Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? I've been better? Uh. Those who follow me on Twitter probably saw that despite all of my careful behavior, being vaccinated and boosted and wearing masks and all that, I still managed apparently to catch COVID. I feel mostly okay, uh, And I'm actually getting a different kind of test tomorrow to make certain that this is a truly a positive case and not a false positive, because the results I got were very faint but within the realm of saying that's a positive results. So I'm taking all precautions. Isolated in my house, and I dealing with all that meant that I wasn't quite ready to have a full new episode for you. However, in Seen, I recorded an episode titled hyper Loop and the Boring Podcast, which in itself was an update to a two thousand thirteen episode titled The Hype about hyper Loop, and I figured it was it was time for a quick update on what's been going on in the hyper loop world since two thousand seventeen. But you know, I there's no reason for me to re record like a whole episode about hyper loop I have done that, and so I thought instead is I would play the two thousand seventeen episode and then at the end. This is a long episode, but at the end of that I will give you some updates about the specific hyper loop one company that kind of emerged from all this. There are other companies all around the world that are also building out variations on the hyper loop design. Some of them are so far removed from the hyper loop design that I wouldn't even call them that anymore. But I'm specifically focusing on kind of the O G hyper Loop company. Also, this was this episode that you're about to here. It was recorded right at the tail end of my time with how stuff Works dot Com, before stuff Media, which was like the podcast arm of How Stuff Works spun out from the company, and then of course I Heart Media subsequently acquired stuff Media. So this is a real blast from the past. I listened to a little bit of it and I was like, oh, yeah, that's what two thousand seventeen was like. But enjoy this episode from I'll be back at the end with some updates I'm so enthusiastic in fact, that I'm going to revisit a topic that we covered way back in two thousand thirteen. That would be hyper loop. Yeah, that's when we published the episode titled the Hype About hyper Loop, because I'm clever with headlines, y'all. Since that time, we've had a couple of startups that formed in order to pour in money, time, resources effort to make hyper loop into a reality, change it from just this interesting vision Elon Musk had into an actual form of transportation. So I thought it would behoove us to revisit the topic and see where things stand now. Plus I can use the word behoove again. That's twice in the same day. I'm recording this. The same day I did a live stream about the game Dungeons and Dragons on a show called Game Changers. Behoof is my word of the day. Anyway, I can also talk about a really boring company, and that's what's called foreshadowing. Now, before I jump into the latest news, I should go back over the history of the hyper loop concept and explain not just where it came from, but what is the actual idea of the hyper loop and how is it's a post to work, and why is it even something worth talking about? Well, back in August, that's when the world at large learned about the hyper loop concept. It's when Elon Musk published a white paper that was about fifty eight pages long. And Elon Musk, in case you aren't aware, is the entrepreneur behind such companies as SpaceX, the private space company, and Tesla, the electric vehicle company. This white paper was all about a high tech transportation system is kind of a train, kind of like a subway, kind of like well, Elon must described it as a cross between a hockey table, like an air hockey table, and a rail gun, which is a pretty exciting way to think about getting from point A to point B. Now, the motivating factor for all of this seems to be that the state of California had approved a high speed rail project and Elon Musk it got his dander up. If you were to look at Elon Musk's dander that day, it would have been in the up position. Now, that's because in that white paper, Musk laid out all of his frustrations with this high speed rail project, and they really boiled down to two major ones with a lot of subsidiary ones. The two major ones was that would be that uh, that one. It was incredibly expensive, just really a multibillion dollar project, so it was in his mind, financially wasteful. Secondly, he argued that out of all the high speed rail systems that were in operation or proposed, it was one of the slowest. So he said, on a per mile basis, it's one of the most expensive. On a speed basis, it's one of the slowest, So why would you want to spend a lot of money to not get anywhere fast? He thought that that was an incredible waste of time and money, and that it wasn't going to solve the issue you of of of speeding up travel between major cities, specifically Los Angeles and San Francisco, which are quite far apart. If you're not familiar with California geography, you might think, oh, well, those are two cities in the same state, but they are hundreds of miles apart from one another. It takes more than five hours of driving to get between the two. So a high speed rail system would be nice if in fact it were high speed. But must argued that the the one that was proposed was not nearly fast enough to be any more advantageous than just taking a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and that there had to be a better way. And so he said there needed to be a less expensive, safer, faster method of getting from San Francisco to Los Angeles or vice versa, and that he had the better idea. Now must acknowledge that for cities that are really far apart from each other, think about a thousand and miles or kilometers or more, supersonic air travel is likely the best option, assuming we can solve a few major issues with supersonic travel. One of those is getting the right airplane geometry to minimize sonic booms so that air travel doesn't become massively disruptive for the population on the ground. A sonic boom, by the way, is when you have uh some mass traveling faster than the speed of sound through whatever medium you are traveling through. So, in the case of air, depending upon air pressure and temperature and that sort of thing, if you're traveling faster than the speed of sound, you're building up this pressure wave that ends up collapsing in on itself after the object passes through that area, and that collapse creates this sonic boom. The sonic boom travels with the object as it moves through. So if you have a supersonic jet traveling overhead, that boom you hear is it passes over. It's not just a single boom. That boom is actually traveling with the supersonic aircraft as long as it is traveling at those incredible speeds. So there are companies that are working on building out better plane models that can travel at these supersonic speeds while minimizing that sonic boom, and they're making some amazing progress. Uh. These are include private companies as well as NASA working on these designs. So, assuming we get that problem solved, Musk says, it's probably going to be the case that the most efficient way to travel the most uh the cheapest