Yes, it crashes directly into an ambulance. Yeah. And then maybe drags you down the sidewalk a little, but that's besides the point. JUSTIN This is also true, yes. When we talk about automatic train operation, trains are not autonomous in that way. They're automatic. You know, like a toaster. ALICE Sure.

You don't need the big beefy computer, because it's a controlled environment. Or should it? JUSTIN Yes. They don't have autonomy, they don't make decisions, they don't need the big beefy computer, cause it's a controlled environment. Or should be. Yes. They don't have autonomy, they don't make decisions, they don't need AI, the computer systems are pretty limited, they require limited input from things like electrical contacts to function. It's why the whole autonomous car thing is fucked, right, is because there's too much shit going on on a road.

Whereas a nice separate, like, railway? You can do whatever you want there, it's very easy. LARSON Right of way, yes. JUSTIN One thing that's interesting, which I don't think we have in the slides, maybe should've put it, that in there is the automatic highway system of the 90s, which did most of the stuff that autonomous vehicle manufacturers are still trying to figure out, with, like, Buick's. are still trying to figure out with like Buicks. Incredible.

Yeah, but sticking nails into the road is just too hard. That's very, very difficult. Very difficult to do one nail every foot or so. So, you gotta want flexibility. Yeah. So yeah, the thing about automatic train operation is these trains cannot see a child and then like Tesla full self-driving, make an informed and rational decision resulting from thousands of machine years of neural network input

to then slam on the accelerator to hit the child as hard as possible. Because automatic trains don't process information like that. ALICE Yeah, if there's a kid on the railway, the kid gets, like, mulched, because it doesn't be on the railway. JUSTIN Yeah, we'll get to that in a second, that is a large part of what makes, especially the very high levels of automation function are like sealed corridors where a lot of these emergencies theoretically cannot happen, or at least in order for them to be happen, in order for them to happen, the person has to really want it to happen.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So, you know, the other thing is like, okay, there's no like machine learning involved or neural networks involved here, so the software is written by a person, so we can sort of make it fail safe. ALICE And blame to that guy! JUSTIN Yeah. Also, they work in the rain. ALICE And at night, too, which is pretty cool.

ALICE And they work pretty consistently, because you can run a whole system like this, like the DLR, and the stations don't change distance, you know? Like the traffic, it's very very controllable. Yeah, it's all fixed, kind of permanent infrastructure, that's really meant to be there, once you build it. Yeah, so, ATO, Automatic Train Operation, is a 70 year old technology. Really? So, Automatic Train Operation is a 70 year old technology. This is an MP51, I believe, it ran on the Paris Metro in 1952 to 1956 as a testbed for what we'd now call a Grade of Automation 2 system, right?

Raising hand here, why does it have rubber tires? This is a rubber-tired Metro. Yeah, Paris had a few rubber-tired lines pretty early on. This is because of Michelin having outsized influence on everything about France. incredible. It's also why Montreal has a rubber-tired Metro. tired metro. Yeah, Mitchell and really tried to promote the system which isn't actually that much better, but they still use rubber-tired metros and there's still a few of them around. Stan Oh, no idea.

Justin Yeah, so there's a bunch of rubber tire systems, but that was... The Bud company also tried them for a while and they would try to run along poorly. That's one thing that's really great to have on a train is blowouts. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why they have a redundant steel wheel behind the rubber tire, actually. That and for going through switches. Rubber Tired Metro does have just a big steel wheel in addition to the rubber tire, there's a whole bunch... that's another episode. ALICE I got the teacher off onto a tangent, so

we're gonna forget that we have homework. JUSTIN So we'll look at the several grades of operation of Metro systems in particular. A few of them do apply to like mainline trains. The first one is grade of operation zero. That is no automation whatsoever. Just a guy. Just a guy in there. Yeah, it's just a guy.

The driver drives the train. The most extreme circumstance can be something like, down here is the third avenue L in New York City. Ooh, she's pretty. They did not even have signalling systems, it was all done by line of sight. The idea is, look, just don't hit the guy in front of you. Try not to. That's the rule.

That's the entire rule. And one of the things about it is you could achieve very high train frequency that way, they were trains every like 45 seconds on some of the busier Manhattan L's. I mean, as long as no one screws it up, then yeah, it was pretty cool. This is this is entirely based on don't fuck it up. And if you have on street light rail, if you have on street light rail without dedicated lanes, they still operate like this. I mean, it's the same as driving a car at that point. Yeah. Great operation, great automation, one, this is most mainline trains.

You have manual operation with some kind of automatic train protection system, which prevents a lot of kinds of engineer or driver error, right? ALICE Yeah, you ran a red signal because you're asleep or dead, therefore power is off. JUSTIN Power goes off, the brakes goes on, yeah, that's automatic train stop, and we've had that since the 1890s. Although it was- GARY 1890s train technology, bleh.

ALICE That was based on, like, the train physically hit a board that then broke a bulb in the train line air system, which then dumped the brakes instantly. ALICE Incredible. JUSTIN Yeah. So yeah, automatic train stop, you pass a signal that's red, the train automatically applies emergency brakes, it stops itself, everyone is safe, then you get fired. ALICE LAUGHS. ALICE Or, possibly, you are already dead, in which case they pull you out of the cab

and then you get fired. LIAM Like what fire, yeah. JUSTIN Yeah, then you get fired and your family doesn't receive benefits. ALICE Like what fire, if you will. JUSTIN These can also be more complex systems, like the advanced civil speed enforcement system that M-TRAC has, or the European train control system that'll display information about the speed limits, oncoming signals, the train will automatically break if a speed limit is exceeded.

You still are performing station stops manually, though. ALICE Yeah, these are fun as hell to drive in any train simulator. JUSTIN Train simulators are so fucking bad right now, it's insane. Go off, go off, go please. That could be a bonus episode, I think. Just start screaming about train simulators.

Yeah, and my contribution too, is like, oh, I'm having fun. I don't know enough to know why this is wrong, I'm just enjoying myself. I just don't understand why, if I run a red signal, the simulation immediately shuts down and tells me it's for my own safety. ALICE That's the guy with the Makarov that they hired, to shoot you in the back of the head if you pass a signal at danger. Do you or Horace not have this? JUSTIN I believe that's grade of automation, negative one.

ALICE Yeah. Yeah, grade of automation, uh, negative one. Yeah. ALICE Yeah, it's driver and political officer. JUSTIN Yeah. So then, they probably had that in the Soviet Union. ALICE Oh god, I'd love to be a train political officer. JUSTIN The train commissar. ALICE Listen, I don't need to know how to drive the train, I just need to know that you are following the correct mass line of Marxism-Lezenism.

JUSTIN Properly follow proper protocol. Grade of Automation 2. Takes this a step further, this is the Washington Metro here, this is one of the seven- the 1000 series cars, they're from like, way in the 60s, I want to say. More like 70s. 70s. Yeah, they're old. They're the oldest cars.

Well, they're all scrapped now, except for two that are a bar. But essentially, the engineer, at this point, if you're driving the train to go from one station to the other, through a series of like electrical equipment on the side of the track that tells the train what to do, you may only have to push a button and the train leaves the station and goes to the next one. Hell yeah. It's a jobs program. Perfect.

Exactly. So, you're still responsible for watching for obstacles on the track, for opening and closing the doors, making station announcements, manually driving the train if necessary, handling various emergencies. This is the most common grade of automation on automated metros, and this 70 year old Paris metro car can do all of that. Then you go up to grade automation three, this is the Docklands Light Railway. The DLR has no driver's cab, but there's still an attendant on the train to operate the doors,

to drive the trains in emergencies, in this case they also check tickets. ALICE Yeah. You've got a button to stop at an emergency anyway, for passengers, so whatever. You know? A kid climbs, like shimmies up onto the DLR, and decides to play chicken with the monorail, and... LIAM Don't do that! ALICE You can, like, hit the thing.

JUSTIN Yeah, you hit the button, you know, someone sees a kid on the tracks, you hit the button, it stops. But that's like the main safety system there. Then you go up to Grade of Automation 4, this is Line C on Rome's Metro. And this involves substantially more infrastructure, it has a sealed corridor with extra safety systems, like sturdy fencing, it has platform screen doors so people can't fall on the tracks, because at this point the possibility of most conventional emergencies becomes so remote, grade of Automation 4 trains can operate with

no staff whatsoever on board. These are very very... How likely is that? How likely is what? To run it with absolutely no one on board. Well, so they're very expensive to build but they do exist. Okay, that was my question. Yeah, so this is sort of... This is sort of... These are becoming increasingly common, they're very expensive to build but very cheap to operate, because nope, no people, right? ALICE I mean, Glasgow subway is in this situation now where they have trains that could do this, and they want to kick out all the stuff and

just run them driverless, and they can't yet. But they hope to. I mean, I think Glasgow has a situation where the stations are so old and so narrow you probably could not do that without substantially reconstructing the system. Oh, they've been trying. The tiny, tiny narrow platforms are gonna have full platform screen doors on them and everything. That's just gonna be like going into a sardine can. Yep.

I mean, listen, I would rather have the sardine can than the current thing of, like, stand on this one girder like you're sort of like a guy building a skyscraper in 1920s New York City. To this side of you, death. To this side of you, death. Give me the platform screen doors. Yeah, give me the screen doors. Yeah, the screen doors are a good idea, I mean, if you see some of the older subway

infrastructure this is like a really good idea just in general. Sometimes they're hard to install, they're certainly expensive to install, but they do stop lawsuits. As well as... Yeah, they stop crazy people from shoving you onto the tracks, because they don't like your face. Exactly. ALICE Hmm.

JUSTIN So yeah, I guess the point here is, we have had this technology to automate trains for a very very long time, the very modern systems, again, they're getting more sophisticated and they're getting more expensive, but they are getting much safer and more reliable. These things don't, you know, these, these, but it's just that this is such an old and refined technology. You know, the oldest trains that were automated, like this MP51 here, you know, this was developed when vacuum tubes were king. And, you know, there were, they didn't even have transistors yet. Some of them ran on relays, right? You don't need extremely high-tech systems to automate metro systems, at least. There's, y'know. You could run this off of a big drum of punched paper, like a player piano.

Exactly. Y'know, and... Right. Because a lot of the work here ends up being done by the fact that, yeah, it's already grade separated, you're usually to have platform screen doors anyway. You know, so there's like, there's nowhere for people to like run and cause problems. Yeah. And then and then and so they do rely on infrastructure and technology. They also rely on like consistent scheduling, you know, railway design.

