Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the Tech Are Yet. So I've been doing several episodes on big news stories of twenty twenty three, and I think you could make a strong case that this shouldn't count among them. But it is the conclusion of a pretty darn dramatic journey in tech, a journey that, fittingly enough is about transportation and how a blue sky concept turned out to be perhaps a bit too far into the clouds. So we are talking about the end of the company Hyperloop one. First, let's turn back the clocks a whole decade to the spring of twenty thirteen. That's when Elon Musk published a blog post that gave to tech about something he had been hinting about for a while since late twenty twelve at least, which was a new concept for mass transit that could work within or between cities. It involved an enclosed tube within which aluminum pods would zip about at incredible speeds up to eight hundred miles per hour or nearly one two hundred and ninety kilometers per hour, and that this would transform travel between cities that were too far apart to easily drive between, but perhaps too close together to take a flight from one to the other. So how would this all work well. For one thing, the idea was to pump out most of the air that was inside the tube. This would help reduce wind resistance significantly. The pods would use what were called air bearings. That is, they would use a cushion of air to hover inside the tube, kind of like an air hockey table works and powerful electro magnets would provide the propulsive force to push, slash pull the pods down the track. Passengers would sit in the pods. They would accelerate up to top speed at a rate that you know wouldn't turn them into soup, and similarly, they would decelerate at a rate that would be gentle as they neared their destination. Actually, Musk had a couple of different variations on this idea so early on, he suggested that these pods would have a pair of compressor fans, one on the front and one on the back, And the idea is that the ones in the front would take the air ahead of the pod and transfer them to the fans that are in the back, so it goes behind the pod so that the pod doesn't have to actually push through the air. I have no idea how that would have worked at speed, but that was the concept Musk outlined. Anyway. Musk estimated that would cost around six billion dollars to build a track between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and that a trip on this hyper loop would take about half an hour to go between those cities. If you were to drive that route, it would take you nearly six hours to do so. Musk's idea seemed to target cities that were just the right distance apart, so that the trip would take you know, a lot less time than it would driving, but it would make more sense to take the hyperloop than it would to take a flight. Musk was essentially telling the world, Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we could do this? And yes, it would be cool if we could do that. It'd be cool if we could do a lot of things. But he was really hoping that someone else would jump in and try and actually do it. He said he couldn't really afford to take time away from his other companies, those being Tesla and SpaceX, and then spend that time on the hyperloop concept. Apparently, transforming transportation is not worthy of distraction, but running Twitter into the ground is. Sorry. I can only go so long while talking about Musk before I start getting snarky. Anyway, while Musk would dip his toe a little bit in the field, he went so far to launch the Boring Company, which at least initially sounded like it was meant to dig tunnels that would house hyper loop tubes. The real push was to inspire other people to embrace the concept of hyperloop and try to make their own version. One person who Musk spoke with actually before publishing that blog post was an investor named Shervin Pishevar. The two had talked about the idea privately, and Pishevar repeatedly encouraged Musk to go public with his concept, and once that happened, Pishevar founded a company initially called Hyperloop Technologies. This was in late twenty fourteen. One person whom Bishevar reached out to was a former engineer for SpaceX named Brogan Bam Brogen and no, that was not the name his parents gave him, but he changed it after getting married, when he and his wife sort of merged their names together, and I think that's kind of sweet anyway, While engineers got to work trying to figure out how to turn this hyper loop idea into a practical reality. Pishevar helped secure funding through various investment rounds and he did okay with that. He raised tens of millions of dollars in the process. But this was a very very expensive endeavor, right, tens of millions doesn't go that far when you're talking about designing and then building out a prototype of something that would be a brand new transportation infrastructure. Now, the first couple of years at Hyperloop Technologies were fairly quiet. The company was hiring engineers and building test facilities and prototypes that kind of thing. They built a test or started to build a test track out in Nevada. Eventually they would complete that. In twenty sixteen, the company actually changed its name from Hyperloop Technologies to hyper Loop One. It also migrated away from the air bearings design that Musk wrote about in his blog, and instead they looked to a magnetic levitation design. So maglev trains have been a thing for a while, and it kind of made sense to reduce the number of brand new technologies that you were going to rely upon and replace some of them with tested and proven ones. Like, if you're using all new technologies