How the Hyperloop Will Work

If you’re out there, Elon Musk, this one’s for you (although you already know everything in this episode). Everybody else, buckle in and sit back for a 700 mph thrill ride from LA to SF in 35 minutes - coming soon!

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, March is tripod month, my friend, and you know
what that means. Yes, that means it's time to let
people know about your favorite podcasts, just to share the
sheer joy of podcast listening. That's right, it's t r
y pod still in nascent industry. A lot of people
don't know what podcasts are and helps everybody out if

(00:20):
you would go out and just say, hey, family member,
who I see it? Thanksgiving once a year? Right, you
should try out this thing called a podcast. Here's what
they are. Here's a cool show you should try, and
here's how to get it. Yeah, and it doesn't have
to be our show, just any podcast you like in
general that you think someone else would like, just share it. Yeah,
so get on board the dry pod train. Welcome to

(00:44):
stuff you should know from how stuff works dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant say hi hello, and there's Jerry Jerry.
Jerry can't talk because the tape is still holding after

(01:07):
all these years. Yeah, it's amazing. Well, at any rate
it stuff you should know that tape has gotten kind
of gross that there's like hair stuck to it. We should.
We should swap it out every now and then, she screams,
though every time we do. Well, the little slit that
we have cut so she can drink her mi so
through a straw is getting gamy. Yeah, I think some

(01:30):
of that miso has a little bit of meat in it.
Oh you didn't like that one? Huh? No, I find
that satisfying. Um. I find it ironic that we're um
podcasting today on this fast thing because I am. I've
had the lowest energy today any day I can think

(01:52):
of in a long time. They need to bring Surge
back just for days like today, man, because I would
strongly recommend you drink a Surge brand beverage. I'm not
into those things, dude. Serge was so good. I'm just
I'm not into any of them. But I've had I've
tried one once when I was super low energy. I'm
not gonna name it, but um, it made me feel

(02:12):
like I was gonna have a heart attack. Oh yeah,
it's like this doesn't feel good? Yeah, no, not at all.
So what about coffee? You've been drinking coffee lately? Right?
Have you fallen off of that? I've fallen off, but
I did. I had a triple this morning? Whoa triple espresso?
That's why you feel low energy right now? You're crashing? Man?

(02:33):
Well I was. That was low before and low after.
So it's just the thing. Are you okay? I'm fine.
Personal problems that I don't feel like telling a million
people about. Do we have a million listeners? Oh? I
don't know. Let's say, what's a listener? What's a download?
Are these bots? Who knows? No one knows? Oh that's good.

(02:53):
That was a nice conversation. Well, I'm I'm super hyped
up chucking you? Why? Uh? Because you had a serge
energy drink. I didn't know. Because literally every project that
Elon Musk has his hands on I am jazzed about.
He was in our short lived television show supposedly he

(03:16):
was your man crush hero idol. Yes, yeah, and actually
it has grown exponentially since then. Like the more I
found out about him, the more I actually have come
to I think he's a pretty cool dude. Like that,
would you have such a crush on him if his
name was, like, you know, Bill Burrels. I actually have

(03:37):
a crush on a guy named Bill Burrels. So yes,
A right, Elon Musk sounds so you know, exotic and
James BONDI, oh, it definitely does. He definitely has one
of those guns that slides out of his sleeve when
he needs it. But he can always talk his way
out of anything that's is real. But it shoots kisses. Right,
So anyway, I'm not the only one. Um you mean

(03:59):
actually loves the guy a lot too. I'm sure you
gotta watch out for that though. Yeah. Well it's it's
like a nice, respectful love from a distance, so I'm
not threatened by just don't let them in a room together. Right.
She has this t shirt. UM it says save us Elan,
which is pretty cool. Yeah, and she tweeted to him
last night actually um asking him to design well, it

(04:22):
was on behalf of our dog Momo. She was asking
him to design um safe dog cars or safe dog
seats for cars, specifically testless to start, I think they
have dog restraining systems that are to use. They do,
But I mean, imagine if Elon Musk put his like
even half of a percentage of his brain towards designing