way. Really, it's everything from the amount of time you're spending to the amount of money you spend will probably be supersonic travel. But for cities that are closer together than that but still a good distance away, let's say like nine hundred miles around kilometers apart from each other, you would want a different solution because with a supersonic jet, you would reach cruising altitude, and you would only then be able to accelerate to supersonic speeds, but you would only be doing that for a very short while before you had to descend. You would be essentially be up and down so fast that you can't really take advantage of the supersonic travel part. So it doesn't make sense to take a supersonic flight between two cities that are nine miles are closer together. What you could do is build this hyper loop system in order to travel at incredible speeds between those points. And that's where the sweet spot is between two cities that are nine miles apart or less, and that they have to be two cities where you would typically have a lot of heavy travel between the two. There's gotta be a lot of traffic. So assuming you have that situation, that's where hyper loop, he argues, would make a lot of sense. Again, his example being Los Angeles and San Francisco, but any major metropolitan areas where there's a lot of travel between the cities that are at this distance from one another would be candidates for this kind of transportation system. Uh. He would want this train sort of hybrid system to travel at incredible speeds not quite supersonic. We'll get into that. This is a system that that consists of an enclosed tube or tunnel, and the air pressure inside that tube would be low. It would still be present, but it would be low. So you would have these giant pumps along the tube that would pump out a lot of the air. So you have a very low pressure system inside the tube that lowers the air resistance considerably, but does not create an actual vacuum, so there's still air inside the tube. Must acknowledges that the vacuum approach, though very effective, it removes air resistance, UH, would be incredibly difficult to achieve from an engineering perspective, because even the smallest imperfection in the tube would allow air to leak in. You know, if you have an extremely low pressure system and you've got greater pressure on the outside, obviously any leak, any crack is going to allow air to rush in. So he says going with a low pressure system would make more sense than a vacuum. Uh, it's too difficult to maintain a vacuum within a room, much less a five hundred mile long loop of tube. In his words, so rather than using something like a mag lev system magnetic levitation system in which the train would levitate above the tunnel floor using electromagnetic repulsion. Musk was proposing using air bearings instead, so this would not be a system where you use magnets in order to repel one another and that would make the capsule float off the floor of the tube. Instead, it would be like an air hockey table. So if you're not familiar with these, uh, an air hockey table is a table that's got a surface with tiny pin prick holes in it, and a fan under the surface of the table blows air up through those holes. You put a little plastic hockey puck on top of the table. The air coming up from the bottom ends up making the hockey puck glide across the table. So that's kind of the principle he had for the the hyper loop concept, except instead of having the tube generating this air and blowing against the capsule, he thought of the capsule having essentially these pin pricks at the bottom of the capsule blowing air down, so that would be where the capsule would generate some lift. It would also generate left through its forward momentum, and at the front of this capsule. He wants. He proposed putting a pump a fan essentially, because there's still air inside the tube. If you didn't have a of moving that air around the capsule, you would run into an issue where you're compressing the air ahead of you. As the capsule moves down the tube, it's pushing a column of air, and if the air cannot get around the capsule fast enough, you start compressing it and that ends up being like an air braking system. It will actually slow down and ultimately stop the capsule pushing against it in the other direction. So he proposed putting a fan in the front of the capsule to pull air in partly to allow the capsule to continue moving down the tube at speed, but also feeding into an air compressor that then would power these air bearings and allow the capsule to maintain lift on the bottom of the over the top of the tube flooring. And because you're not using wheels, you're not losing a lot of energy to friction. Right. You've got a little bit of air resistance that you're dealing with, but you're not dealing with wheels running against a surface, so that loss of energy to friction is minimized. It's still there. You still have some air resistance, you still have some other elements of friction, but it's greatly reduced. So Uh, this approach, he said, was going to be an effective engineering solution to the problem. Um, now, what about propulsion. The air bearings provide lift, but how does the capsule actually move forward? This is where Elon Musk was suggesting the external linear electric motor version of of propulsion. So, if you know how an electric motor works, let's use a very simple version. You've got, let's say, a permanent magnet, and you've got some uh, you've got some electromagnet, you know, conductive wire, insulated conductive wire. Uh. We're talking more of a dynamo than a motor here. And you move the permanent magnet so that it's north and south poles or road tating and going. The coil of inductive wire is then being exposed to a fluctuating magnetic field that's going to induce current to flow through the wire. Uh. That also, by the way, generates its own electric field, because you have electricity voltage essentially applied to this, uh, this conductive wire. He's thinking about the same sort of thing, but in a linear pathway. So you've got this, uh, this electro magnetic force that is pulling and pushing the capsule. You have opposite poles magnetic poles attracting one another that's pulling the capsule forward. Then you have like poles pushing against each other that continues to push the capsule forward. This allows you to accelerate the capsule like a railgun. You're using the electromagnetic force to accelerate it in a linear motion, so it's going straight. The air bearings are what allow it to have the lift. The electric motor allows it to have the forward momentum. And this was kind of his general idea for the infrastructure. As for the capsules themselves, his version of it would seat twenty eight passengers per passenger capsule. He had a couple of different models of capsule. He also proposed a version that would have a slightly larger capsules. These would hold up to three full sized automobiles and you could have passengers inside the automobile, so you could be sitting in a car inside a capsule, and that way you would start in your car in l a and then thirty five minutes later you'd drive out of the capsule. In San Francisco, which would save you a ton of time from the normal five hours plus of driving. UH. The maximum width for a passenger only capsule would be four point four three