That's why automating mainline trains is much more difficult. They've tried to. They sort of work on sealed corridors, like dedicated high-speed lines, but on mainline trains, none of this technology works very well, because there's just too many things, too many variables to deal with. ALICE Yeah, too much weird shit. Could throw a bunch of weird signals at you, could throw, like, signaling faults at you, there could be a bunch of railway children, from the film The Railway Children on the railway...

Yeah, there's situations like, in the United States you can't use automatic train stop in a lot of places, because, big ass freight train, if it applies the emergency brakes, you're gonna cause the derailment you tried to prevent. So, it is... Also, like, women tied to train tracks, y'know. JUSTIN Gotta watch out for that. SEAN The man tweaking his mustache. Filling it slightly.

JUSTIN Yeah. Yeah. That would be, uh, what's his name? ALICE Snyderly Whiplash. SEAN Snyderly Whiplash. JUSTIN Is that the guy from Wacky Races? ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN Oh.

I was thinking Dick Dastardly for some reason. Oh, maybe you're right. Yeah I think so. Dick Dastardly's from Wacky Races. Yeah, who is the tiniest of women to the train tracks? Whatever. Dick Dastardly sounds like he probably had a previous career in that before he got into motorsport.

I wonder where that came from, as a, like, trope. Aside from anything else. Like, do you think it was originally serious? Like originally a horror thing? Like... ALICE It's highly possible, since it would've been silent films and earlier. ALICE Yeah, do like, 1880s Saw to you, and be like,

you know, you've... But by being habitually late, in many ways you've run people over with a train every day. So now you're gonna find out what it's you've run people over with a train every day. So now you're gonna find out what it's like to get run over by a train. I assume that's how the Saw movies go, I haven't seen one. LIAM I want to play a game. But I don't know how you just wake up in a dirty bathroom that has train tracks in it, I don't think that'll work.

SEAN Maybe in the middle of the tunnel, somehow? JUSTIN Yeah, but the train's gonna come like every four minutes, you have not a lot of time to set this up. ALICE I was gonna say, yeah, you gotta be pretty hot on the tying women to stuff front, to be able to get that done, without getting hit by a train yourself. SEAN So you gotta go real quick, yeah. JUSTIN Yeah. It's like, you have 40 minutes to solve the puzzle, and then the train that's coming is

the cardinal and it's delayed for three hours. ALICE It takes three hours. SEAN The woman has long since freed herself, and it's just like, alright, I'm gonna go smoke, do you want anything? SEAN Fuck this. Precision scheduled railroading has in many ways been the death knell of the tying women to railroad tracks. ALICE Our finest heritage, yes.

JUSTIN Yeah. And they say America has no culture. JUSTIN And in the interest of time, I would speak about attempts to automate freight trains and how they're extremely stupid, but that could be another episode. ALICE Mmm, should be. JUSTIN Automation of trains, in certain circumstances, is very very very effective. One of which is, of course, the people movers. ALICE Yeah.

JUSTIN Control environment, grade separation, regular schedule, nothing unexpected, no railway children, no women tied to things. ALICE No railway children from the movie Railway Children? ALICE Getting tied to a monorail in Jacksonville. LIAM Ugh. SEAN Wait, it's not a monorail yet, in this picture. LIAM Just being tied to a monorail rail, and being held captive by a man who keeps insisting that Trevor Lawrence is the future. Yeah, I think the long story short about the Great Society people movers, were they, were

a great idea that they fucked up unimaginably badly. That tracks. The Lyndon B. Johnson story. Yeah, I mean, in a nutshell, yeah. You end up with this whole position where everyone and their mother kind of initially wanted a people mover. And by the time like the USDOT actually gets around to saying, okay, we'll pay for your people mover. A lot of those cities have already backed out. In some cases, it was like they

decide they didn't want to pay a local share or that like they couldn't really find a way to make it work in their downtown. So in the end, you only get really just these free. You get Jacksonville in the top left where you can see that old train station back there. You get Detroit with their weird loop that was supposed to connect to a big rapid transit system that got canceled. And then you have Miami,

which is the one success story of this whole deal. The one that worked. Because the whole system is premised on like, you take the high speed, the rapid rail subway system from your suburban house into downtown. There's a limited number of stations, but then you're going to be able to get on a people mover. And that's just going to bring you directly to whatever the hell building you live in, or you work in, where you design Agent Orange, but Oranger. ALICE Yeah, like, sort of Agent... Fuck, I was trying to think of like an orange monster and I couldn't think of anything,

so. ALICE Oh, it's Gritty. JUSTIN Yes. But yeah. We're sending Gritty. Yes. But yeah, standing gritty to Vietnam. There's an idea. Yeah, everyone kind of realizes at some point, like, oh, wait, you know, we, we, we can't build the rapid transit system. So especially in like Jacksonville and Detroit,

you get the like last minute idea that maybe instead of trying to just build a rapid transit system, you're going to have people essentially drive 90% of the way to work, and then park, and then get on the people mover for the last half mile to your Dow Chemical office. ALICE I mean, if nothing else it puts the giant parking lots slightly out of downtown? It could do that, if you actually didn't build those parking lots, but, well, you can see them. Yeah.

Yeah, and especially in Jacksonville you get this weird last minute decision, cause they just turned the train station into a convention center, and they didn't build any hotels next to the convention center So the idea was okay. Let's put one station there and then let's Make it go like half a mile to where the hotels are downtown Like in the center of downtown and that will make people use it, right? It did not sort of retroactively justifying the system somehow.

Essentially. So that's how you end up with like the report in 1990, which is the year after the Jacksonville system opens, where they pretty much immediately say like, wow, this did not work. You know, it gets like maybe a thousand riders a day. It costs millions to run. It's not a big enough system to really justify the cost of doing all of this automation,

you know, building all of this totally dedicated infrastructure. So you get that line that the recommendation is that no funding be made available at the time. Brutal. It's already built at this point. Well, the first like 0.7 miles, they originally wanted to build several more miles of it, essentially, to kind of go from like two different ends of downtown and they wanted to build like a north-south part.

So they had pretty lofty plans. But the Department of Transportation like, we don't feel like this is a good investment. And then Congress decides, nah, let's do it. So like, this is the real experts, you know? Right. Uh, so the big like surface transportation funding bill, uh, of like 1991, uh, Jacksonville gets this little earmark, uhmark down at the bottom right there that says that,

yeah, actually the Secretary of Transportation has to negotiate a deal with the transportation authority to fund the next phases. So that 1.8 mile extension. Oh yeah. And before we go to the next next slide I would like to point out another major problem with these systems which is vendor lock-in right? All of these different people mover systems use entirely different guideways, they use entirely different systems for traction. The exception being in Detroit where they at least use two steel rails like a normal person, although they use weird linear induction motors on the bottom. So if for some reason you want to extend the line, or you want new vehicles, you have to

go back to the same company that manufactured the system, you're not getting competitive bids on any of this. ALICE It's a beautiful piece of diversity in bidding, you know, let a thousand people movers bloom. JUSTIN Yes. Yes. Soon people will be building people mover systems in sheds. You'll have your backyard furnace for casting people mover parts. This just reinforces, again, my thing that, like, there's too much variety.

You know? There should be one train, it should be called Train. It should be made by the Train Factory. I've been saying! The Train Company. Yeah. Well, it doesn't help that, like, a big part of this was, the people movers are supposed to be, like, this essentially demonstration program. So it's supposed to be essentially like, a demonstration program.

So it's supposed to be like, hey, let's showcase trying all these different options. See which one works. And the answer is... none. Well, you'll see when they built that 1.8 mile extension. Aw, I'll feel foolish. The guideway changed. How did that happen? Yeah, so, before that, really quick, just kind of a general overview of like, what is the,

you know, funny logo people here? That's a really cool logo. I really like it. It's really nice. Some kid designed it, I think. So you have like originally, like this agency that got created by the state, their job was, hey, let's build highways. So you see, kind of in the top right there, that's them building, I believe that's I-95 there. And then on the bottom is like also part of I-95. You can see like the Florida East Coast Railways tracks, like just kind of squeeze through the middle there

with some future grade crossing accidents, I'm sure. Yes. And then in like 1971, so that's like after like 20 years or so, 15-20 years, the last big local bus private company goes bankrupt. And so someone has the bright idea of, well, why don't we just make the highway agency do the transit too. So they go from being...

And why not? They're very roads guys, you know? Buses run on roads. Sensible. Right. So they make the expressway authority the transportation authority. Oh boy. Ah.

And so that leads them... Sorry. So that's how it's gone in many states, I mean, y'know, a lot of places that still have a Department of Highways and nothing else. Right. So, you end up with also this weird problem in the 90s then, when they're trying to expand it, like you said. And that one company, we can actually go to the next slide, right, the one company, I just kind of like the vibes of these photos here.

Oh yeah, no, these are cool. Right, so that French company Matra, that built this original system, is running into some trouble with a system in Taiwan, I believe, and so they just kind of bail on doing the extension themselves. Which means... So I'm also using Michelin tires here. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. A kind of French Lyle landleaf, I guess. They love findingICE I'm kind of a French Lyle Lanley figure.

JUSTIN They love finding new reasons for people to buy tires, I mean... ALICE Yeah, I mean, they have that whole restaurant guide off of that, y'know? JUSTIN Yeah, that's a scam to sell people tires when they drive to the restaurants. ALICE It's all Big Michelin. That's not his name, his name's Bibendum. JUSTIN If you get a Michelin star, you should be obligated to sell tires at the restaurant.

ALICE Can you imagine? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You ever seen that old... ALICE All your fine French cuisine served in just a big tire. JUSTIN Yeah, a big tire, yeah. Have you ever seen the old Michelin ad where Bibendim, the Michelin guy, is like, eating, like he's like, toasting with a wine glass, sort of nails and shards of glass?

Sort of horrifying moment in marketing history, but the idea is that, like, because Michelin tires are like, strong, they'll like, just chew up nails, or whatever, and like, your like, pussy woke tires, which won't. You know? ALICE The old Michelin Man is absolutely fucking terrifying. ALICE Yeah, well, yeah. To be honest, the new Michelin Man is pretty terrifying, but the old one was used to... yeah, no, horrifying.