all down the line in your very complex system, something's not going to go right. So if you look at other companies in the hyperloop space, you'll also find that most of them deviate to some degree from the original proposal. Some of them deviate wildly from the original concept of hyperloop anyway. By early twenty sixteen, Bambrogen had been named Chief Technology Officer or CTO, and a guy named Rob Lloyd was the CEO. But drama was right around the corner. And you can't really take corners with a hyperloop design because you need these really like long, graceful curves to be able to change direction. Anyway, the summer of twenty sixteen would see a real shakeup at Hyperloop one. Bambrogen suddenly left the company. Now, the official statement from hyper Loop one was that Bambrogen had decided to take a step back, but Bambrogen himself would contradict that statement, and he did so through a lawsuit. He was also joined by three other employees who brought charges against the company. Bambrogen accused top executives of hyper Loop one of engaging in financial shenanigans and abuse. He was essentially saying people were funneling money away from the company for their own personal benefit. He also said that he had been threatened physically by leaders at the company, and he accused his co founder Pishevar of leveraging hyper Loop one to essentially promote himself. So Bambrogen was saying that executive leadership was more concerned about using the company to upgrade their personal status rather than, you know, build a new kind of transportation. The company countersued Bambrogen and accused him of plotting to take over the company. His whole thing was that he was going to over throw leadership and take over because he wasn't satisfied with where the company was going. And it all got very melodramatic, but the parties settled out of court in late twenty sixteen. Bambrogen went on to found another company called a Rivo or a revo if you prefer Riivo. Ultimately, that company had trouble securing funds and it shut down in twenty eighteen. But anyway, let's get back to the hyper loop story. So we're going back to twenty seventeen now, because Bambrogen has left. He files his lawsuit, the company counter suites. They all settle out of court. And now in twenty seventeen, that's when Richard Branson's company, Virgin made a significant investment in hyper Loop one, essentially acquiring the company. So the company rebranded itself again and now called itself Virgin hyper Loop one. Later in twenty seventeen, the company lost its other co founder, that of Shervin Pishevar, the investor who was really the driving force behind the company being founded in the first place. So why was that, Well, the reason for his departure was that multiple women had stepped forward and accused him of sexual misconduct. Those were charges that he denied, and he claimed it was actually part of a coordinated smear campaign. True or not. He stepped down from the company, or was told to step down. He maintains it was his decision. Others said that he had no decision in the matter. The board of directors told him to resign, and Branson essentially took over Virgin Hyperloop one. Now, while all this was going on, the engineers at the company were still just trying to develop the technology and hoping that hyperloop would remain solid around them. Virgin hyper Loop one built a test track in Nevada, as I said, and ran multiple tests of maglev technology. In fact, in twenty twenty, the company even conducted its first and only test with human passengers inside a pod before they had all been unmanned tests. The test track wasn't nearly long enough to push the pod to the insane speeds that Musk had envisioned, but it still got up to around one hundred miles per hour or you know, like one hundred and sixty kilometers per hour, so still really fast, just not fast enough to cut a trip from you know, Los Angeles to San Francisco to just thirty minutes. The company changed names again in twenty twenty. It dropped the one from its name and it became Virgin hyper Loop. And no, it would not be the last time that the company would change names. Okay, we've got some more drama to get through before we get to that. I'm gonna reduce the drama here by taking a break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back. We just left off in twenty twenty with Virgin hyper Loop one becoming Virgin hyper loop, and things went a little quiet after that. You know, there was still work being done at the company. There were still plans for tests, there were still plans to deploy hyperop transportation around the world in the future. In early twenty twenty two, the company announced a major change in its focus. Rather than building out a transportation system meant for human passengers, the company said the new goal was to build a way to transport cargo. Now, this was a pretty big blow to the kind of utopian view of what hyper loop was meant to be, but representatives of the company said the change was due to how the pandemic affected travel, as well as how it highlighted bottlenecks in the supply chain, and arguably this move was an effort to address a real world need. The supply chain was, without question a delicate thing, and as we learned through the pandemic, a small disruption in the supply chain could ripple out and escalate into huge problems. Also, moving stuff around carries way less risk than moving people around. With people, you have all these troublesome regulations that you have to work within. Just so you know, folks, don't get reduced to goo as you try to get them from point A to point B. Ideally, you don't want your cargo to become goo either, but if it does, it's way less of a headache