feet or one point three five ms, so not very wide, with a height of six point one one feet or one point one zero meters, so again not very tall. If you're a tall person, you'd be stooping a bit in order to move around this cabin. UH doors would either be of a goal wing design, meaning like the DeLorean, they lift up, or they would be slides so that it would allow for easy UH loading and unloading of the vehicle. Luggage would go on one of the two ends of the vehicle, depending upon where you would put the rest of the components, so either in the very front or the very back, and the weight of the passenger capsule without the interior components just the weight of all the external parts would be about six thousand, eight hundred pounds or three thousand one ms. And Musk estimated the cost for each capsule's exterior to be about two hundred forty five thousand dollars apiece. Now, all the stuff on the inside, like the seats, the door panels, the restraints, the various displays would weigh another five thousand, five hundred pounds or two thousand, five hundred ms, and it would cost another two hundred fifty five thousand dollars. Then they're all the other elements to add to the costs, such as the propulsion system components that would be in each capsule, the air compressor blades, the air bearings, all of this stuff. All of that told, Musk estimated that a passenger only capsule would cost one million, three hundred fifty thousand dollars apiece and have a weight total of fifteen thousand kilograms, And he goes on to estimate that you need about fifty four million dollars to make enough capsules for the hyper loop system he was proposing between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Now that's enough capsules where you would have them at either end so that you could have a consistent uh service between the two cities on any given day. So fifty four million dollars for just the capsules, that's not too bad. However, that doesn't include the cost of the infrastructure. Will get to that if you were traveling on that route, how safe would it be? Well, elon Musk, again arguing for the system he was proposing, said that there'd be a lot of redundant safety features, including maintaining a healthy distance between capsules. So between you and the next closest capsule would be a gap of twenty three miles or thirty seven kilometers on average, which is a lot of safety space to prevent collisions between capsules. Still, tons of other safety issues that you would have to take into account and make sure we're uh prepared for so that way you don't have any massive issues. Now, according to Musk, the hyper loop would allow for eight hundred forty passengers to travel per hour between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Now that number could be increased by decreasing the amount of departure time between capsules. He was envisioning capsules arriving at a station, unloading, loading up, and every two minutes you would have a capsule leave either l A or San Francisco. Now that that doesn't mean that a capsule only spends two minutes per station. You would have one station or one capsule arriving at a station while another capsule, maybe three capsules ahead, is leaving, So you would still have several minutes to unload and load each individual capsule before it blasts off and heads over to its destination. Uh, these capsules would be going pretty darn fast. Musk talks about them hitting speeds of seven hundred sixty miles per hour or one thousand, two hundred twenty kilometers per hour, which is also known as mock point nine one at sixty eight degrees fahrenheit or twenty degrees celsius. So you're talking about going nearly as fast as the speed of sound, but not actually breaking the sound barrier at that speed at those temperatures. And again that offers me the opportunity to remind you guys, sound travels through the air at a speed that depends on other things like air temperature, So you have to take that into account when you talk about the speed of sound. It's not a constant through all altitudes and temperatures. You have to have these other variables in account before you can actually talk about the speed of sound, although we can usually just assume we're talking about a standard temperature when we're usually using that term. Back to the show, at that speed, you would be able to make the trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco in about thirty five minutes, and the high speed rail system would take two hours and thirty eight minutes on that same trip. So the system that Elon Musk was saying was inefficient, slow, and expensive would take two hours thirty eight minutes. Driving takes five hours. A plane trip would take a little bit more than an hour, like an hour and fifteen minutes. So the hyper loop would theoretically be the fastest way to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco, assuming it works the way Elon Musk imagines. So thirty five minutes is a huge amount of time saved going from point A to point b. Uh, it would be the fastest solution by far. You might wonder what it would be like to actually travel inside one of those capsules. According to Muss, he imagines that the entire interior would have displays, kind of like television displays or computer displays that would show a landscape, maybe a model of the landscape that you're actually passing through, or maybe it would be something else like our space or under the water or some other city if you wanted to, Or maybe it would just be television, because there's no point in having windows your inside and enclosed tube. All you would see is the interior of a tube whizzing by at seven miles per hour. Using the displays would help you get some other sensory input. Uh. There's other interesting questions like would this affect your sense of of your your perception of space? Like would you feel an emotion sickness due to this kind of thing? Uh, that's a question that I don't know the answer to you, because as far as I know, no one's actually tried it. But it is really interesting. Now We've got a lot more to talk about, uh, and I'm going to dive into some more details about what travel aboard the hyper loop would theoretically be like, as well as talk about some of the companies that are trying to bring it to life. But before I do that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Now, I just mentioned about being inside those capsules and looking at those displays, and you know, seeing some gorgeous stuff, and and that sounds really nice. You would have restraints on your your seats because you're talking about accelerating too pretty incredible speeds and then eventually decelerating. Now, the ideas that you would do this gradually, so you wouldn't be experiencing any very powerful G forces. That would also mean that the tube itself would not be able to have any sharp turns on it, because the amount of G force you would experience as a passenger would be too great. You would be very much uncomfortable, if not blacking out due to those G forces being placed on your if you were making sharp turns. So you'd have to have very gradual curves to your hyper loop track, and you would have to again have this long acceleration and deceleration so that you're not placing too much stress on your passengers. But let's go back to price for a minute. So