JUSTIN I had a bowl of nails for breakfast. Without any milk. ALICE Remember when the Michelin Man was hard. JUSTIN Yeah. LIAM But yeah, so the French actually kinda give up, at this point. Which means that they have to find someone to... not only... ALICE I heard you bite your tongue on that one. LIAM Yeah.

JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE Cheese-eating surrender monkeys. LIAM Aw, come on, man. That's my... it's like one, it's the one bad thing about me. That's my love for the French. So they essentially have to look for, for someone else to like fix the existing part and then also expand to the new part, which leads them to a bombardier. Oh no. Yeah.

So if you actually want to go back one slide, that actually leads them to build the monorail. Like the literal monorail. Yes. That they go with. It's cute. Yeah! It's supposed to be able to be made longer, and then Bombardier decides that, like, nah, they're not building any more of these.

We're done with these French guys. Give me a guy who speaks French way worse. Yeah. So, rubber-tired Metro, just smoking corruption. Mepronome, monorail. So yeah, so they kind of spent essentially the rest of the 90s like converting the people mover into a monorail and then extending the monorail a few more stops. So they end up at a point where they build like two and a half miles in total.

But this still kind of doesn't quite go to the places where stuff is happening. Because like at that point, like Jacksonville'sville's downtown is not doing as much. All the malls are being built way out in the suburbs. And so you have this whole weird decade and a half period of trying to make downtown Jacksonville matter. And none of it really comes to fruition, which leads us to really the next slide. We arrive in like the early 2010s at this point where the previous CEO gets like ousted for, I don't know, it was like a thing about like bus driver background checks. Oh good. Oh fun. Going full Uber and just be like nah don't fucking worry about it. I love the municipal scandal, you know?

That's the kind of level I want my scandal pitched at. Oh yeah. Yeah, so that guy gets ousted, they look for a new guy, and this is the guy, right? I had someone who works in the industry tell me, this guy has a really compelling life story, because he started out driving trains for the New York subway worked his way up a bit there then became like CEO of Marta in Atlanta at like 39 which you know doesn't happen often that board and then the blew the budget on photography yeah and we'll get there. So he runs that for like a couple years, and then goes to run Marda, or not Marda, Muni,

in San Francisco, so many M's. Runs Muni in San Francisco for another like, five years, and then gets, not necessarily ousted, but like, leaves. ALICE But he's in the confrary of like, 20 guys in the country who can run one of these systems, or are like, believed to be able to run one of these systems, right? SEAN Right. So, you know. SEAN So in like 2012 Jackson will think like,

oh wow, we got a great deal, we have one of these really cool guys. And obviously he seems to think so with his photos. So we need to get the menswear guy in here to judge the suits, but like, it's got good photos. Yeah. It's sort of inspirational staring into the distance look, he's got that down pat. Yeah, I mean, even with the headline there that he's got his eyes set on the future. Which I think really kind of sets the tone of where this is going. Even with the headline there that he's got his eyes set on the future. Which I think really kinda sets the tone of where this is going.

So let's go to the next slide, actually. So it's 2015, and a couple problems have cropped up. One of the whole issues with people movers is, like, why that stuff's not really super built to last, technology-wise? Well, by the time this stuff, like, you know, all the concrete crumbled, we were supposed to have invented Great Society 2, right? So... LIAM Yes.

SEAN What's funny is, like, the country society. ALICE Yeah, Great Society 2. Racism ended, you can get to your job at Dow Chemical to the, like, second, the Vietnamese are still getting napalmed. ALICE Oh, we're doing super Vietnam to another planet. We're doing, like, Helldivers, but instead of Super Earth, it's Super Vietnam. JUSTIN Yeah. SEAN Yeah, but at this point, the concrete actually

isn't doing too bad. And that's especially a good thing, because when you take the federal government's money for like one of these systems, or really for any like transit like infrastructure, you have to like use it for a certain amount of time. Like it's lifespan essentially. You can't just like give up on it or else you have to give the feds their money back. None of these people mover systems can be torn down without paying the federal government a lot of money. That's fantastic. Pretty much, yeah. Some of them are maybe starting to get old enough for like that might almost be the case, but especially a decade ago in Jacksonville,

like that wasn't true because the last like bits of the system had only been built in like 2000. So you really kind of have to do something. But your problem at that point is that stuff is starting to just like not work. Like some of the monorail trains, like they're like the computers that operate them are just like giving up. This was programmed by like one French Canadian man who was long since retired. Yes. I think it's even worse. I I think that company was like an acquisition.

Bombardier acquired the company to actually make them, and I don't know if they kept any of those guys. Yeah, you can see them kind of like really landing the Black Hawk next to the guy fly fishing, being like, we need you back for one last mission. One more job. Please tell me what this comment means. Calis Tabernak. Right. And then... Calis Tabernak, je vais exploser les muveurs du peuple. So then there's kind of a... Why do the notes just say Algeria is French and always will be?

I don't... Good sign, I'm sure. So one of the problems you have to it too, at this point is that there are only kind of so many ways you can do something with, with this infrastructure. So you got to like upgrade trains and try and figure out how to make it useful. And so they try to go to the federal government in like 2013 to say like, Hey, give us like a small grant to like extend it to this one neighborhood where stuff is like happening and also like upgrade the trains because they're like

breaking down and the Obama administration says, nah, you're on your own. Oh, cool. Hope for change. So yeah. So it's that, uh, it's a discretionary grant. I think a lot of the cities use that money money for street cars and street improvements and stuff. And they were only asking for like 20 million here, but they didn't get the money, so too bad.

Seems like a pretty good deal, all things considered. Well, yeah. Obama didn't think so. That's not a huge amount of money for a short extension. I mean, that is... if you're just going into, like, an extra neighborhood, 20 million dollars... I mean, think about the infill station they built on Washington Metro a few years ago, it was like 500 million dollars. So, Great Society 1, you commit, like, unimaginable war crimes in Vietnam, right? And then... You trades that work.

But you get a people mover, at least the people mover ran on time. Great Society 2, you commit unimaginable war crimes in Afghanistan, and then you don't get the people mover. Yes. That fucking sucks down here. You can just drive to your job at Dow Chemical. I want to give a quick shoutout to Philly's finest ice bar cheese steaks and pizza in Jacksonville Beach, where my wife and pizza in Jacksonville beach where

my wife and I went. And at one point I walked in wearing a Hassan reddit jersey. What's up? And the guy said, welcome to Mecca with his arms raised. It was, I love Jacksonville, man. Yeah. So like two years after that grant, they decided, okay, we need to like, I guess go bigger than it's clearly a modest expansion won't cut it. So they launched this whole modernization program where they spend essentially a year debating what should we do. And so they decide, the mantra they come up with is keep, modernize, expand.

Yeah. Make the brain look cooler. This map is, I guess, from what my limited knowledge of Jackson Is this makes a lot of sense? Most of it does. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I've been to Jacksonville once about Is maybe is maybe asking for a lot. Yeah, that that's gonna be difficult Yeah, which they did cut because like you know, I not gonna spend that money on another bridge. The operating pattern here also I don't understand at all. It's a bit goofy looking.

I think the idea was supposed to be essentially point to point almost more. Oh my god, so you're gonna push a button in the train to take you to a station, right? Something like that. Oh boy, okay. It has to be the train. And then you have to pick a technology, right? Something like that. Oh boy, okay. Alright. It has to be missed the train. Yeah. And then you have to pick a technology, right? Because clearly the existing monorail won't work anymore, so you need something else.

Oh no. And luckily- Oh, I know what the next slide is. No! No! Hold on. Sorry, sorry Marcus. It just so happened, very luckily for them, right at the time that they were talking about this, Bombardier, again, it turns out,

had created essentially a new version of the original technology, the original French stuff that was used. They reverse engineered a monorail? Well, the people mover. The original people mover. It was like a weird rubber tire thing. But now it could do Kevin Quaswares. Yeah. And they were actually like those slurs you've never heard of.

Yeah. Yeah. So they were actually at that time, too, like under contract to to build one at O'Hare because O'Hare, it turns out, was one of the places that also built that original technology, and they needed an upgrade too So it was like, you know, there was this perfect moment for like this synergy. Oh jeez. I said synergy. That's weird Yeah, so there's this moment for like hey, you know These two systems kind of need new things at the same time and use kind of some more infrastructure So, you know, why don't we just do that?

But then, y'know, there was a surprise. I don't know if here's where you would put something crashing through walls noises, but- Yeah, terrifying noise. Yeah, the Kool-Aid man comes through, but he's the lift man. The Kool-Aid man comes through like 15 minutes late. And surge pricing. Yeah. So, you get to like, I believe it's August 2016 at this point, and the co-founder of

Lyft puts out this huge manifesto that, in a nutshell, is basically like, guys, we figured it out. Self-driving is real. We did it. It's real, it's strong, it's my friend. No, you can't see itICE It's real, it's strong, it's my friend. No, you can't see. LIAM It's definitely happened. No.

SEAN Yeah, uh, so, next slide, actually. LIAM This is an incredible chart. ALICE Would that it were so simple, by 2025, private car ownership will all but end in major US cities. SEAN Yeah, I'm sure we're still on schedule for that, right? LIAM Yeah, no. ALICE I'm pretty sure it's like 2045 right now. ALICE It depends how bad the Israeli retaliation to Iran gets, you know? JUSTIN Every year I feel like it's two years later than it is.

I'm pretty sure I'm in 2045 right now. ALICE How old are you? Actually, how old are you? ALICE He's like, aging and dog-y is. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. ALICE He's like, aging in dog years. He's a strange bird. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. 400 years old. ALICE Yeah, so we essentially end up at this point where it's like, oh, yeah, autonomous

vehicles are here, we've sorted it out, basically any second now we're gonna start using them on streets, and it'll only get better from here, it's gonna go great. JUSTIN Yeah, of course. And we're gonna have FSD. Like, full self- here, it's gonna go great. Yeah, of course. And we're gonna have FSD. Like full self-driving, it's gonna be fine. Basically, yeah. We did it. We did it, chat.

And someone in charge of a transit agency, who used to work in San Francisco, I guess really seemed to dig it, to buy it. Oh no. Which leads us to a... Don't tell me that they're at the farm on this? For those of you who are on audio only, let me explain this chart. Yeah, good fucking luck. In 2017, we will mostly have, or we will entirely have, human rides share drivers, but by the middle of 2017 we will start to

see autonomous fixed route transit. ALICE Which is gonna peak in the sort of March of 2018. JUSTIN Yeah, will peak in March of 2018 when we invent autonomous vehicles that can go under 25 miles an hour, and then gradually die off. But we'll still keep having human ride share drivers because we can pay them so little. And then we're going to have slow speed autonomous vehicles are going to start taking up the majority of the share of all traffic on the road, I assume.