than if you were moving people around. A change in focus to cargo was seen as something that would ease engineering and regulatory challenges and make the hyper loop a more practical and potentially realizable goal. Late in twenty twenty two, Virgin removed its branding from the company and once again it became hyper Loop one and Branson pretty much you got out of Hyperlop one at this point. So if you're keeping track, here's how the name of the company changed. It started as Hyperloop Technologies, then hyper Loop one, then Virgin hyper Loop one, then Virgin hyper Loop, then back to hyper Loop one. That's five names in ten years, which kind of reminds me of how I was hired in two thousand and seven, and I've had five or six different corporate overlords while technically I was still holding the same job, or at least I was still on the same career. There's a ship of theseus kind of thing going on here. Anyway, a few years ago, the folks at Hyperloop one projected that there'd be working hyperloops by twenty twenty or so. Obviously that didn't happen. It didn't happen from hyper Loop one, it didn't happen from any of the other dozen or so companies that are trying to make the hyper loop idea work. And since twenty twenty one, pretty much all the top brass at hyper Loop one left the company. Like, by the end of twenty twenty one, you didn't have anyone there at the company who was a founder or original executive. They had all left. The folks leading Hyperloop one by the end of twenty twenty two were just not the same people who founded or led the company in previous years. It's really hard for any company to hold itself together with that kind of massive shift in leadership. And keep in mind, this was a startup that still was just closing in on being a decade old. Ultimately, hyper Loop one was not able to hold it together. The company is now shutting down and its intellectual property will go to its largest investor, which is a company out of Dubai called DP World. The hyperloop company that was arguably both the most famous and the most likely to achieve Musk's vision has now called it quits. There are still other hyper loop related companies out there that are still working on these challenges. A couple of them have actually drifted away from really anything resembling a hyper loop and gone with more conventional forms of transportation, things like maglev trains that aren't traveling in any sort of tunnel or tube or anything like that. And you could make a decent argument to say that it's too early to call hyperloop well and truly dead, but it sure as heck isn't doing great. Even Elon Musk has moved on. The boring company is in the process of creating a network of tunnels under Las Vegas, Nevada. But rather than using pods to risk folks around, or even sleds that would risk people who are sitting in their cars parked on those sleds around, because that was an alternative, they said, well, maybe we don't need to build the pods. Maybe we just build sleds that can levitate above the surface of the tube and people just sit in their cars, they'll park on a little sled and get taken to wherever they need to be, and that'll cut their transportation time. That's not happening either. Instead, the tunnels that Musk is digging under Las Vegas, it's really just a network of underground roads and Tesla vehicles are just going to drive around on those. This is not reinventing transportation. It's just building more roads. And it definitely isn't mass transit because the Tesla can only hold a few folks at a time. A lot of people have argued that the Las Vegas project is just a huge waste of time and resources, that it's not actually addressing challenges in transportation. It's just gonna, you know, make things worse because you're just adding more congestion. It's just as happening under the city as opposed to on city streets. But it's not going to make any meaningful difference in the day to day experience that people have while they're traveling through Las Vegas. And I think there's some valid criticisms there because this really isn't anything like the original vision that was pitched back in twenty thirteen. So it seems like Musk himself has given up on the dream. A lot of people have said that the engineering challenges are far too great for us to meet in a way that is financially practical, and that any real effort to build one of these things, even if it worked as designed, would be so prohibitively expensive that doesn't make sense. Others have argued that it's inherently unsafe. That if you have this enclosed tube structure and anything happens to the tube. Let's say that there's some seismic activity that shifts elevation along part of the route, what happens to pods traveling at eight hundred miles per hour down those tubes. That is a pretty scary thing to think about. So a lot of folks have said that this idea was never really doable, at least not in the original concept, and that once you start to whittle things away so that you can make it more practical, well, the question remains, well, why are you doing this at all? Why not just build a regular maglev train, something that exists in lots of places around the world, And it's hard to come up with an answer to that that doesn't seem hokey. Anyway, I thought it was worth exploring this story of this particular company just a bit. I didn't have Hyperloop one biting the dust on my twenty twenty three Bingo card. But then again, to be honest, the reason for that is I haven't really thought about the company in more than a year, so maybe that's a good indicator as to why it called it quits this year. Anyway, I thought that merited an episode of its own. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the Tech Are Yet. So I've been doing several episodes on big news stories of twenty twenty three, and I think you could make a strong case that this shouldn't count among them. But it is the conclusion of a pretty darn dramatic journey in tech, a journey that, fittingly enough is about transportation and how a blue sky concept turned out to be perhaps a bit too far into the clouds. So we are talking about the end of the company Hyperloop one. First, let's turn back the clocks a whole decade to the spring of twenty thirteen. That's when Elon Musk published a blog post that gave to tech about something he had been hinting about for a while since late twenty twelve at least, which was a new concept for mass transit that could work within or between cities. It involved an enclosed tube within which aluminum pods would zip about at incredible speeds up to eight hundred miles per hour or nearly one two hundred and ninety kilometers per hour, and that this would transform travel between cities that were too far apart to easily drive between, but perhaps too close together to take a flight from one to the other. So how would this all work well. For one thing, the idea was to pump out most of the air that was inside the tube. This would help reduce wind resistance significantly. The pods would use what were called air bearings. That is, they would use a cushion of air to hover inside the tube, kind of like an air hockey table works and powerful electro magnets would provide the propulsive force to push, slash pull the pods down the track. Passengers would sit in the pods. They would accelerate up to top speed at a rate that you know wouldn't turn them into soup, and similarly, they would decelerate at a rate that would be gentle as they neared their destination. Actually, Musk had a couple of different variations on this idea so early on, he suggested that these pods would have a pair of compressor fans, one on the front and one on the back, And the idea is that the ones in the front would take the air ahead of the pod and transfer them to the fans that are in the back, so it goes behind the pod so that the pod doesn't have to actually push through the air. I have no idea how that would have worked at speed, but that was the concept Musk outlined. Anyway. Musk estimated that would cost around six billion dollars to build a track between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and that a trip on this hyper loop would take about half an hour to go between those cities. If you were to drive that route, it would take you nearly six hours to do so. Musk's idea seemed to target cities that were just the right distance apart, so that the trip would take you know, a lot less time than it would driving, but it would make more sense to take the hyperloop than it would to take a flight. Musk was essentially telling the world, Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we could do this? And yes, it would be cool if we could do that. It'd be cool if we could do a lot of things. But he was really hoping that someone else would jump in and try and actually do it. He said he couldn't really afford to take time away from his other companies, those being Tesla and SpaceX, and then spend that time on the hyperloop concept. Apparently, transforming transportation is not worthy of distraction, but running Twitter into the ground is. Sorry. I can only go so long while talking about Musk before I start getting snarky. Anyway, while Musk would dip his toe a little bit in the field, he went so far to launch the Boring Company, which at least initially sounded like it was meant to dig tunnels that would house hyper loop tubes. The real push was to inspire other people to embrace the concept of hyperloop and try to make their own version. One person who Musk spoke with actually before publishing that blog post was an investor named Shervin Pishevar. The two had talked about the idea privately, and Pishevar repeatedly encouraged Musk to go public with his concept, and once that happened, Pishevar founded a company initially called Hyperloop Technologies. This was in late twenty fourteen. One person whom Bishevar reached out to was a former engineer for SpaceX named Brogan Bam Brogen and no, that was not the name his parents gave him, but he changed it after getting married, when he and his wife sort of merged their names together, and I think that's kind of sweet anyway, While engineers got to work trying to figure out how to turn this hyper loop idea into a practical reality. Pishevar helped secure funding through various investment rounds and he did okay with that. He raised tens of millions of dollars in the process. But this was a very very expensive endeavor, right, tens of millions doesn't go that far when you're talking about designing and then building out a prototype of something that would be a brand new transportation infrastructure. Now, the first couple of years at Hyperloop Technologies were fairly quiet. The company was hiring engineers and building test facilities and prototypes that kind of thing. They built a test or started to build a test track out in Nevada. Eventually they would complete that. In twenty sixteen, the company actually changed its name from Hyperloop Technologies to hyper Loop One. It also migrated away from the air bearings design that Musk wrote about in his blog, and instead they looked to a magnetic levitation design. So maglev trains have been a thing for a while, and it kind of made sense to reduce the number of brand new technologies that you were going to rely upon and replace some of them with tested and proven ones. Like, if you're using all new technologies all down the line in your very complex