(04:47):
something like that just on the back of a cocktail nap,
can it be awesome? Yeah? MoMA would be in a
like a plasma bag right with like one of those
Hannibal Lecter masks. So she looks so cute. Oh boy.
So I bring up elam Musk though, because um, well,
we're talking about one of his projects, but technically it's

(05:08):
not actually one of his projects because this the hyper loop,
was um basically a concept that he thought of about
a fifty seven page white paper on it, just roughly
outlining some of the challenges the problems, and then did
something really unusual, especially for massive transportation projects, which is

(05:28):
what the hyper loop is. He open sources that. He said,
here you go, everybody, let's see what you can do
with it. Somebody take this and run with it. He's
kind of big on that though, right Yeah. I think
though that um yeah, I don't think he did that
with like tesla um or SpaceX or anything like that.
I think that's all very like private and hush hush.
This one was. This was like, here's a really good idea.

(05:50):
Here is how you would do it. Somebody go do it.
He It's yeah, this is unusual I think even for him.
He uh he open source something I can't remember what.
Maybe it was the the the home battery system or something.
Oh yeah, yeah, maybe he opened sources things that he
doesn't feel like you can make a lot of dough on. Well,
I don't know that battery thing he said that, Um,

(06:11):
I think he's going to use that to solve Australia's
um black and brown out problems. Oh yeah, all right,
well who knows. I just like that he does that occasionally. Yeah, no,
that's what I'm saying. Cool cat, Yeah, agreed. So let's
talk hyper loop you want to? Yeah, So the idea
here originally, and I've kind of learned to through reading this.

(06:33):
We're gonna talk a little bit about his UM his
boring company pun intended UM as well at the end.
But um, I've learned that when Elon Musk gets irritated
with something, good things happen. Right. If he has a
problem and he's like, you know, I'm tired of sitting
in traffic or flying from l A to San Francisco

(06:55):
is a real drag. Uh, he gets that cocktail fifty
seven pages of cocktail napkins, and he said, you know what,
how about if we developed a high speed transport system
forget your maglevs? Does only go I know you're building
one California for sixty billion dollars. But that thing only
goes two hundred miles an hour. It's not even maglev.

(07:16):
It's just a straight up bullet train. Oh it's not
even I thought it was a maglev now no, no,
it's a it's as he he called it, the UM
like world's slowest high speed train or something like two
hundred miles an hour, right right, which I mean two
hundred miles an hour. That's super fast. How how could
you possibly improve on that? Well by putting people in

(07:39):
a pod in a tube and shooting them at almost
mock one in twenty three minutes I'm sorry, thirty five
minutes from l A to San Francisco or vice versa.
That's and I know he wants mock one so bad. Yeah,
I don't know what the problem is. I I don't
know if UM like the the sonic boom would throw

(08:01):
off the whole thing, the whole UM closed system. You
mean make it cooler. Yeah, no, it definitely would. But
he in the in his white paper, he makes reference
to the shock waves that are created as you get
close to the speed of sound and the supersonic threshold.
And I was reading UM the right. Stuff that Tom
wolfbook about the early space program, right, And he was

(08:25):
talking about Chuck Yeager when he broke the speed of sound. Um,
they had no idea what happened on the other side
of a sonic boom. No one had ever gone that fast, right,
And it was Yeager who figured out that. He was
just sure that once you hit sonic boom, everything would
smooth out. But the closer and closer and closer you
got to the sonic threshold, the harder it was for

(08:47):
to for to keep the plane stable. He said, it
felt like it was gonna break up. His teeth were
like breaking off into little pieces. UM. So I would
imagine that if you're doing that inside it closed and
enclosed tube and start to hit those same kind of
shock waves, it would it would screw things up. So
I would guess that's why they're they're not taking it
to supersonic level, gotcha. So there it's a purposeful thing. UM.