And then of course we'll have full autonomous driving starting sometime in 2020. And then I guess this graph goes on forever, until we fill the solar system entirely with cars. ALICE Well, Elon Musk did send the One Tesla to space. JUSTIN Yeah, that's a good start, actually. That's one more car than was in space before. Which is an infinity percent increase. Unless you count the moon rover.

Which I guess is a car. ALICE It's an electric car too, so. Two EVs in space. JUSTIN Well, we're not gonna really have progressed as a civilization until we can get a good old-fashioned gas car into space, y'know? ALICE Rolling coal on Mars. LIAM Yeah, so you have this really ambitious dream, and clearly, this is the future of transportation, but you have this kind of pesky problem now, that you've already spent

all these years and time, and probably money, on moving towards planning to upgrade your monorail with normal stuff that works. So you need to fix that. Yes. So we go with this chart on the right, where we come up with some criteria that you need for your new people mover system. And of course, the first thing about your people mover that's like almost the most important thing

is that your people mover should definitely work at grade with intersections. Right. Yeah, that definitely is a feature of the technology I would like to have. SEAN Right. Okay, but yeah, okay, you know what I mean? JUSTIN And it saves you building more, like, sort of, grade separation, you know? SEAN No, what if it worked at grade, because a wizard

will do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the magic box will simply drive. And so you also need operational flexibility. When I hear flexibility in transit... Make it more rigid. Genuinely, though. For once in my life, I am right about this.

Oh, well, too bad. It has to be able to chain respond to changing demands. Like, for example, obviously a thing you want from a from a fixed transit system is that like trains should just like randomly connect to each other sometimes, right? Couldn't figure it out with Skybus and they can't figure it out now. No, no, but here, all we have to do is call it platooning. They did figure that out with the... Yeah, yeah.

They actually did figure that out with the automated highway system in the 90s, but that requires a small amount of infrastructure. No nails, no nails. No nails, definitely don't do that. So essentially, you can kind of see the chart, what gets weighed, and how everything scores. You have like, the APM beam, which is just another monorail, you have the APM rail, which would have been that Bombardier thing, and then you have, like, I think they said that new technology...

ALICE They do, which is audio-video, and then, the dread initials. Which I know about, because this was the proposal that they tried to do when they cut the Glasgow Airport rail link, I see the fucking horror sigils, PRT, personal. Rapid. Transit. MORGENTOWN'S CUTE. Oooooooooh. I will not ride in the pod. EAT THE BUGS. RIDE IN POD. The issue with the Morgentown PRT is that it works. And November has to get to West Virginia, and we will be her accompaniment.

I'll just ride the PRT all goddamn day log. So, yeah. So that so that brings us to, of course, this this total ranking at the end where wow, surprise, autonomous vehicles are number one. Wow. The preferred technology. It's crazy how that how that works. Yeah. Who could have thought? And in fact, we can actually do this really easily because all we have to do to fit this is take off that little monorail beam in the middle, right? You just

have to just take that little bit off and just make it a road and it'll work. Yeah, just just just pave it over with asphalt. And oh my god, I mean, every fucking study has these like evaluation matrices and they're all, like, just completely arbitrary. But someone has to fill out these big tables so that you can choose the option you want. ALICE What is your maintainability? Oh, well, my fucking transit method has a maintainability of five. What?

What does that mean? LIAM What does that mean? What does that mean? It's like, five times one. Presumably you've written, you know, several... well, that's in the waiting chart, but presumably you've written several hundred pages explaining that earlier. Which is, you know, no one's ever going to look at. Yeah, I think the excuse they came up with was that maintainability means that if you use the vehicles a lot, can you like easily like change things out in the future?

And the idea they come up with is the explanation at least is that it doesn't work for monorails because it's proprietary, your APM rail vehicle is a little more common, the autonomous vehicle isn't common right now but so many people are investing in it. There's so much investment. This is gonna go great. It's gonna go fine. This won't be an issue in the future. So it gets a four.

Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Why the hell not? Because of the existence of dumb money. We've also found that autonomous vehicles are four in reliability, they are two in proven technology as opposed to PRT, which there was at least a few systems running at that point. Yeah.

This is so goddamn dumb. Oh, you gotta consider Liam, you know, you gotta think about the new paradigm. I don't wanna think about the new paradigm! I wanna put up some wires! What about your Agile implementation? Don't talk to me about fucking Agile! Talk to me about Waterfall! I fucking hate Agile!

Well, this would probably be a third rail-powered system if it were designed commonly. So I'll show you a third rail-powered system. Don't talk to me about fucking Agile. Talk to me about Waterfall. I fucking hate Agile. This would probably be a third rail-powered system. I'll show you a third rail. No, it needs batteries actually. I've got a fucking kill. No, no. How else would you get a five for operational flexibility?

So yeah, so you get that whole tech spiel there. But we didn't go on to the next slide, honestly. So yeah, you get to December, and you know, we're gonna do it, we're gonna replace the Skyway with driverless vehicles. Yes, right. Because like that one report at the bottom says, this is evolving at such a rapid pace, a rapid pace, that within a short amount of time, it will be able to accommodate,

it'll do whatever you need it to, it'll work. It will only improve in the future, it's gonna work. I would point out that the current system, the system they were using was completely driverless. I do not even believe they had an attendant on the trains. They did not. They should have had some more safety improvements was completely driverless, I do not even believe they had an attendant on the trains. They should have had some more safety improvements to allow that to happen, but it was built in the 80s, so, y'know, everyone's like, well if a kid falls on the tracks, what are you

gonna do? Um, heh heh heh. But yeah, it's gonna work, okay? It's gonna work. Yeah, you can tell, because it has the future all over it. JUSTIN This is entirely a system that was, y'know... All of the documents for this were written by a hype man.

ALICE If you look at the background hoardings, you can see there's a bunch of cool words that imply technology, like network, and intelligent, and smart technology. JUSTIN Interface. Dashboard. Yeah, but one of the- SLAM algorithms, that's the one that kills the kids, I assume. There's also, I guess this is as a service?

Question mark? But like, the second from the left, along the bottom row, is... Mass. Yeah, mobility as a service, that's what that is. UGHH, fuck off. What is, what is, what is that, that's what that is. Fuck off. What is, what is, what is that, that's the same as... That's just mobility as a service. Give me the Kevin Cobb guys back, you know?

They won't misgender me, right, but at least they don't try and sell me this shit. No, they will do it under cost, they will do it on time and under budget, and they will call you slurs you never even thought of. I pay mTrack far too much money for a regional ticket and they provide me with a service which is being in another location. But you don't do it through an app, right? I do do it through an app. Yeah, but that's not innovative. It's not the future though. Yeah, I guess it's not the future. Trains are too permanent. They're too fixed and stuck in place. So ideally, like, the, I don't know, the ethereal AI angel comes and plucks me out of my chair

and puts me somewhere else. Yeah, mobility of an angel. That's innovation. But now, you know, they have to prove that it works, right? So it's time to launch the Test and Learn program, is what they call it, so, next slide. So it's 2017 in that last picture, this is essentially the next four years, in one slide. That's so ugly. All of them.

Every single one, in a different way. Four years. In one slide. ALICE Oh, it's... They're so ugly. All of them. Every single one. In a different way. SEAN Well, let's see. That top left and the bottom right one, that's a French one. If that's in a constellation. ALICE The Nuya. SEAN Navya, I think it was.

ALICE Navi? I can't read it because they've stylized their logo too badly, which just kind of... refines a bunch of my objections here. SEAN Yeah. And then you have the ollie, is the one on the bottom left. Which is also the one we saw at the beginning. ALICE That's the toaster. SEAN Yeah.

Yeah, cool thing about it, it's 3D printed. ALICE I've heard that so many times about this vehicle, and I'm like, why should anyone give a shit about that? Because I guess... I think the idea was like, it means you could make a lot of them, I guess, or something? But that's what a factory is. That's not how you make a lot of people. You build micro-factories, because the factories are small, I guess.

So next to my... Next to my... Next to my backdoor fur is, yeah. They're reinventing Maoism! Uh, and then... You're gonna 3D print your micromobility as a service in your backyard, and then you're gonna use it to run over sparrows, yeah. Mmhm.

Yeah, uh, and then, you know, they get the chance, you also have that one on the top right, which is just, like, one of those small shuttle things that, uh, they put in an autonomous kit. It's called a kit, they put a kit on it. ALICE You've just, you've done a kind of, like, bus JDAM. Perfect. It's just, like, a dumb bus with a GPS slapped onto it. I think I've seen these in zoos before, yeah.

And you also get the chance, obviously the world ended a couple years ago, in case you missed it. Yeah, yeah, New York City was destroyed. Right. So, they get this bright idea that, oh yeah, I guess I should note that Jacksonville's for some reason one of the free places in the country that has a Mayo Clinic hospital. It's like a big deal. I mean, it's, it's a good thing. Right. Yeah. This is one of the, one of the stunts they did to prove the technology was to transport. Um, I want to say like COVID tests from one side of a parking lot to another, to the Mayo Clinic.

That's so cool. And disprove that you could actually have it work in, clearly, like a busy urban street. Because a parking lot is the same thing as a busy urban street. I, man, I wish I could get millions of dollars for walking across a parking lot. You can do, if you get hit by a municipal vehicle. SEAN That's a good point, yeah. Gotta stand in front of one of these things. ALICE So, now that they've gotten to spend a couple

years and a bunch of money testing and learning, they decide that, you know what, it's time to try again, it's time to ask the government, the president, for money. So... I mean, obviously like, President Obama has not responded to reasonable proposals, nor unreasonable proposals. Yeah, but now there's a different president. This one wants to innovate. So they decide that, yeah, let's spend some money.

They get... this says 25 million, but it's like, it's a split, actually. Of that 25 million, half of that goes to essentially tearing down a bridge, and building a road. Right, like, boulevard conversion type things. And then the other half is going to create, you ready for this, the Bay Street Innovation Corridor. Oh, that's so cool. Oh yeah. I would love to live in the Bay Street Innovation Corridor. ALICE Oh, that's so cool. I would love to live in the Bay Street Innovation Corridor.