system, something's not going to go right. So if you look at other companies in the hyperloop space, you'll also find that most of them deviate to some degree from the original proposal. Some of them deviate wildly from the original concept of hyperloop anyway. By early twenty sixteen, Bambrogen had been named Chief Technology Officer or CTO, and a guy named Rob Lloyd was the CEO. But drama was right around the corner. And you can't really take corners with a hyperloop design because you need these really like long, graceful curves to be able to change direction. Anyway, the summer of twenty sixteen would see a real shakeup at Hyperloop one. Bambrogen suddenly left the company. Now, the official statement from hyper Loop one was that Bambrogen had decided to take a step back, but Bambrogen himself would contradict that statement, and he did so through a lawsuit. He was also joined by three other employees who brought charges against the company. Bambrogen accused top executives of hyper Loop one of engaging in financial shenanigans and abuse. He was essentially saying people were funneling money away from the company for their own personal benefit. He also said that he had been threatened physically by leaders at the company, and he accused his co founder Pishevar of leveraging hyper Loop one to essentially promote himself. So Bambrogen was saying that executive leadership was more concerned about using the company to upgrade their personal status rather than, you know, build a new kind of transportation. The company countersued Bambrogen and accused him of plotting to take over the company. His whole thing was that he was going to over throw leadership and take over because he wasn't satisfied with where the company was going. And it all got very melodramatic, but the parties settled out of court in late twenty sixteen. Bambrogen went on to found another company called a Rivo or a revo if you prefer Riivo. Ultimately, that company had trouble securing funds and it shut down in twenty eighteen. But anyway, let's get back to the hyper loop story. So we're going back to twenty seventeen now, because Bambrogen has left. He files his lawsuit, the company counter suites. They all settle out of court. And now in twenty seventeen, that's when Richard Branson's company, Virgin made a significant investment in hyper Loop one, essentially acquiring the company. So the company rebranded itself again and now called itself Virgin hyper Loop one. Later in twenty seventeen, the company lost its other co founder, that of Shervin Pishevar, the investor who was really the driving force behind the company being founded in the first place. So why was that, Well, the reason for his departure was that multiple women had stepped forward and accused him of sexual misconduct. Those were charges that he denied, and he claimed it was actually part of a coordinated smear campaign. True or not. He stepped down from the company, or was told to step down. He maintains it was his decision. Others said that he had no decision in the matter. The board of directors told him to resign, and Branson essentially took over Virgin Hyperloop one. Now, while all this was going on, the engineers at the company were still just trying to develop the technology and hoping that hyperloop would remain solid around them. Virgin hyper Loop one built a test track in Nevada, as I said, and ran multiple tests of maglev technology. In fact, in twenty twenty, the company even conducted its first and only test with human passengers inside a pod before they had all been unmanned tests. The test track wasn't nearly long enough to push the pod to the insane speeds that Musk had envisioned, but it still got up to around one hundred miles per hour or you know, like one hundred and sixty kilometers per hour, so still really fast, just not fast enough to cut a trip from you know, Los Angeles to San Francisco to just thirty minutes. The company changed names again in twenty twenty. It dropped the one from its name and it became Virgin hyper Loop. And no, it would not be the last time that the company would change names. Okay, we've got some more drama to get through before we get to that. I'm gonna reduce the drama here by taking a break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back. We just left off in twenty twenty with Virgin hyper Loop one becoming Virgin hyper loop, and things went a little quiet after that. You know, there was still work being done at the company. There were still plans for tests, there were still plans to deploy hyperop transportation around the world in the future. In early twenty twenty two, the company announced a major change in its focus. Rather than building out a transportation system meant for human passengers, the company said the new goal was to build a way to transport cargo. Now, this was a pretty big blow to the kind of utopian view of what hyper loop was meant to be, but representatives of the company said the change was due to how the pandemic affected travel, as well as how it highlighted bottlenecks in the supply chain, and arguably this move was an effort to address a real world need. The supply chain was, without question a delicate thing, and as we learned through the pandemic, a small disruption in the supply chain could ripple out and escalate into huge problems. Also, moving stuff around carries way less risk than moving people around. With people, you have all these troublesome regulations that you have to work within. Just so you know, folks, don't get reduced to goo as you try to get them from point A to point B. Ideally, you don't want your cargo to become goo either, but if it does, it's way less of a headache than if you were moving people