(09:11):
I did look into makwe and apparently it varies, and
I never realized that, um, we should do something on
that at some point. Mack one varies. Yeah, it depends
on the local conditions, um, Like mainly temperature and air
pressure as to how fast you need to be going.
I mean it's generally in that wheelhouse of seven hundred
and sixty two, you know. I'm not sure how high,

(09:33):
but I saw seven sixty seven. Uh. And it just
depends sort of where you are the object speed as
it relates to the conditions, which is interesting. I got you. Well,
that's one of the benefits of this hyper loop that
he's proposed is it's it's enclosed, it's encapsulated, it's UM

(09:54):
it's a closed system, which means that it can be controlled, right,
so you can control everything from the temperature, to the
air pressure, to all that stuff, which we'll get into.
But the hyper loop, we I guess we should say,
is UM this proposal for the line, like you said,
from l A to San Francisco, and it's two tubes

(10:15):
side by side. They're actually welded together, but they are separate.
That UM form, this closed system on either end is
a UM a way for the cars to go one way,
turn around and go back the other way. And like
you said, it takes thirty five minutes to to for
this this journey, a one way journey. I don't even
know if you call that a journey. Uh a, what

(10:37):
would you call it? Just a yeah, hey, so it's
whatever it is. It takes thirty five minutes to go
three D and fifty miles. It is five d sixty
three kilometers. We should say hello, rest of the world. Uh.
And he proposed initially that this thing would only cost

(10:59):
about six billion dollars, which the entire world scoffed at
that more than I think they scoffed at any other
part of the plan. Um. I mean, you know, people
were like, first of all, this train that we're building
in California sixty sixty billion, and the Bay Bridge in
San Francisco, we're just we're just redoing that thing for

(11:20):
six billion, for the same price that you think you
can build this George Jetson machine. Uh but you know,
who knows. We'll see what it ends up costing. But
six billion dollars sounds like a ton of money. Um.
The thing that shocked me, I think, well, first of all,
let's not ruin the price tag just yet, um, except

(11:41):
to say that it's shocking. But uh so, so what
you do is you would you would have this tube
mounted on these pylons. The pylons are about their reinforced concrete.
They're about a hundred feet apart from one another, and
they vary in height because of the train. You know,
he's gonna run along. I've five ye right down the

(12:01):
median is as long as possible, or as they call
it in Los Angeles, the five uh, and it would
be you know, at vary in height hundred feet depending
on the terrain. And UM. Part of the reason they
put it on the five was because it just makes
sense because there's already already highway there. They wouldn't have
to like, you know, buy people out of their homes
and businesses to build it. And UM, I like to

(12:24):
think another reason is that they could just make fun
of people sitting in traffic right when this thing, when
you hear that sonic boom as it goes by. UM.
The other thing about the pylons too, is it has
a much It creates a much um smaller footprint on
the actual ground because the whole thing is raised up

(12:44):
in the air and those pylons are they're gonna be
twenty ft wherever possible. It's gonna be about the average
height off of the ground of the hyperloop. Earthquake proof supposedly,
which is a big deal. Yeah, there's gonna be dampers
in the pylons um so that it could take a
pretty pretty decent sized earthquake. And then I guess the
just the whole process of running this system will cause

(13:07):
some expansion and contraction and so the whole things it's
got to be pretty well um together, you know, I think.
So you can't make it loosey goosey, so um the
any any movement, it's gonna be um conversated for in
these dampers in the pylons and he sway and he
up and down and barrel rolls any of that stuff. Yeah,

(13:30):
I'm sure that was I mean, besides the movement, but
just building something that travels that fast full of people
along the fault lines out there, that was probably a
very early consideration, Like am I just stupid for even?
But then he went on. So when he first started, uh,

(13:54):
I guess what the people like Elon Musk would call
Blue Sky Territory. People started throwing out idea as he
assembled a team, and they were like, hey, you remember
those cool pneumatic tubes and offices. Sometimes you gotta look backwards,
you know, at old technology to realize that you're wrong.
And they had these fans that would shoot, you know,

(14:14):
a letter from Florida floor through a tube, so satisfying
the man. Those are the best. It's the same thing
that they used them when you do a drive through
banking thing. Yeah, which does anyone do that anymore? All Right?
I can't remember the last time I went to a bank.
I'm like, I've got too much gasoline in my car.
I need to get rid of some of it, and

(14:35):
I need to bank and a lollipop. I'm going to
combine those two. So, uh, they had that idea to
use these giant fans, and he said, you know, I
don't know if he personally said this, but they basically said,
not a bad idea. It is possible to build a
fan that large, but over three fifty miles that's going