JUSTIN I just looked at this, this is... they proposed this in 2018, or they got funding for it, you look at the renders and it's like, okay, you've got the weird autonomous vehicles which are supposed to go up on a ramp up to the skyway, which we'll get to in a bit, but they're also saying, we're gonna build solar freaking roadways. Oh, I was... Well, correction, correction actually. Oh no. They'd be solar freaking sidewalks.

What? Oh. I love to, like, get electrocuted and also broiled every step I take. I'd like to have one of the least efficient configurations for solar power possible. ALICE It's like covered in dirt, and chewing gum, and shit. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Everyone cleaning up the chewing gum gets electrocuted also.

JUSTIN People keep walking on it, people keep, uh, you know, you gotta make it really durable. Yeah, otherwise people will get electrocuted. ALICE Put it On a fucking roof! There's a lot of roofs! You have a nice awning and put the solar panels on there. I mean, as long as people aren't walking on it, it's less of a problem, but, you know. Nah, but that's not innovative enough. You have to make the innovation quarter innovate, so you put the solar panels on the sidewalk. Yeah I want to say they like wanted like

dynamic lanes so even if they're not using the road as a solar freaking roadway it has the other things like the lanes can change dynamically. They already have that. Oh I know they have like, I know they have like the, uh, yeah, they use like the normal dynamic lanes as opposed to something incredibly stupid. Oh yeah. Glowing arrows in the road, I guess. Yeah. But you know, now that they're armed with, you know, 12 and a half million from the feds, uh, they also need local money, right? Uh, so they, they will need just a little bit more local money, right?

So they go and they estimate the cost of the full system, right, the full, I think ten miles is what they're estimating for, and they go to city council and they ask for $379 million. Oh, cool. Wow. people, and they ask for 379 million dollars. JUSTIN Oh, cool. Wow. Okay, so not just betting the farm, betting everyone else's farm as well. ALICE Yeah. And they almost get it.

JUSTIN Tallahassee deserves nothing! ALICE I'll get to Tallahassee. I'll get to Tallahassee. JUSTIN There's two more things here I want to point out, though, is, I did watch the video on this, you can see that there's like these wave icons above people's heads. The idea being, the entire street would be WiFi enabled, so if there were an imminent flood, everyone would be alerted somehow. Which you could do with the existing cell system.

Why the hell not? Yeah, but now you know that you're up to your ankles in floodwater on a fully electrified surface. Yeah, and then also, brand new, high tech roads, still the worst bicycle lanes I've seen in my life. The autonomous vehicles don't even have their own lane. Fucking watchdogs, um, like watchdogs Jacksonville hacking into the CTOS to make the bike lane the whole street epic.

JUSTIN Yeah, may as well at that point, y'know, I would do that, I would immediately kick all the vehicles off and say, this is permanently... y'know, until you give me 500 Bitcoins, this is pedestrianized. ALICE Why don't ransomware guys ever do anything cool like that? JUSTIN Exactly. ALICE It's always, it's always, we'll leak your sex, and never like, hey, we're gonna pedestrianize the street by force.

JUSTIN Well that's cause we haven't installed solar freakin' road waste. ALICE I'm gonna... I... Oh, ha ha, doesn't have a say in this way, give me... This show usually makes me pretty angry. I'm going to have to take a walk after this one. Yeah.

I mean, the assignment I was given was a give everyone else my derangement. So I'm glad to see I'm succeeding. Uh, but next slide, actually, you might as well get there. Uh, they do approve raising most of that money. Uh, they take away like 132 million that would have gone to the like all of the other extensions But they save a quarter billion dollars to convert the the monorail into the the pod way Right, and then also do like the ramp to the street. This is actually, these meetings are where I learned about the quote, maybe some of you

have seen me use it, of that, this will make Jacksonville the Silicon Valley of the East. And of course some of the news articles mentioned here, the need that we have to have faith in that fort. ALICE I love the vote of confidence in telling the guy, if this goes well you're the hero, if it doesn't, you're not. You either win the game of pods, or you die. Like... LIAM But, uh, yeah.

You know, we're gonna have faith, and clearly, this is gonna innovate and it's gonna work, right? And we're even gonna put out videos saying that anyone who complains about this doesn't understand it. Yeah. This is a faith-based transportation system, maybe one of the first ones. Where the angels come in, I suppose. ALICE Yeah, it's like this, the subway and Mecca.

ALICE If God will send his angels, but it's just that fort. SEAN So obviously, as we can tell from this slide, it all worked, and pods went on the streets, and they all work fine, and then the next slide proves that, right? ALICE. Of course.

Oh. ALICE. Please listen to about every episode of Trash Future that we've ever done, to find out about how maybe the autonomous vehicles are not that good. JUSTIN. The whole industry is collapsing. It hasn't fully collapsed, but it is collapsing. SEAN.

I mean, there's been, has been an active collapse for the last two years at this point. ALICE It's almost as if all of that VC money that went in, on the basis that full self-driving was an inevitability, it's almost as if those guys weren't that smart, and didn't, in fact, see something that nobody else could, but were just kind of easily duped. LIAM Perhaps. But some bankruptcies happen, of course.

You have the 3D printed shuttle guys, local motors, they run out of money. You have the French guys, Navia, they also run out of money. That's crazy. You have cruise, which, y'know, General Motors spends nine billion dollars on autonomous vehicles, and then they block an ambulance, and then they also drag a pedestrian down the street, and GM decides that maybe nine billion dollars is enough. Sort of widely hated, very easily sabotaged, you can put a traffic cone on the hood and it just stops dead where it is, cause there's nothing to do about it. SEAN Right.

And the company they partner with that will operate the shuttles essentially for them, with this complicated P-free arrangement with possibly unlimited liability for the city, but anyway. that company launches a shuttle pilot because everything is a pilot still. I mean, JTA's like actual plan is supposed to be the first like production like operation of this. Because I think they even have to charge fares. I think that's what the federal grant says they have to do. But yeah, he launches a pilot in Orlando just down the highway. And two days later, it hits a bus or maybe the bus hit it. It's...

It crashes. It crashes. It crashes with a bus. And then yeah, the guy they hired from Amazon to run this stuff for them, gives up, and leaves. Which is a good sign. He's actually at, he's a vice president, I think, at a utility company now. So y'know. ALICE These guys, they can only fail upwards, y'know? SEAN Yeah.

JUSTIN Yeah. He's gonna deploy autonomous shuttles to deliver your natural gas. SEAN Oh god. ALICE Just, like, as a pod car arriving, just full of gas? Yes, exactly. It'd be like, you know, bicycling around with a propane tank. So, okay, so clearly there have been some problems, right? Some minor setbacks.

Yeah, a few minor setbacks. So, y'know, really, what's the right course of action here? What do y'all think? I mean, you've already spent all that money, let's get sunk cost with it, let's throw more money after it. Yeah, sunk cost sounds good to me! Yep, the only way out is through. That's right, baby!

Y'all would do great in Jacksonville, actually, because next slide... If you're going through now, keep going. Yeah. So, we spend some more money. The original phase, that Bay Street Innovation Corridor, was originally estimated at 44 million. Right? And, so the breakdown was essentially, you know, the feds give that 12 and a half million. The state gives another like 13 million.

And then the rest is like a weird split of like, JTA put some money in, the city's utility company puts in some money to, it's more of like an in kind thing because they're going to do like infrastructure stuff for the innovation corridor. And it's, it would have all totaled to like 44 million, but they run into some issues, like needing to build a new operations center because the other two they have don't work, I guess, for this.

And they- They're designed to maintain real vehicles. Yeah. Yeah, like buses, which Nat Ford says are really too big and flexible, which is why you need smaller vehicles. And then the others designed for like the existing Skyway, which I guess also wouldn't work. So, so they end up deciding, yeah, we'll raise the budget. We'll make this cost $65 million for the, I believe it's 12 to 15 shuttles that will then run to a stadium that holds like 60,000 people. I'm not that good at math,

but that's way more than a regular 40 foot bus. For the equivalent amount of buses. Like $65 million. Don't worry about that, Ross. It's fine, get the pump. Well, you gotta consider, you know, this is an innovation project, right? Yeah, dummy. We're introducing autonomous vehicles to America and the world, really.

Right. Right, so y'know, why would you worry about those things like cost-benefit, right? Yeah, the people writing those pods, right, they're gonna be inspired, and that inspiration is gonna lead them to become, like, the next Jeff Bezos, or whatever. You can tell your friends that your single seat, on your autonomous pod, you rode in a three and a half million dollar seat or something like that. ALICE Yeah, it's like, sort of cost to seat ratio that's up there with F1 or being an F35 pilot.

JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. ALICE Actually, I am curious what the cost to sit in a seat ratio is, once you factor all these things in, but... Hi, it's Justin. Uh, 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? already listening to. It also gets you our full back catalogue 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. But another kind of little issue crops up with not the base reinnovation corridor, but with the converting the skyway portion. So you might remember earlier that I mentioned that the plane was just pop off the monorail beam and put a smooth running surface like a road and just run the pods

on that. But this little issue kind of comes up with that, which is that, uh, that running surface, the road is like, probably a couple feet below where, where the platform would go. This is like the most obvious problem that should have been caught, you know, within 30 seconds of someone proposing the project. Um, is like, at one point, like the talk was maybe they just ramp up at a station to do that. And I think they ran with that assumption for a couple years and then I think then realized it wouldn't work. Yeah, you're going to add a lot of area that's difficult to maintain and all of a sudden, if you're like, I want to do a routine repair to the bridge, I have to send in people with

combined confined space training. It's not a good solution. So, so new plan and apparently this is how we get to it costing a quarter billion dollars to do this conversion on the system that originally costs like 180 million. We're just going to rip the whole top half off. That's what we're looking at here. The proposal to just build these entirely new beams, or girders. ALICE Just kind of like, this is our beautiful, elegant,

sort of structural solution, decapitate the fucking thing. JUSTIN This is like someone who just can't stop redecorating. It's like, well we had one skyway, then we converted it to a new system. Now we're converting it to another. Just one more skyway. A big part of like the argument for this is that, uh, it's this whole idea of, like they call it being vehicle agnostic. So like the idea there would be that once you've converted it into being an It's this whole idea of, they call it being vehicle agnostic.