I talked about the capsules and that they would cost a cool fifty four million dollars each, But what about the tube itself, Well, Musk said it would be several billion dollars. He eventually came up with the figure rough Napkin figure of being six billion dollars for a hyper loop system, but he adds that this would still be less expensive than the high speed rail system to California had approved. He said, yeah, it's six billion dollars for this hypothetical thing I just made up. But it's many more billion dollars for this other thing that exists. So, um, you know, it's it's kind of easy to say that it's only six billion dollars, only six billion dollars, when you have just proposed it and no one said, actual build the thing yet. But let's just for argument's sake, say that, in fact, it would cost six billion dollars to build. Because I don't want to cast aspersions towards Elon Musk. I'm just saying that until you build something, you really can't say how much it was going to cost, not with any real authority. It's only after you've built it that you really understand the cost of it. The tube, he says, would be made out of steel, and he says that you could constructed and prefabricated sections and then kind of snap them together, which is being a bit flippant on my part. It actually would involve using an orbital seam welder to create a seal between each length of tube. So you would put in a prefabricated length the tube and then you would just seal it to the previous one using this orbital seal welder, which kind of goes around the entire tube. And make sure that they are nice and tightly welded together. And he also suggested that these tubes would rest on pylons, so it would be an elevated track that would be above or really to the side of Interstate five in California, which was more or less a direct path between l A and San Francisco without too many sharp turns. He says that you would have to have a few deviations from the highway in order to avoid putting too strong a curve in the track, but those deviations would be, in his words, minor uh that way, you could avoid putting those unacceptable g forces on the bodies of your passengers, which, as we have already discussed, would be a bad thing to do otherwise. Musk also said that the energy needed to power the hyper loop could come from solar panels along the top of the tube. Now, according to Musk, the panels would be enough be able to generate enough electricity to power the entire system and also charge batteries that would allow the system to operate even if the sun weren't out, so if it were an overcast day, which is common in San Francisco, not necessarily so in Los Angeles. Or if it were nighttime, you can still take the system from LA to San Francisco or San Francis Cisco to l A, because you'd have enough battery power to keep it going. This is one of the reasons why he was arguing for this air bearing system. He said, the air bearing system would be less expensive than a fully electromagnetic mag lev system, and it would consume less power than a mag lev system, so you wouldn't have to worry about creating a huge drain on the existing power grid. You could have it all self powered through these solar panels and batteries. Keep in mind, Elon Musk again is behind Tesla, and Tesla's big product that's coming out aren't really electric cars. I mean, that's the flashy side. It's really the battery solutions that Elon Musk is behind. So arguing for a system that would rely heavily on battery power also serves his interests to some extent. In his paper, must argued that the energy per passenger using the hyperlop technology would be less than any other form of transportation. Travel by airplane would represent the greatest amount of energy expended per traveler per mile, so he was saying the hyperlop, based on his calculations, would end up being less of an energy drain per person per passenger than anything else that includes cars, motorcycles, trains, any other system in existence would be more energy per passenger to get people from point A to point B h compared to his hypothetical hyper loop. And I keep saying hypothetical and things of that nature, again not to disparage the idea, but just to acknowledge the fact that without an actual working system, where we're relying upon theoreticals hypotheticals, we're not relying upon actual hard data that we can look at and say, oh yeah, in fact, the math does work out the right way. Uh. Due to this low cost of operation, Musk says that you could charge a very reasonable price for tickets on the hyper loop. His suggestion for a one way ticket from Los Angeles to San Francisco or vice versa, would be twenty dollars for a thirty five minute trip between the two cities. He says charging twenty dollars per ticket for twenty years would offset the six billion dollar estimated cost of constructing the whole shebang, which is pretty incredible. I mean, it's making a lot of assumptions, again that you would have enough of a passenger base to be busy and charge at twenty dollars, and that you're patient enough to take twenty years to pay off this investment. But if it's correct, that is amazing. Twenty dollars would be a steal compared to an airplane ticket or even a ticket on the California Train because that high speed rail train they were talking about much more expensive tickets than twenty bucks a person for a one way ticket. Uh. Again, without having all of the math done, we can't be sure that twenty years would be enough time to recapture the cost of construction. I don't know if that also builds in any potential maintenance costs that surely would come up over those times. But he claimed that twenty dollars a seat that would do it. A couple of notable companies have formed to try and bring this vision to life, and one of those is hyper Loop one. So let's take some time to talk about this company because it's got some stories behind it. So there's an entrepreneur named Shervin Pishamar who first talked to Musk in January two thousand thirteen. I remember it was August when Musk announced this idea of the hyper loop, and they were traveling to Cuba, and apparently during this trip, Musk talked about this hyper loop concept and Shervin was really interested in it, and he even said later on that Musk should go public with this idea. So, according to the hyper Loop one web page, it was Shervin who convinced Elon Musk to publish that white paper and talk about this. After Musk's announcement, Servin gathered a team together to form the startup hyper Loop one. Now, if you go to hyper Loop one's website and you look at this team, it includes some names on there. There's Jim Messina, there's Joe Lonsdale, David Sachs, and Peter Diamandis. But there's one name you will not find on the hyper Loop one website, but he was among the founders, and that's the name Brogan bam Brogan. So Brogan bam Brogan, formally known as Kevin Brogan, was an engineer who worked at SpaceX, and of course that's the private space exploration company. He married a woman named Bambi lieu In and the two decided that they would merge their aims together, so it was kind of forming a new name by combining their names. That's where he got Brogan bam Brogan, which I think is endurable. And he became the chief technology officer for hyper Loop one. But then things seemed to go very wrong, and we don't