(14:56):
to create a lot of friction with this thing, and
it would explode. You know. Something interesting is somebody actually
created that very system in London in eighteen sixty four
and exploded. It didn't explode. It it ran for a
year apparently without major problems. It's called the Crystal Palace
pneumatic railway. I think I've heard of that. The thing

(15:18):
is is It wasn't trying to go a thousand kilometers
an hour. It was just puts them along, like isn't
the future amazing? Or in a pneumatic railway. But I
mean it worked, right, So it had Actually that had worked.
But for what the hyper loop is trying to be
pneumatic just it wouldn't work. It would It would just

(15:39):
create too much drag pushing a column of air three
d and fifty miles too much friction. Yeah, so the
pneumatic one, he said, no, we're not doing that. By
the way, that made me think the exploding thing. Did
you know that cars don't really explode like a car
on fire? Oh yeah, I think there's a lot of
like safety feet. Does that keep it from doing that? Right? No,

(16:02):
it's just gasoline just doesn't explode like that. It can
catch fire very fast and cause a big fire very quickly,
but it's not like a movie where a car catches
on fire and then goes boom really loud. Yeah. I
feel like Chuck Norris really misled me all these years,
well in many many ways. But I saw a car

(16:23):
it made me think of because I saw a car
on fire the other day on the highway and the
people were running away from it, and which is you know,
it's probably not a bad idea anyway, but um, I
was kind of curious, so I looked it up and
apparently that doesn't happen. So I if my car is
every one fire, I'm just gonna like stand right next
to it like the coolest dude in the world. You
just light a cigarette off exactly. You're like, I don't

(16:46):
even smoke. But I'm not recommending that I would still
get away from a burning car if I were you
people time. That's sage advice. Uh So anyway, Um, the
other they came up with another idea and they said, well,
you know, we mentioned Maglev trains. They said, that's a
pretty good idea to get trains to go fast. And
we did a we did a whole episode on that, right, Yeah,

(17:07):
we did a Maglev episode. It was pretty good. And
I think when we did the Maglev episode, everybody's like,
you have to do a hyper loop episode. So we
go everybody, well, it was probably good that we did
it years later, you know. Um, and you know Maglev,
when you when you put two magnets together, uh in
the correct way, that will either snap together or they
will have that, um, you know, they will push each

(17:29):
other apart. And we also did one on magnets, so
refer to that for for that magic explanation. But um,
the idea is that there what you create is no friction, right,
And there's a couple of problems. We talked about drag
and friction, or we're gonna talk about drag, but those
are sort of the two issues with the hyper loop.
Those are the things that will make something slow down, right.

(17:51):
And there's like really no problem with the maglev train
except that it's extraordinarily expensive to build track. Right. So
Musk was like, well, we maybe we could put a
maglev train in this tube in the hyper loop, because
there's drag even on a maglev train, but in a
vacuum there would not be. No But that's what he
was saying is Okay, well we can put it in

(18:12):
a vacuum and it would just go zoom and you'd
be there in like half of a second. The problem
is is it would be extraordinarily expensive, um to build
and operate. And the reason it would be so expensive
to operate is because the closer and closer you get
to creating a full or perfect vacuum, the more expensive

(18:34):
the pumping operation gets right. So you know, if you're like, uh,
if you're one or two percent away from a perfect vacuum,
you're spending five bucks pumping out the air to get
to that point. But it's ay a hundred trillion dollars
to get to a perfect vacuum. I don't think that
those numbers are accurate, but you get the picture, right. Well. Yeah,

(18:56):
And the other thing too is it's it's nearly impossible
to create thing over that distance. Uh. Musk himself even
said if there's one small leaky seal or small crack
anywhere and that three fifty mile tube, then everything's down.
So one of the other problems when they were in
blue Sky Territory, which I guess was starting to look

(19:16):
like dark Sky territory at this point, um wash, what
if we had something like a syringe, Like we're moving
air through this tube, but it's pushing this entire column
of air. And they basically said it would just go
too slow unless you built it super big, and then