So the idea there would be that once you've converted it into being an autonomous vehicle like road, you could just run any autonomous vehicle on it, because that's how that works. Yeah, or the autonomous bus, autonomous freight... Well, buses are too big, but... Oh, okay. Oh, autonomous freight! You can't run any autonomous vehicle that's useful. Ross is saying that autonomous freight trains. Oh God, I mean you run an autonomous truck up there and then just collapse the whole thing.

No system is vehicle agnostic. That's, that's fake. There's no way you could... Vehicle agnostic would be like, all right, can I run an autonomous shuttle crawler up there? I'm sorry. I was yelling at Ross to take his allergy meds. Yeah. But yeah, you see you have kind of a on here just the different strategies for like, which type of girder would you want to use for this? If I remember right, I think that that third one is the one they considered a good one. strategies for like which type of girder would you want to use for this? If I remember right, I think that that third one is the one they considered a good one. And we can go to the next slide too. They also consider, well, hey, what if we like move, we extend the beams

so that they can, they can also go up there. Because you know, that's, That's also a perfectly feasible solution. I mean, you're the engineers. I'm not. Yeah, I just got here, man. I was just looking at this like none of it makes sense. It's sort of difficult to say exactly, because I'm not super familiar with the plans, I just thought these images should be in there. Just to show that they really early on missed some very basic problems. Yeah. I guess it didn't know what they were doing, it just got lulled to sleep by the whole,

this is the future. Well, if you just... You can solve any problem by throwing computers at it. That's our current paradigm. ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN Just, like, throwing whole ass laptops at this thing. JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE Not the thin and lights either.

The big shit think pads from 96. JUSTIN I'm just finding captions I like here. I see a label here that says, fill pockets with non-shrinked grout brackets for aesthetics only. What? JUSTIN So what it looks like they want to do here is, you would raise the deck entirely by jacking up the existing piers using temporary supports, and then you would... and then, because of that, you would then have, the autonomous vehicles would then be at the appropriate height for the platform.

Which again, the whole idea here is, this is supposed to be cheaper, and this is the most expensive and stupidest thing I think you can do to, y'know, a simple concrete post-in-beam structure. ALICE A simple concrete pillar, and look how they massacre my boy. JUSTIN This is like, this is like people who go and get like, leg extensions. Because they're, they're like, whatchamacallit, they're insecure about their height. And it's like, this is one of the worst and stupid procedures out there.

ALICE And why do this? Why not simply do... SEAN Anything else. ALICE Yeah, exactly. SEAN The future. SEAN The future, as we know, is trash. LIAM It's the future, and they decide to spend money on this, and they don't really want to turn around, because it will make them famous.

In fact, uh, it got them on. Well, there's your problems. So that's true. Yeah. In fact, there's actually a quote of, of the like chair of their board saying the media needs to listen because they're, they're going to be famous for this. Definitely a fan. Yeah.

So, you know, they I guess know what the objective is here. And the state wasn't a big fan of that, which brings me to the next slide. Which is that, it turned out, like, three years ago, the state asked them, like, hey, are you sure about this? Essentially. ALICE The state of Florida, like, found time to do something besides bathroom cop stuff? LIAM I mean, it was the Department of Transportation, so I guess it was instead of building a highway, although they do that anyway. So. JUSTIN They have limited jurisdiction over bathrooms, so. They have bathroom cops, they're

just, y'know, playing Candy Crush. They don't have anything to say. SEAN So yeah, so essentially you have this whole bunch of emails where FDOT repeatedly asks JTA's executives, like, are you sure this is going to work? Like, can it actually drive itself? Can it drive at night, or in the rain? ALICE It seems like you're betting the farm on this, are you sure you want to do that?

And JTA's response is essentially, not necessarily that you're wrong, but more so that if you're so worried then we'll reorganize how your money is spent, so that this is our problem and not yours. Oh, that is the mark of confidence. There you go. And then of course, you flash forward a couple of years and now that it turns out that all of the companies that make these are bankrupt now or their technology is even more obviously not ready to work with this, they've decided that instead, in order to meet the deadlines imposed

by the grant, they'll buy a van from Ford, like, you know, a passenger van. What? Yeah. And they'll attach- Say less, though. Say less. Love a van. Well, and they'll attach an autonomous kit, so it'll sort of drive itself.

The JDAM is back. The JDAM is back. Yes, except- It's the JDAM. It doesn't appear to be able to work at night yet. Oh. Or in the rain. Oh.

Well, good thing it's never night or rains in Florida. And of course, if you mention this on the internet, you get the bottom right there. Oh, we gotta get blocked by this guy, yeah. Yeah. Oh, we gotta get blocked by this guy, yeah. Uh, yeah. Which weird is, I don't think I was saying anything about this when he did that, but I don't know. And yeah, and there's... You received a personal block from Nathaniel P. Ford.

Oh, yeah. And then you get... 483 followers, which is not enough to be this thin-skinned. Like... LIAM Well, he knew just to get... SEAN You're honest to say something incredibly offensive and then slap it on mute, baby. ALICE Look, that's always a smart idea.

You know, if you do a post and it's not a banger, well, just mute it. Don't worry about it for a bit. ALICE Yeah, it seems like he's only got 483 followers that's because he's got banned a couple of times for like, popping off on Twitter. SEAN You know, I think he gets rewarded in some other ways, which brings me to the next slide. JUSTIN He's looking for ten thousand of his closest followers, all of whom are bots driving autonomous pods.

You go into the pod and it just says pussy in bio. My hot nudes in bio. I don't believe you. My hot nudes in pod. No, this is just a pod. This is where there's your problem, dude. What you listening? So, it also comes out last year, I think people weren't necessarily aware of how much money,

how much money you would ordinarily pay the CEO of a transit agency. And so we find that for some reason in that Ford's case the answer is a lot. But I mean, you have to pay for excellence, is the thing. Is that what we're paying for? SEAN Yeah, because, uh, 11,000, or 21,000 riders a day is very excellent. Right. ALICE 21,000 people can't be wrong!

SEAN I mean, it's only like the tenth largest city in the country, right, so. ALICE Yeah. You know. Don't worry about that. It has total ridership about the same as Virginia Railway Express, which only runs in the peak hours and only on weekdays. Oh, VRE baby. I mean, Floridians have a lot better things to do than to be just taking public transport,

for instance, like, you know, various crimes that end up becoming sort of memes. Yeah. Meme crimes, you can fight a gay- Cardjacking. Well, that falls under crimes. That's a different crime. What else did- Crime brackets not meme.

Yeah, exactly, that's a non-meme crime. Crime brackets hate. Oh, welcome to Florida, baby! You can spend a lot of effort passing anti-trans legislation. You can require a supermajority vote for bus lanes. You can run for president against Donald Trump, against everyone you know is telling it's a bad idea, and get owned. And then you can also spend $190,000 over five years on travel.

JUSTIN That is a lot of money. ALICE Shit, I'm in the wrong line of work. How do you get into managing transit systems? Like, I mean, podcasting's very very rewarding, but like, clearly this is a whole other league. JUSTIN Well, we could do more shows. And you could spend a lot on travel, and expense... ALICE Talk about that. ALICE could spend a lot on travel, and expense- We'll talk about that. That's a good idea, yeah.

But then I would have to get over the fact that doing an engineering disasters podcast has made me too afraid to fly in a plane. Yeah, don't worry, we'll come to you. Yeah, do that. Yeah, we'll talk about that. So, yeah, also this year the governor signed a bill that on top of the bus lanes requirements, I'll also say that maybe you can't pay your executives that much. So I guess we'll see where that leaves Matt.

Yeah, I mean, you know, that's a good amount of compensation right there. $626,475.29. Yeah, but how many subscribers does he have on Patreon? With those twice the numbers, probably not many. JUSTIN He does get like a bunch of awards, and apparently that's what some of the travel was for, so. Take that as you will.

JUSTIN I have to go try to receive an award for my autonomous vehicle system that doesn't work. SEAN Shitty bad job that I did. I mean, it turns out they give out awards for those in Germany. And so, you know, he needs to fly to Germany. For that. Likely place for it. You know, we'll actually get to that, but uh, I guess let's maybe circulate on kind

of where we are at this point, so next slide for that. Uh, oh yeah. Is this the van? Is this the van? Is this the van? LIAM That is the van. That's the van. ALICE This is it. This is the JDAM, this is the thing that, like, they had to...

This was the compromise that they ended up having to do, is a Ford Transit? LIAM Yes, it is Ford. ALICE Oh, it's 23. ALICE It's beautiful, I wanna kiss it on the mouth. This is... Just, here, I am accepting my $600,000 a year in compensation, in return you receive, trade deal of the century, VAN. Like kidnapping VAN.

Like minibus. LIAM And I'd also like to, let's see, recap some of the other technical issues that emerged. At one point the idea was supposed to be that these things would be able to like, you know, go point to point, right? You could call it on your phone and essentially ride it like an Uber to your other place. Apparently the problem that emerged there

was that you could not keep any consistent headway doing that. Yeah, that makes sense. That does not take a genius to figure out, yes. Well, it did take JTA like, three years, so... Well done, boys! We can't all be geniuses. Is this at least driverless? Well, there's, um, you see, you need something called an attendant, and that person has to

sit in the driver's seat and be ready to drive it. ALICE Look inside driverless van. Driver. JUSTIN I like that the driverless system has more drivers than the existing Skyway. LIAM Yeah. ALICE We have to hire a bunch of drivers to make this driverless. JUSTIN Yeah. Oh my god. We have to hire a bunch of drivers to make this driverless.

Yeah. Oh my god. Yeah. Let's see, another problem that cropped up was the ridership estimates they originally made were off, and the state called them out for that, and so you got the revised number... Again, this is the number to connect from the existing Skyway to the football stadium 60,000 people use, and you get that average of 250 to 300 riders per day. Based on pre-COVID numbers. ALICE It's gonna say per hour,

that's pretty good, per day, okay. SE. Yeah. But... People don't wanna sit in the driverless van? That has a driver? I guess when you could just drive to go see football and drive drunk home, like, what? Are they sure love doing it? I've been in the ultimate fall. Public transport. Drunk driving. Oh, and one more problem.

Turns out the whole mixed traffic thing doesn't work either. So we have to, last minute, look for dedicated lanes for these. Oh wow, that's crazy how that works. Looks like they're getting rid of the bike lanes for that. Uh, yeah. Yeah. Well, here's what I'm seeing. Is some completely insane and possibly illegal ADA issues.