around. A change in focus to cargo was seen as something that would ease engineering and regulatory challenges and make the hyper loop a more practical and potentially realizable goal. Late in twenty twenty two, Virgin removed its branding from the company and once again it became hyper Loop one and Branson pretty much you got out of Hyperlop one at this point. So if you're keeping track, here's how the name of the company changed. It started as Hyperloop Technologies, then hyper Loop one, then Virgin hyper Loop one, then Virgin hyper Loop, then back to hyper Loop one. That's five names in ten years, which kind of reminds me of how I was hired in two thousand and seven, and I've had five or six different corporate overlords while technically I was still holding the same job, or at least I was still on the same career. There's a ship of theseus kind of thing going on here. Anyway, a few years ago, the folks at Hyperloop one projected that there'd be working hyperloops by twenty twenty or so. Obviously that didn't happen. It didn't happen from hyper Loop one, it didn't happen from any of the other dozen or so companies that are trying to make the hyper loop idea work. And since twenty twenty one, pretty much all the top brass at hyper Loop one left the company. Like, by the end of twenty twenty one, you didn't have anyone there at the company who was a founder or original executive. They had all left. The folks leading Hyperloop one by the end of twenty twenty two were just not the same people who founded or led the company in previous years. It's really hard for any company to hold itself together with that kind of massive shift in leadership. And keep in mind, this was a startup that still was just closing in on being a decade old. Ultimately, hyper Loop one was not able to hold it together. The company is now shutting down and its intellectual property will go to its largest investor, which is a company out of Dubai called DP World. The hyperloop company that was arguably both the most famous and the most likely to achieve Musk's vision has now called it quits. There are still other hyper loop related companies out there that are still working on these challenges. A couple of them have actually drifted away from really anything resembling a hyper loop and gone with more conventional forms of transportation, things like maglev trains that aren't traveling in any sort of tunnel or tube or anything like that. And you could make a decent argument to say that it's too early to call hyperloop well and truly dead, but it sure as heck isn't doing great. Even Elon Musk has moved on. The boring company is in the process of creating a network of tunnels under Las Vegas, Nevada. But rather than using pods to risk folks around, or even sleds that would risk people who are sitting in their cars parked on those sleds around, because that was an alternative, they said, well, maybe we don't need to build the pods. Maybe we just build sleds that can levitate above the surface of the tube and people just sit in their cars, they'll park on a little sled and get taken to wherever they need to be, and that'll cut their transportation time. That's not happening either. Instead, the tunnels that Musk is digging under Las Vegas, it's really just a network of underground roads and Tesla vehicles are just going to drive around on those. This is not reinventing transportation. It's just building more roads. And it definitely isn't mass transit because the Tesla can only hold a few folks at a time. A lot of people have argued that the Las Vegas project is just a huge waste of time and resources, that it's not actually addressing challenges in transportation. It's just gonna, you know, make things worse because you're just adding more congestion. It's just as happening under the city as opposed to on city streets. But it's not going to make any meaningful difference in the day to day experience that people have while they're traveling through Las Vegas. And I think there's some valid criticisms there because this really isn't anything like the original vision that was pitched back in twenty thirteen. So it seems like Musk himself has given up on the dream. A lot of people have said that the engineering challenges are far too great for us to meet in a way that is financially practical, and that any real effort to build one of these things, even if it worked as designed, would be so prohibitively expensive that doesn't make sense. Others have argued that it's inherently unsafe. That if you have this enclosed tube structure and anything happens to the tube. Let's say that there's some seismic activity that shifts elevation along part of the route, what happens to pods traveling at eight hundred miles per hour down those tubes. That is a pretty scary thing to think about. So a lot of folks have said that this idea was never really doable, at least not in the original concept, and that once you start to whittle things away so that you can make it more practical, well, the question remains, well, why are you doing this at all? Why not just build a regular maglev train, something that exists in lots of places around the world, And it's hard to come up with an answer to that that doesn't seem hokey. Anyway, I thought it was worth exploring this story of this particular company just a bit. I didn't have Hyperloop one biting the dust on my twenty twenty three Bingo card. But then again, to be honest, the reason for that is I haven't really thought about the company in more than a year, so maybe that's a good indicator as to why it called it quits this year. Anyway, I thought that merited an episode of its own. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your favorite shows.