(19:37):
it would go too fast, which I don't I don't
fully get right, um because well, I think about it
when you're pushing air, when you're pushing something through a
tube a cylinder, it starts pushing the air ahead of it,
which slows it down. Right. The only way for that
to um to get away, to get around that is
to make your little whatever you're pushing through the tube small,

(20:00):
or make the two bigger. So he he looked at
all these challenges, you know, the problem with a vacuum,
the syringe effect, um, the idea of newmatics, and he said,
I think I'm onto something with a closed loop, a
closed tube and pushing something through it. So I just
got to figure out the details. And he did, and

(20:20):
he came up with the hyper loop. And we'll tell
you how he solved a lot of these problems, uh
in just a minute, all right. So he does not

(20:50):
work in a vacuum, even though he works on a
vacuum that was terrible. But he has a great team
of brilliant, brilliant people. Um. So he gets his engineers,
the same folks who work on the Tesla and the
same people at SpaceX, and uh, I get the feeling
that these men and women can kind of do anything

(21:11):
when they put their mind to it. So, like you said,
they proposed these two tubes a northbound line in a
southbound line along I five, and he said, what we
want to do is reduced drag and reduced friction, the
kind of two things that will slow down something that
you want to go super fast. Uh. And if you notice, uh,

(21:33):
jets fly really high in the air at high altitudes
because it's less dense, so you're gonna have less drag.
So he said, we can recreate that by uh manipulating
the air pressure in that system in a big, big way. Yeah,
by dropping it tremendously, like hugely. So he figured out
that you don't have to have a vacuum. Like, sure,

(21:53):
a vacuum is nice, but it's just so prohibitively expensive
to pump the air fully out of an enclos system
and all it takes his one little leak in the
whole thing's toast, right, So he figured out that you
could still get roughly the same effect by lowering the pressure,
not to a vacuum, but just super super low. And
what he settled on was about a hundred pascals of

(22:14):
air pressure within the tube. That's extremely low air pressure.
It's something like a sixth of the air pressure on Mars,
which is pretty thin, but if you haven't been to Mars.
It's actually about a thousandth of the air pressure at
sea level on Earth. So it's significantly lower pressure air,
which just means the air is thinner, which means things
will move through that tube with that low pressure air

(22:36):
much more easily, with much less drag. So the other
point to UM having very very low but not a
full vacuum as far as air pressure goes, as even
if there was a crack or something in the tube,
you can still pump that air. You can overcome it
um by pumping air out a little more, but it's
not gonna raise your cost of five or ten trillion

(22:59):
dollars again because not creating a vacuum and just a
little duct tape and you're all set right. So it's
a durable system that you can do with existing technology. Right,
So you've got your drag um solved in a way.
But then you have the friction problem. Um, what do
we put this thing on wheels? Uh? Do we want

(23:20):
it on magnets? He kind of had already decided against that,
so he said, what if we put it on skis
and did sort of like they like, And it's a
perfect way to describe it in this article like an
air hockey game, where these tiny little holes blowing air
up from the bottom, and that is what makes the

(23:41):
train not have contact with I guess the track whatever
that would look like, right, or the inside wall of
the tube. Yeah, So the little ski it basically it's
like you just said, it floats on a cushion of air,
very very tiny cushion of air, something like less than
half of an inch I think, So it's just barely
above the surface of the tube. But that's all it takes.

(24:06):
And you've got a little cushion of air that it
floats on. And since it's already thin air, um, it
just zooms along as fast as you like with very
little drag. So the wind gets under the ski because
it's kicked up a little bit in the front. And
then amazingly, astoundingly, they also designed these skis so that
little bursts of compressed air shoot out of the skis

(24:29):
to help support that cushion whenever it starts to erode,
like say at a turn, or because it starts to
get too hot underneath. Yeah. I mean, ideally you would
do this all on a straight line, but um, you
just can't do that when you're designing it to go,
you know, as as far as from l A to
uh San Francisco. Um, so to to get this thing, uh,

(24:52):
to to continue this air flow because it is a
closed system. They have a really really powerful electric compressor
on the front of the odd that pumps air to
the back. Yeah. Instead of forcing the air to go
around it, it allows a lot of it to go
straight through. And when it gets compressed again, some of
it gets shot to the skis, but a bunch of