Which is just that, alright, we're going from a system that has level boarding, if you're in a wheelchair you can just roll yourself in, to something where our autonomous electric shuttle has to stop and deploy a wheelchair lift to get you in there. And that's going to, you know, add insane amounts of dwell time. I mean, I mean, using wheelchair lifts at this point is, it's just bad practice. It's, you know, effectively useless. But if you have something that's high floor like that, that's gonna be your only option.

If there are any disabled people in Jacksonville who decide to use this, this is going to be incredibly slow. This is gonna be slower than walking. ALICE You can incapacitate this whole system by trying to use this as a wheelchair user. Yeah, and then if you somehow drive this up onto the guideway, there's only one wheelchair lift, how do you get people onto the platform when you need to be on the other side? Oh, don't worry about that. If you ride this and you use a wheelchair, you're enlisted in a kind of platforming section. Yeah, I think, yeah, exactly, at that point you need some kind of like...

This is... I don't understand how anyone like... I do understand how we got to this point, but it's... Someone should have been able to point this out on day one, and say, no, we shouldn't do this. As opposed to day, like, 2000. Yeah. But innovation.

You know, after eight years, that's what this is really all about, you know? Innovating. You can prove, you can innovate. The whole autonomous vehicle economy is just about cycling money through, you know? And none of it does anything, but you can say... I don't know, it feels like people are... We somehow have formed an economy where it's...

You can just shove oceans of money into a hole, and somehow things keep going, but... I don't know. ALICE Don't worry, it gets a little bit faster and a little bit dumber every time. AI is like this, also. LIAM Oh wait, faster. That's a good point. These, I think, can still only go, like, ten miles an hour.

ALICE Yeah. LIAM Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah, you know, this... If I get in a Ford Transit, and floor it, and it tops out at ten... Oh my god. Yeah, you're gonna wind up getting on a regular JTA bus which can presumably use these lanes. You're gonna see like 14 of them go past you by the time you've gone down like three blocks. I will say, I'm not sure the lanes are wide enough for them. I'm not exactly sure how wide they are.

Because I'm pretty sure those are repurposing like parking lanes. You're gonna see the buses go past you anyway though. Well, I mean, there aren't that many buses there. So. Okay, you're gonna see two buses go past you. Potentially, yeah. But there is one more potential saving grace that will fix all of these problems, you know, if Nat4 keeps his job long enough to make it all happen.

And that's the next slide. Oh boy. Oh yeah. Slightly different toaster. It's yeah. So the story here, uh, this is a company called a hold on or how long, uh, I think their, their slogan is like founded like tomorrow or something like that. Uh, it's a spin off of this company that builds like parts for cars. Your slogan is like, founded tomorrow, or something like that. It's a spin-off of this company that builds parts for cars, essentially.

They did a bunch of EV equipment too, and they decided to take that and the self-driving part and just spin it off into another company. And so that's this. Their thing is called the mover. Starting the big bankruptcy clock. Yeah. Oh Jesus. Possibly au contraire.

It just so happens that earlier this year. Oh design by Ben Farina. Yeah, it just so happens earlier this year that a big company in Saudi Arabia decided to invest a bunch of money into this. A money, an amount that they will not disclose, but some large amount. Oh. I mean, fantastic. Provided it doesn't get hit by the same kind of panic sell-off and cutback that everything

else the Saudi Public Investment Fund has been doing lately. Like with Neom, for instance. ALICE Oh, the nub? ALICE Yeah, the nub. Maybe they'll just ship you like, one wheel of this. SEAN Possibly, I can't guarantee that, because this is still unfolding live, essentially.

And it just so happens that all of a sudden a Mysterious company that has not been disclosed yet has announced that they would like to maybe build an autonomous vehicle in Jacksonville Oh perfect. Yeah, they are saving a lot of money because they do seem to be using the body from What was that car that had the wraparound window the Toyota Scion or something? It's like really boxy. Scion XB, bud? Maybe? Yeah, that sounds about right.

They're just reusing that. So that is gonna save them a lot of money. All of this is rug pull. Like, genuinely, right. There's so, so many times this happened with like, autonomous, with like, AVs, with EVs before that as well, where like, company comes to town, weather, and there's like, inevitably some horse trading, and like, backroom deals, allegedly, with whatever local politician, and it creates X number of jobs, usually in time for an election, and then the factory shuts

and the company goes bankrupt in like six months. Now I can't say for certain that this will happen, but come back to me in six months. And if I'm wrong about this, like, own me mercilessly onto its own. Do not actually do that. JUSTIN Well, they would have to set up an entire production line in that amount of time. Yeah, I mean, they wouldn't have time to do that. I think the plan right now is they're asking for money now, they're asking for, I think, is it seven or eight million from the city in incentives?

Seven point seven million in city incentives, and then another eight million in state incentives. And then they would try to build that factory by 2027, I believe. Yeah, end of 2027. So that's too late to fix the Vestry Innovation Corridor for one, right? That has to be the Ford Vans. The feds are gonna revoke the money otherwise, right?

Well, yeah, they have to open, I think, by next year. Oh my God. I don't think they can get any extensions for that. Yeah. So they have to open I think by next year. Oh my god. I don't think they can get any extensions for that. Yeah. So they have to do the Ford Vans. That has to happen. Incredible. Yeah. Best of luck guys.

Would you like to take this autonomous Ford van with the guy in it that goes slower than you can jog? Well, possibly to the 300 people pre-pandemic would. So, yeah. ALICE Incredible. ALICE So, uh, that has been my derangement, I think. SEAN I think I've gotten your derangement.

I'm feeling pretty deranged. JUSTIN This was the story of... ALICE The ultimate urban circulator. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Incredible rap. Yeah. So, uh, I dunno, maybe there'll be an update next year of, you know, clearly they will have solved all these problems, right?

That will definitely happen. JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, you know, I'd love to say, you know, what did we learn here? But I'm still astonished at how... ALICE We didn't need to learn anything, we didn't get anything wrong! JUSTIN Yeah, no, we're like, it's relatively easy to, like, identify a scam, but our elected officials are incapable of that.

ALICE That's your lesson, city of Jacksonville. JUSTIN Yeah. You got scammed. You're a pigeon. ALICE I mean, it must be a beautiful time to be, like, one of the people in this ecosystem, right? To be like a branding consultant, right? Who gets to do all the hoardings, or gets to do all the renders, whatever. And then you just move on to the next thing, you know?

JUSTIN No, no, that's the worst part, is they all feel bad that they didn't achieve the innovation even though they got a trillion dollars out of it. You know, all these tech guys are like, they drank their own Kool-Aid so they can't even be a good scammer. ALICE. Sucks. If I get scammed, I want the guy scamming me to enjoy it. JUSTIN.

Yeah, I would hope the guy scamming me enjoys it, as opposed to, like, you know, that's one of the big problems with today's scams, is that the people doing it don't even like it. No joy in it, yeah. Yeah. I want, like, selfies of you on the yacht, in, like, Monte Carlo, spending my money. Yeah, we need the Monorail guy back. You know, sort of... well, as I said,, is going to sell you a proprietary guideway system.

That's the most unrealistic part of the Simpsons monorail episode is that he, that guy would come back for the maintenance contract and make bank. Yeah. So half, half billion dollar self-driving car program is going pretty well, I'm sure. Yep. Yeah, it's so depressing. Alright. Yeah. You need to emulate the People's Republic of China in this, right?

Which is, when one of these guys makes enough enemies, they execute him. You gotta, like, execute at least one of these guys. ALICE Yeah. Yeah. I do think that... you don't have to do it to all of them, but you do have to make an example of someone every once in a while. LIAM At some point, sure. ALICE And, like, I know that the way it works in all the places where they do do this is

that, like, it's all graft anyway as to who doesn't get executed, but you gotta at least make it a risk that's on the table. ALICE Yes. ALICE Um. ALICE Enjoy living dangerously, maybe it'll put some relish back into your scam. LIAM Hell yeah. ALICE I have to say, you might be able to enjoy yourself for once, you might have a nice day.

LIAM Probably still want one. ALICE What we've done, we've really done psychic damage to the American Scammer by not executing them. LIAM Right, gotta keep them on their toes, you know? ALICE Yeah, genuinely. JUSTIN We gotta bring the mob back. ALICE Yeah, that's the policy, right? We gotta bring back the mob.

JUSTIN If this were entirely done by organized crime, they would deliver a better product. Probably for cheaper, too. Yeah, but that's not innovative, right? That's not innovative. It's not innovative. The Italian mob are gone. That's for the Scorsese films.

Today we have to have, I don't know, a guy who, like, religiously conserves his body water, like, as our thought leader. SEAN Yeah. Or a guy who gets his own offish shower, I think, in the elevator. Oh my god. ALICE You see how, like work in fully-fledged kleptocracies, right? Where the government is like, a guy, right, and he wants to get a prestige project done,

is he hires a bunch of these guys to do it, and says like, no expense spared, but if you fuck up I'll kill you. And then they do the thing! And then all of a sudden Astana has a beautiful airport that is empty all the time. Because you got all of the airport building guys in a room, and you said, build the best airport, here is all the money in the country, if you don't do it I will shoot you in the kneecaps. JUSTIN Yeah, Morocco has high speed rail, India has a fully electrified railroad system,

where else? ALICE Big prestige projects! Like, if you wanna do a- The arts that art the line, please. Yeah. If you wanna do big prestige projects, threaten to shoot your contractors. Yes. I think that's what we've learned.