know the full story, but we do know about the lawsuits, so I can tell you what the lawsuit said. According to bam Brogan and a few of his colleagues, things went sour at the corporate level at hyper Loop one. So you've got this company that is trying to create the actual technology that Elon Musk was talking about. Meanwhile, according to bam Brogan, there were some shenanigans going on at the corporate level. He alleged that the company leaders were being wasteful, that they were blowing through investor money on things that weren't necessary or that were fraudulent in his eyes, and he also claimed that the corporate leadership was engaging in Nepa. His m that they were hiring on friends and family for things that they weren't necessarily qualified for, or that there might have been more qualified candidates out there that were being ignored. In favor of these folks. He also accused Pischavar of using stock options as leverage to get what he wanted from employees, essentially holding it over their heads. Uh as both a stick and a carrot at the same time. So, in other words, these were a whole series of really ugly all allegations and accusations. Beam Brogan then says that he and some of his colleagues voiced their objections and concerns and then they were all met with repercussions. They were met with punishments. Beam Brogan was met with a threatening gesture. Specifically, he says that Pischavar left a rope nodded in a noose on bam Brogan's desk, and there's some security footage that seemed to potentially back up bam Brogan's accusation. There's a man who you know, they say was pish of our and he's clearly holding some rope, although you can't necessarily see if it's a noose or not, but still, if that is true, it's a pretty ugly move of intimidation. It's not your typical corporate behavior unless you're salesperson trying to move property in Glengarry Glenn Ross style. Always be closing guys, always be closing well. Ben Brogan then said that one of his colleagues was fired in front of his own family the next day and another one was demoted, and that bam Brogan himself was encouraged to take a leave of absence from the company, so he responded with a lawsuit. Hyper Loop One's response was also accusatory. The company lawyer said that the lawsuit was quote unfortunate and delusional end quote, and also claimed that bam Brogan had been trying to undermine Bishamar and was actually trying to do a corporate coup and and change the leadership through some other form of corporate leverage. And so there were accusations flying on both sides now. In November six news broke that the two parties had settled this lawsuit out of court for uh an unreported sum, so no one was talking about how much money changed hands. According to a statement from bam Brogan's lawyers, uh It's said this quote, My clients are pleased to announce they have reached a confidential resolution of litigation with their former employer and look forward to moving on with their future plans end quote. Bam Brogan, by the way, recently founded his own company called Arrivo, with its headquarters apparently less than one mile away from hyper Loop one's offices, So that's got to be awkward if you're ever in traffic. Arrivo is also in the hyper loop design game, so they're getting in that space. According to bam Brogan, his new company has a quote unique take end quote on the hyper loop concept. No idea what that means. Meanwhile, back at hyper Loop one, the company was installing a They installed a fifty ft long, twelve ft wide structure called the Big Tube. Now this was not a hyper loop to tube. It was a testing facility. It was meant to create low pressure environments to test things like seals in test tracks, test tubes. Not a test tube, but a tube that they were testing to make sure that it was constructed properly. So it was a testing facility, not a hyperlop tube on its own. And the hyper loop one approach doesn't use air bearings the way Musk's design did. Instead, it did use mag lev as the means to suspend capsules in the tube. So they went with the electromagnetic levitation route uh, so it requires a bit more power, more than a bit more power than the hyperloop one or hyperloop concept that Elon Musk was first chatting about back in In December, hyper loop one built the APEX Test and Safety site outside of Las Vegas, Nevada that would become the testing ground for prototype hyperloop infrastructure and capsules, and on May eleven, sixteen, the company hosted a Propulsion System Open Air test or p o a t POPE or poe AT. In this test, a hyper loop sled accelerated to a top speed of a hundred thirty six miles per hour in two point two seconds. That's an incredible acceleration. The test was to see if the acceleration motor would work properly, so they weren't trying to accelerate up to top speed. A hundred thirty six miles per hour is nowhere close to the top speed of what their capsules would ultimately take. The company also announced a global challenge to find the best hyperloop projects in the world. Hyper Loop one has proposed a system that would link Helsinki and Stockholm together, which would be pretty nifty, and in August the company began construction on the Development Loop or DEVL loop in Nevada. This was the first full scale hyperloop test track, and November of the first section of the DEVL loop was installed. It was called Fixity, and in January hyper Loop announced that thirty five semifinalists had been u had been had reached the global challenge, so they got down to thirty five semifinalists and these were proposals that would link various cities together to create hyperloop routes. On March seven, twenty seventeen, the DEVL loop construction was completed, and on May twelve, twenty seventeen, the first full scale hyperloop test was conducted. On July twelve, twenty seventeen, Hyperloop unveiled a prototype aero shell. This is the outer hole of the capsules that would be in its system, and it's kind of nifty looking. You should take a look at the picture of it. Sadly, this is an audio podcast and I cannot show you one. On July seventeen, they tested out a vehicle that traveled down the full length of the five me DEVL loop track, accelerating for three and then gliding the rest of the way again at fives you're not going to get to your full speed. You just can't, but you can test out the various systems to make sure that the concept behind them does in fact work. The company wants to have three production systems working by one, which is pretty ambitious so highper loop one. It's probably the furthest along out of all the different hyper loop companies, and it inadvertently spawned a second one or Evo, but it is not the only one. There are other hyper loop companies out there and they're all competing at this I'll talk about another one in just a second, called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, and it's really interesting to see people jump on this again in an area that hasn't had proven success. That's not to discourage them, but it kind of shows how Elon Musk has this amazing ability to inspire people to take chances without necessarily being able to show that you can have a return on them. People have talked about Tesla Motors struggling to be profitable while they are clearly creating products and people have a strong desire to own them. The company as it