(25:13):
it gets shot to the back, which helps um which
helps accelerated I think, yeah, but that's not how it
gets going. Uh. He had that, you know, the idea
with the magnets. He didn't completely discard it in order
to get it started. And the at the beginning of
your trip, Uh, he does use magnets on the skis
and he gives it. They basically said, it provides for

(25:34):
the initial shove. This electromagnetic pulse gets it going. And
he said at that point, you're gonna feel it when
you start from zero, sort of like you're taking off
in a plane basically. But then after that, once you
get up to speed, he said, you can't even feel
like it doesn't feel like you're moving basically, right, which
is amazing. Do you remember our electricity episode. We're just
both so blown away with how electricity is generated. Yeah, like,

(25:58):
that's what that is. So the actual inside of the tube,
You've got a stat or, right, which is basically just
a um ah, a magnet with a groove in it
and then attached to the skis on them. On the
capsule the pod, you've got the rotor and what you

(26:19):
when you put them together, you have a linear induction motor, right,
So you run one through just like when you run
like a coil of copper through a magnet, it generates electricity.
If you run metal through a magnet in a in
a straight line, it will also generate electricity. And then
when it does that, like you said, that's how they

(26:39):
actually accelerate from zero to say three hundred. Then after
you're at three hundred, you're going through a city going
three hundred miles an hour because there's almost no drag whatsoever.
You're just coasting. And then as you get out of
the city and they step you up to full speed,
you go through another linear induction motor. And when this
this rotor goes through the stator, an electrical charge is

(27:01):
created and it's like the tube. This is Elon Musk's words,
it's like the tube is chasing the capsule and it
just speeds it up to seven and sixty miles about
a thousand or so kilometers an hour, and you just
coast along fast as you like, going between l A
and San Francisco. Yeah, and these these motors are sort
of placed along the way, and I get the feeling

(27:22):
that works in concert with that air, and I mean
it sounds like something from the future. But well, and
we'll get to it here in a bit. It's actually
kind of happening in a way, but um, we won't
talk about that quite yet, right, right, So this sounds
very cool as it is, uh, the actual experience on

(27:42):
one of these things, because it's Elon Musk, you know,
it's not gonna be uh you know, like a like
a chicken bus, even though I love a good chicken bus.
We've been on him in Guatemala, right, Um, so he
wanted to make it a little more posh obviously. Oh,
what this thing is. It's a pod that holds twenty

(28:03):
eight people, got fourteen rows of two. Um, there's a
little luggage compartments, you can put your junk. Apparently they're
going to design them one day, hopefully where if you're
I guess I would imagine it would They would charge
you a little bit of dough for this, but you
can put your car in it and transport your car
as well. Well. They have that's like he has basically
two designs. He proposed two designs once, like the regular

(28:26):
passenger only one and the other is a passenger and
a car, which makes a lot of sense because you know,
you're zipping from l A to San Francisco, just shouting
the future. But then when you get to the other end,
you still need your car. You don't want to rent
a car like yeah, uh, it should drop you off
at like you know, car rental row. Yeah. I think

(28:48):
those would build up around the stations for sure. So um,
they would take off about every thirty seconds or so,
uh during peak travel time, and you think, man, that
sounds dangerous. You gotta remember, thirty seconds later, this thing's
already twenty three miles down the loop, so there's a
good amount of space in between even though it's only
thirty seconds, which is a benefit of going three miles

(29:10):
an hour. At startup. Uh. And supposedly, and this is
the thing that blows me away more than anything else.
He said it would be about twenty dollars each way.
That's so, that's how much you could charge and just
break even, I think, is what he was saying. That's crazy.
So in other words, it would be five dollars a ticket. Yeah,

(29:32):
depending on who actually built it and started operating it.
I'm sure. Yeah. And I imagine, like you get the
romantic notion of being in Los Angeles at at three
fifteen and saying I want to I want to hit
Napa Valley at happy hour. Um, I don't think that'll
be possible, Like, surely this thing will be booked months
and months in advance. Well, supposedly they say that the