Gotta keep midwives, gotta keep midwives. This isn't a endorsement of autocracy, it's just something that they're capable of doing, that we used to be capable of doing, and now we don't. We're not a proper country. It's just, it's something that they're capable of doing, that we used to be capable of doing, and now we don't. We're not a proper country. On a related note, every... Well, last year, and I guess also this year, JTA holds this National Autonomous Vehicle Day event, so they bring everyone to the big pod development facility, they have a bunch

of talks, and they point at some pods going around the parking lot. Yes, there are people in them. Don't they have like a demonstrator line running now at like Florida State or it might be like State University of Florida? It's the Florida State College at Jacksonville. They did a big flashy launch for that, and that's where the quote from the chairwoman going, we're going to be famous for this comes from. And they have they do have one pod running

from one side of the parking lot to the other side of the parking lot. That's at least what they've said. I have not been able to confirm that it is, in fact, doing that. On a regular basis, there might be a pod that goes from one side of the parking lot to the other side of the parking lot. I don't know if it like regularly runs. There may on some days be one pod that goes from one side. Yeah, well, because if it starts raining, they have to like put it away and then bring it back out when it starts raining, they have to like put it away and then bring it back out

when it stops raining. Cause after eight years, that is, that is the best they can do. On three weekends a year, we have a pod that goes from one side of the parking lot to the other side of the parking lot. Let's add this shit plays Tuesday and Thursday in August, we have an autonomous pod that goes from one side of the parking lot to the

other side of the parking lot. We are innovators. That's right. And I guess the one last note is that one of those companies that presents at the autonomous vehicle day, it's a company who's like chairman is the former Prime Minister of Estonia. Because I guess that's what you do when you're no longer Prime Minister of Estonia. You run a pod company. ALICE and JUSTIN Yeah. Yeah.

ALICE Yeah. I mean... This is the thing, right? This is the other thing in which I'm jealous, right? Not only am I not getting the hundreds of thousands of dollars of free travel a year, but like, as far as I know, and please tell me if I'm wrong, because I would like the security, there's no jobs, like, do nothing, sinecure jobs for like, ex-podcasters. Right?

Like, we stopped doing this, nobody's putting us on the board of a company. No. Honestly, I'm not sure about it. No. You have to do, like, I guess running a transit transit agency or maybe banking, maybe law, because I think all the people on JTA's board of directors are like lawyers and bankers, I think. So... I don't want to go back to law school.

Or do I? No. No. Well, we just have to hope this particular crypt stays alive forever. Please, we need your money. Well, I don't know, convince the city to give you some money, right? Yeah, well, we can make a podcast. The podcast innovation center.

Yeah. We have more board drops, new slurs. Yeah. Oh, man. Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Shake hands with danger. Did it get louder? It sure feels like it. Maybe.

Howdy Roz, Liam, and November, and any potential guests. Yeah, but that's cowardish shit though. Stop hedging your bets. Because Liam and November, and any potential guest, ding ding ding. ALICE That's cowardish shit, though. Stop hedging your bets. You can only pick one. JUSTIN What, you have to, uh, you have to, like, uh, what you would call it, like, name the potential guest? ALICE Yep.

Fuck em. JUSTIN You have to go into, like, the book of baby names and pick one randomly? ALICE That's right. No, no, no. If you're doing this I wanna hear, like, your best guess at each of our horrible secrets. Oh. No.

Well, this person sent an email specifically to say November, even though in the first email they said Alice. Mmhmhm. That's cool. That's cool. I like the update. I also appreciate the screenshots of my farming simulators. They've attached.

I have a story to tell that deals with basic driving skills and spatial awareness. Which I guess is something that autonomous pods lack. And my lack of either of those attributes... God, is this written by an autonomous pod? This might be an autonomous pod, yes. For context, I work on a ranch in Texas. When I'm not feeding cattle or ploughing fields, I've been clearing out invasive shrubs with a skid steer and a root grapple attachment to clear up more grassland for our cattle.

ALICE Skid steers are so cool. JUSTIN Yes. If you don't know what either of those things are, it's like a mini bulldozer with Diesel Ten's pinchy the claw arm from the acclaimed cold classic Thomas and the Magic Railroad, starring Alec Baldwin. Okay. Yeah. I know what that is.

I would also probably call it a bobcat, but y'know. I would spend hours every day ripping these shrubs out of the ground, and piling them up in a burn pile. Again, since this is Texas, we can do crazy shit like that out here in the open. These shrubs would grow along the edge of creeks, and the particular creek in our property was quite large for creek standards. ALICE Yeah, small creek the size of a large creek. JUSTIN Small creek the size of a large creek.

Oh, that was another news item, the Dubai Creek flooded. ALICE Oh, yeah, we'll get to that in the next episode. JUSTIN Yeah, sure. ALICE We'll see if Dubai is fully destroyed, before we talk about it. JUSTIN Oh, you know, I mean, you live in a desert, every once in a while you get a five million inch rainfall event. ALICE Especially if you're doing cloud seeding. You live in a desert, every once in a while you get a five million inch rainfall event. ALICE Especially if you're doing cloud seeding.

JUSTIN Yeah. I was told explicitly not to work after it rained in the event I fell in so I wouldn't drown in muddy crick water. That was the only safety breathing I received, so I hopped in and got to it without questions. Fortunately, I was working on a lovely sunny day and the water was only a foot or so deep. As I was clearing shrubs and singing All Star by Smash Mouth, I made the fateful decision to turn around and add to the pile. Unfortunately, I was too busy singing, well, the years start coming and they don't start

coming, to turn my head around... ALICE LAUGHS. There's existentialism around, the years start coming and they don't start coming. JUSTIN Yeah. To turn my head around and see that the back of the skid steer, the bobcat, was a mere inches from the creek's edge." ALICE Oh boy. I mean, the thing is, if you die like this, you go to Skid Steer Valhalla. LIAM Yeah, you go to Valhalla, yeah.

JUSTIN Yeah, and then St. Peter asks you, is it called a Skid Steer or a Bobcat? ALICE What happens if you answer wrong? ALICE Your hand on the lever to the trapdoor, you know? JUSTIN Yeah. As I backed up, I suddenly got this sinking feeling. When I realized what was happening, I start screaming bloody murder as I tumbled 12 feet in the skid steer, down into the creek, bouncing around like a pinball on my way down. When I came to, in agonizing pain, I realized the entire skid steer was upside down, see

attachment one. Yup. Yup. And I was sitting on the ceiling. As I gazed up in the seat, I realized that one, the lap bar immediately spat me out, and two, there was, in fact, a seatbelt that I didn't know existed, since it was buried in the seat cover. It would have been nice to know either by being told in a safety briefing or having the common sense to expect one to exist. I

crawled out, climbed over the treads, the edge of the water, slowly made my way up the 12 foot embankment while groaning in pain. When I collected myself, I realized I had a scrape on my forehead, my arms and shoulders were in throbbing pain, and my back was royally fucked. I laid on the ground to catch my breath, then made the painful trek across the field and back to the barn to tell my boss I had just fallen into the creek. I was sent home where I had downed some gummies to ease the pain while my boss and other farm hands spent all day digging a ramp out of the embankment and dragging the skid steer out with three tractors chained up together in tandem.

Oh, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, that's what's going on. Fantastic. It was of sight to behold and a feat of redneck engineering, see attachment two. I'm saluting. Yeah. The next day, my boss showed up to check on me, and gave me a bottle of Jack, which was empty by the following day. They were the real heroes that day, even if they were probably bitching the whole time. ALICE I think you should, like, not to be a lib about

this, but I... as cool as this is, I prefer the Osher workman's comp situation to here as a bottle of the least good bourbon. ALICE It's not bourbon, it's Tennessee whiskey. LIAM Remain exactly the same besides the Lincoln County process. It's basically bourbon. Fuck you. JUSTIN Well, the charcoal may not do anything.

ALICE I know that it's bourbon, because I don't like it. LIAM Good enough. JUSTIN Alright, we're gonna have to have a talk. ALICE Yeah, honestly. I'm not fired. No! Eugh! JUSTIN As of writing this, it has been about a week

since the accident and I'm still sore as all get out. I've learned some valuable lessons, so let me share them with the rest of you. Always be aware of your surroundings, look behind you as you reverse, even if you think you're far away enough from the edge of a cliff. Always wear your seatbelt, never under any circumstance operate heavy machinery while under the influence of Smash Mouth." ALICE LAUGHS. ALICE I don't know that Smash Mouth is the issue here. JUSTIN There was probably some lack of safety procedures

here, yeah. ALICE Like coal and like, ocean, about this. JUSTIN Oh, it's a farm, they probably won't do anything. ALICE Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of exemptions there, unfortunately. JUSTIN Thank you for your time, and I hope- ALICE Yes, it's a farm.

JUSTIN Thank you for your time, I hope you all learned some valuable lessons from Simple Farm Boy. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go eat a pound of brisket and sing Deep in the Heart of Texas on repeat. Hopefully there won't be another music-related disaster this time. Keep up the great work, and the podcast is wonderful, and I hope you all keep it up for years to come.

Cheers. ALICE We're gonna have to, no one's gonna make us company directors, you know? Yeah, well this is true, exactly. We're not gonna be able to introduce autonomous pods to, uh, I don't know, to Maqua, Pennsylvania. I dunno, I mean, AI voice technology's coming on to the point where pretty soon we can all just retire, you know? You keep getting the podcasts and we're just like, it's done by our awful phantasms. Now, I- I need something to do, November.

Yeah, me too. I, yeah, no. I don't wanna do that. I'm just saying that we probably could do. And if we all sound like the TikTok voice next time you hear this, don't investigate that too closely. JUSTIN Welcome to Well There's Your Problem. Um, alright, that was...

ALICE Do I have...? Uh, fuck's sake. JUSTIN Need a bigger drop board. ALICE Oh, let's look. I'm literally typing this out right now, because it's so fucking... Welcome to Well, There's Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters, with slides. I don't like her cadence on it, it's like, no, we have to keep doing this ourselves. Yeah.

That's unfortunate. Okay, well, that was Safety Third. Shake hands with danger. That was Safety Third. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? We have a store. You can buy shirts. Yeah, you can. You can buy shirts.

Marcus, if they want more Marcus, where can they find you? Yeah, uh, I'm on Twitter. I'm not calling it that other thing. It's uh, at Marcus, the letter C, because that's my middle initial and then Nelson, so hit me up I guess if you want to become more deranged with me. I also have Blue Sky but I'm sorry I just don't use it. Yeah, I don't use it that much either, yeah.

But uh, I mean it's been a pleasure, thank you for having me. Oh yeah, this has been this. This has definitely made me more deranged. It's two things I mentioned on the previous episode. There will be an event involving disaster films sometime in on May 4th, twenty twenty four in Philadelphia that I will be a part of. The other thing, of course, it is the month of Plapro. So if you want a podcast from Australia, go listen to Boonta Vista podcast.

That's all I have to say. Perfect. Well done. We'd record the podcast. All right. Goodbye. Yeah. All right.

Good night, everyone. Let's just let, just keep the bit. Ross, you got to stop the podcast by guy. I am stopping the podcast. I just have to do several things. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,

oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,