stands is one of those that is always striving or profit but hasn't emerged as an enormously profitable company. So for Elon Musk to continue to go forward and make these bold proclamations and have people not just take it to heart but then pour their own money and investments and resources into trying to make it come to pass, that's a pretty insanely awesome thing to be able to do. Uh I can't convince people to give me a seat on the subway, so although I find that if I talk to myself a lot and argue, I often end up with a seat all to myself. But I think that might require that doesn't rely so much on charisma as it does just social awkwardness. All right, when we get back, I'm going to talk a little bit about hyper loop uh more, you know, the hyper loop transportation technologies, as well as Elon Musk's attempt to get into the hyper loop game himself. But I really wanted to cover that weird controversy of hyper loop one first and get that out of the way. We'll come back in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, let's talk about hyper loop transportation technologies for a second. This is, like I said, was the other big startup to come out shortly after Elon Musk's announcement. Arriva was new to the scene, but hyper loop transportation technologies and Hyperloop one have been around for a while. So this company is also using mag lev technology, but in this case it's passive mag lev, not active mag lev. Now that means that part of the system, the system that would actually be lining the the tubes, is just unempowered coils of conductive wire, and so you're not putting any electricity through them and are not acting as electro magnets on their own. Uh. This method was pioneered by a physicist named Richard Post and the concept itself ends up getting a little complicated, So I'm not going to dive too far into it because it would require almost a full episode all on its own. But basically, what you have are these various coils of conductive wire, and then you take these magnets and you put them in a specific configuration so that their polls are lined up in a very specific way with respect to one another. And I'm I'm glossing over this because again, to get into real details, we'd have to dive into physics pretty deeply. If you pass this array of magnets over the coils of conductive wire. It induces uh a charge to flow through those those coils, and that in turn creates an electromagnetic field. The key to this is you have to get the capsule up to a certain speed before this will happen. But once you do get to that speed, then you are able to achieve magnetic levitation with a passive system. So you don't have to send any electricity through that that those coils of wire that would line the the hyperloop tube. That means that you're saving a lot on energy. You just have to have the right UH systems aboard the actual capsule, but you don't have to power the whole tube itself, so that cuts down on your electricity needs. It also cuts down on the cost of operation, so you end up being able to pass the savings onto maybe the consumer, or maybe you're just pocketing a whole lot of extra profit. But it's a really cool form of magnetic levitation. UH. The cool thing about it also is that in the case of some sort of problem that there is some sort of power loss on board the capsule. For example, the the capsule will start to coast and it once it dips below a certain speed a threshold, then it will not be able to create the electro magnetic field or won't be able to induce the electromagnetic field from these coils of wire, and the capsule will come to arrest on the bottom of the tube floor. So in a way, it's kind of a safety measure because in a catastrophic failure, the capsules are all going to slow down on their own and then gradually come to arrest because just by the act of slowing down, they can no longer remain above the tube floor. Hyperloops hyper Loop Technologies leadership team includes Dirk all Born who is a co founder of jump Starter Incorporated, and Bebop g Gresta, who is another entrepreneur, and both of them have extensive experience and starting and funding ventures, So these are people who are used to starting up big companies or getting funding for big companies. They have agreements with lots of different cities, including cities in South Korea, Indonesia, and France. In Czech Republic, In the UH they have an agreement with Abu Dhabi UH. There's an agreement in Slovakia all to construct hyperloop systems in the future. But all of this is really early on obviously, so it's the earliest phases of the hyperloop game from that aspect. Now recently, as of the recording of this podcast, Elon Musk has actually decided to get into this game himself. So when he first announced this back in two thousand thirteen, he did so as it as an open source project, meaning that he was allowing anyone to take this idea and run with it and alter it in any way they wanted to in order to build the sort of systems that he had in mind. So he was saying, look, I've got this great idea, but I don't have time for this. I'm going into space and putting people in electric vehicles and other stuff. Uh. Being an international man of mystery, perhaps I don't know. I don't have time to get into this as well, So someone else do it. Well, now he's saying, you know what, I think I'm gonna do this, And he has said that he's getting into this as well. And in fact SpaceX has been working on building out a tube that would be not not quite hyperlop, but is sort of a stepping stone toward hyperloop technologies, and they've talked about also building a hyper loop test facility in Texas. So part of this involves a new company that Elon Musk announced, the TBC Company or the Boring Company insert tons of pun jokes here. The boring company in this case does not mean a company that is uninteresting and we'll put you to sleep, although it may also do that. It is talking about a company that bores holes into the earth or tunneling purposes. So it uses boring machines, machines that bore a hole into the ground so that you can build out tunnels. Now, they didn't build the boring machines, they bought them. In fact, as far as I know, they only have one right now, and it is named good And they decided to name their machines after literary characters and figures, so Goodo being from Beckett's play Waiting for Godot and uh. I don't know if that's a commentary about literature, about whether or not literature is supposed to be boring. I hope it isn't. I was a literature major in college, and I would find that deeply insulting. Not that I think Elon Musk would really care about that, but still, come on, Ellen, be a nice guy. So these machines would bore tunnels into the earth, presumably for a either an underground transportation system within a city that would not be hyper loop. Instead, it would use electric skates. Imagine slot cars. If you've ever played with a slot car system where you've got these little cars and they fit into a slot. They snap into a slot on a track, and then use a little controller and you can make the car zoom around the track. It's not dissimilar to that. Instead of slot cars, you would have these sleds that would be attached to this underground tunnel system, and what you would do is, if you wanted to travel across town, you would drive your car onto a platform of some sort that would lower you down onto one of these sleds, and then you would put the car in park and then the sled would zoom off, So it's like you're in a parking space that is moving. The sled itself can move through the tunnels, and it can even join in two tunnels that have existing sleds already moving through it using UH software. So it's essentially like an autonomous car, except instead of the car being autonomous, it's the sled itself. It's programmed to know where you want to be dropped off, and it picks you up, takes you through the tunnel system, drops you off wherever you need to go, and it can do so at a very high speed, at least according to Musk's design, like a twenty miles per hours, so pretty fast. And again this is for intercity travel from one point in a city to another. And the reason for this, Musk says, is to alleviate traffic issues. He says, there are only two solutions you have to alleviating traffic ultimately in big urban centers, and that is either to go up in the case of flying cars, or to go down in the case of tunneling. And he says, by tunneling, you can create this whole three dimensional transportation system that can get you anywhere within a city super super fast, uh, avoiding street traffic. So it's an interesting idea. Well, that was what the boring company was supposed to be. But he also said, oh and also you could if you wanted to, you know, dig hyper loop tunnels. So remember originally he had talked about hyper loop being a tube on top of pylons, but now he's all so talking about the possibility of building a hyperloop that would be subterranean. You would go down a couple dozen feet, and then you would dig a tunnel to UH to house this hyper loop tube and you would go through that way. He says that you know, this would be less expensive than other tunneling companies, largely because he's thinking of building one way travel tubes, so instead of it being a double wide tunnel, it would be single wide. He says, they would have to be only fourteen feet wide compared to your standard tunnels, which are twice that length, and that would speed things up and make them less expensive. By speed things up. I think he's talking in relative terms because your average boring machine moves slower than a snail's pace. And that's not an exaggeration, that's legit. They actually move slower than snails move. Now, Elon Musk wants to use this potentially to build this hyper loop system, and he tweeted not long ago in that he had received quote verbal approval and the quote from the White House to build out a hyper loop system that would connect DC to New York City and also potentially connect other cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia within this loop. So verbal commitment isn't a contract. There are lots of other layers that any sort of agreement would have to go through before you could actually build out such a system. We're talking state level, we're talking city level, county level. There are tons of different layers that stand in the way of building out the system, and a verbal agreement doesn't really hold up as anything really firm. So we still have a long way to go. But if Elon Musk has his way, he would end up building out this system on the East Eastern seaboard, and you would have a way of getting UM Washington, d C. To New York City in less than an hour going more than six hundred miles per hour on one of these hyperloop trains. UM Obviously, we're still in the early days. Back in when we talked about this the first time, it was all very conceptual and no one had really built anything, not even a testing facility. Yet today we can say that there are testing facilities out there and they're showing some promising results. We still don't know exactly how expensive it will be to build out these systems, or how much interference or or resistance they might encounter at a political level, there haven't been enough studies on the safety of such systems or potential environmental impact. I'm still curious to find out about how all these systems will be powered. If Elon musk system can in fact be powered by solar power, if he does a subterranean version, is he going to align the upper level with solar panels to power this hyper loop or will it in fact draw its electricity from some other source. We don't have any details for these to answer these questions as it stands, so I'm sure assuming that tech stuff is still alive and kicking in the future, when hyperloop either becomes a reality or is abandoned altogether, we can revisit this again and talk about what did happen, what didn't happen, what went right, what went wrong. I can say that I want it to succeed. I want this to be something that works. I want to see cities connected in this way where you can have very fast, convenient travel. I want to see it at a price where the average person could in fact take advantage of it. If it's twenty dollars a ticket ends up being a reality, I think that's great. A lot of people have suggested that perhaps the expenses would be much greater than what what's anticipated, and therefore the price per ticket would be way way higher, which means you ultimately create a transportation system for rich people, and rich people, while they can afford to take it, there's not enough of them to support an entire transportation system on their own. You have to have something that can have the volume of passengers needed to keep it going with that flow of revenue. Ah. Otherwise you're just gonna have a very expensive toy that ends up getting a little bit of use out of the gate, and then overtime winds down because there's just not enough financial support. Even if all the technology works, the economics might not work. And that's the interesting thing about tech is that sometimes all your parts are working just fine, it's just they're not working enough. I've got a lot more to say, but before i get into the next part, let's take a quick break. All right, Let's do a where are they now? Run down on some of the that we chatted about in that episode and something we didn't really chat about because their stories had not yet begun. In two thousand seventeen, with regard to hyper loop, brogan bam Brogan, I mentioned they had the company Arivo. Well that that's no more. That's how quickly things can move in this space. Um. In seventeen, I was talking about a brand new company, and in twenty two that company is long gone now. Arrivo initially landed a government deal in Colorado and proposed conducting a feasibility study for building out a hyper loop like transportation system in the city of Denver, and it would use pods rather than like train cars. And the description usually said like you would drive up onto what would effectively be a sled that would hold your vehicle, and you would travel through the system in your vehicle on this sled which would levitate above the the track. So you drive your car into one of those pods and then get whisked off to your destination, for example, the airport, and you would avoid traffic congestion along the way and get there in minutes. But by the end of one year, after the episode you just heard had been recorded, or EVO ran out of money and shut down, and you might wonder what kind of progress the company had made on that whole building out you know, a test track and conducting a feasibility study Well, the answer to that is that no construction ever broke ground on a test track. The company was not able to complete its feasibility study, and Wired reported that there wasn't even evidence that the company had created a proof of concept model at any scale, So it just didn't happen. Now that being said, I don't think it was a hoax or a scam. For one thing, the government deal was for two thou dollars. Now that is a lot of money. If you were to offer me two hut dollars the little cash and what would pop up in my eyeballs. But for a tech startup, it's nothing. Two dollars. You've burned through that in a month. You can make way more than that if you were trying to hustle a scam by peddling it in Silicon Valley, if that was your goal, If your goal was to scam people out of money, you'd make way more money doing that. So I really do think this was a sincere effort. It just it fizzled out once the challenges of actually building these things out in the real world became more apparent. Now I recently saw Bam Brogan's name in another news report, this one was from tech Crunch, which was published an article saying that the former Hyperloop Technologies co founder is serving as an advisor to a startup called Craft Aerospace, and Craft Aerospace has proposed the construction and operation of a fleet of vertical takeoff and landing aircraft meant to transport people across, you know, relatively small regions such as between Sanford go in Los Angeles, So essentially kind of filling that same niche as what hyper Loop was being pitched as um fascinating technology. By the way, their vital technology uses a totally different approach than say the osprey, which is a good thing because the osprey is not very reliable. But uh, that's for another episode. So folks are still trying to figure out how to get between the Bay Area and La La Land efficiently. That appears to be like the metric that we use now. According to his LinkedIn Bam Brogan is currently involved in a company called Jicks Jocks. That's j I x j O X Jicks Chocks Design Group in fact, and that company has described on LinkedIn as a company that quote designs and builds rad objects for the human experience. We design and fabricate with innovative technologies and using state of the art processes, materials, and codings, often in applications outside of what they were created. Four love rad, Live rad stay rad end quote. I could not have made that up if I tried. I did try and go to the company's website, but I got a too many requests error, so I I don't know anyway. As for the company that was formerly known as hyper Loop one and even before that hyper Loop Technologies, uh, the Virgin Group, Richard Branson's company formed a partnership with hyper Loop one and the company rebranded as Virgin hyper Loop one, but in it rebranded again, this time becoming Virgin hyper Loop, though some journalists still call it Virgin hyper Loop one, which is interesting. But by that time Richard Branson had had joined and then subsequently left the board of directors, so he came and went. The company conducted several test runs of its technology, including some with actual passengers inside a train. Now, they did not get anywhere close those to the top speeds that the hyper loop was, you know, being touted as capable of, Like, there wasn't anywhere close to six hundred miles per hour, but they were demonstrating that it could work with people and that they would be safe. So that did happen, but it's not been a smooth ride for the company. Rob Lloyd, who had served as the CEO for hyper Loop for three years, left to be replaced by a guy named Jay Walder. This happened in two thousand and eighteen. Walder left the company in early one, apparently due to some disagreement between him and presumably the board regarding company strategy. Josh Gigel, who was an original hyper Loop Technologies engineer. In fact, he talks about being a co founder of the company that he was one of the original team members. Uh. He became the new CEO in early but he stuck around his head honcho for less than a year. He left the company in October of one, meaning that at that point the last original co founder of hyper Loop had left the company. Raja Narayanan is the company's chief financial officer and is serving as an interim CEO. Other executives who have bailed on Virgin hyper Loop include Sebastian Vigneron, who headed up product development, Brian Gallmer, who was the head of engineering, and Aaron Kearns, the head of operations. They all left. It's generally not seen as a positive sign when several top executives leave your organization. Uh, but you know, I don't have any insider information on what's going on with Virgin hyper Loop. According to The Telegraph, Virgin hyper Loop rep has said the company currently plans to concentrate on supply chain logistics rather than serve as a passenger transportation company. Now, that seems like an odd reversal, considering Hyperloop not so long ago was really promoting its passenger tests and it even released a concept video last summer. And I think, like June about what it would be like to travel as a passenger aboard a future hyperloop train. But maybe the passenger plans are just on the back burner for now, and it may well be because of the various administrative and legal obstacles that stand in the way of building out full infrastructure for passenger transportation. I think this is yet again a great reminder that you can create technology that technically can do what you wanted to do, Like you could find the technological solutions to achieve your goals. But it's possible that you know, that's just a tiny sliver of the effort you're going to have to do in order to bring your vision to reality, that all the restless stuff ends up being way more difficult than you anticipated, and that even though you've solved some of the technological, you know, challenges, you still have everything else to deal with, like regulations and laws and environmental studies and all that kind of stuff, and that that is where you're gonna encounter incredibly difficult challenges uh to overcome. You know. It's it's all that stuff. It's infrastructure is hard, right, It's there's a reason why it took decades to build out infrastructure that we still rely upon today. And you know, we we end up spending huge amounts of money repairing ancient infrastructure rather than building out new stuff because we know it's hard. It requires enormous investments in time, money, and effort, and not every company is really up for that. Now, that doesn't mean I think that Virgin hyperloop is never going to be transporting people, or that some other hyperloop based company isn't going to do it either. It may very well happen. I just think it's a case where people are learning very hard lessons along the way. All Right, I hope you enjoyed that update to an episode. I hope all of you are well. I'm doing as well as I possibly can. I'm actually out of breath. So fun times with COVID. If you have any suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, please reach out to me on Twitter, uh the Handles, text Stuff hs W. Maybe you just want to say hi and say I hope you get better. That would be great too, because I gotta tell you, isolating in a single room sucks. But hope you folks are well and I will talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.