(29:57):
the at the at the thirty seconds I think thirty
seconds of departure That's what I'm trying to say at
rush hour, and then significantly less at other times. Um.
They say that that is enough in and of itself
to account for like the seven million people a year
who traveled between San Francisco and l A. UM, I

(30:21):
don't know if that's by air. I don't know if
that's by air or not. But there's there was some
number that this number satisfied that UM said it covers
everybody who would want it. So I don't know. I
wonder if that's if they're just saying for like business
travelers or something, because once you get this thing going,
you are going to have people like I want to

(30:41):
have dinner in l A tonight, right, and then I
want to have dessert in San Francisco. Yeah, you know.
I mean though, if you think about it, and it
mustn't cover this, I'm I'm riffing here, But if you
all you would have to do is build another one
right next to it or on top of it, or
right below it, and then bam. He just doubled doubled
how many people can be served by this. He also

(31:02):
said that if you need to add more people, that
these things could depart significantly faster than um thirty second increments. Uh.
And there's a lot of ways that you could do that. Right.
So when you are UM, well, let's let's go to
the future. Chuck, does the way back machine go forward? Uh? Yeah,
just let me recalibrate it here. Alright, alright, oh nice, Alright,

(31:26):
let's go like I don't know, ten years from now okay,
so here we are. We are at the the San
Francisco end of the hyper loop station, right, so what
you're not dead yet, that's that's twelve years um. The

(31:46):
the in the station, you and I are like handing
off our baggage to a friendly hyper loop employee, right,
aren't they smartly dressed? Those are on the ball. Uh,
they're all wearing silver jumpsuits everybody. So they take our luggage,
they put it in a luggage pot and it's just this,
well it's just a pod, right, and these other guys

(32:08):
are loading them up, and they close the luggage pod
and they say follow us, and we walk alongside the
luggage pod, and the luggage pod gets put on a capsule, uh,
a passenger pod. It just kind of like clicks onto
the back of it. Right. So you've just figured out
a problem of getting luggage on board when you're trying

(32:29):
to get a thing to depart every fifteen seconds. Right,
you know how fast that happens on planes, right, exactly.
So you do the luggage ahead of time using capsules
that can be taken off and put on. Same with
the batteries, and we'll talk a little more about the energy.
It uses in a little bit, but the batteries are rechargeable,
and so on each journey they get used and then

(32:49):
taken off and new fresh batteries are put on, and
then the passengers get onto them. The actual passenger compartment
with through goal wing doors which are just cool. Right,
you get in and take your seat, the golding doors closed,
the luggage compartment has been attached to it, and the
new batteries are on and you're off. You could conceivably

(33:10):
do that in fifteen seconds if you made everybody run
and like clap your hands. Well, like I said, anyone
who's reported a plane, I think they're there dreaming if
they think that that's gonna happen. Yeah, I don't know
exactly how they could. But he also says in the
white paper that it has to be um as safe
as T s A. But having um people just streaming

(33:33):
on like almost constantly, would somehow, in his estimation, make
the trap the screening process faster and more efficient. That
I don't understand, but I'm quite sure that whatever t
s A Is doing could be made more efficient. I
have total faith in that. It sounds like you'd be
in a queue, sort of like a roller coaster ride. Yeah. Probably, um,

(33:55):
and I guess you'd have to have a system where
unless you had, you know, hundreds of these pods lined up,
where you have the southbound ones, you know, doing a
little uh, you turn right and then heading back north
immediately exactly. Yeah, like when it reaches the end, it
hits the turntable, turns around and is aligned with the

(34:16):
old street cars. Yeah, or like a record. I didn't know.
I didn't until I wrote a street car. I didn't
know they did that. That was that was kind of
blown away by that. Did you get to ride it
to the end? Yeah? Oh wow, Well now I think
I got on at its departure point, and so you know,
street car came down, the city moved around it, it

(34:39):
seemed like, and then you know, we took off again.
What was the street car named Desire? I had actually
one of my best moments of my life on a uh.
I had been to a bar by myself in San
Francisco and Emily and I were traveling. She went back
to the hotel and I wanted to stay out and
uh got a little saucy and then I'm I told

(35:00):
the story. On the way back, I caught the last
street car uh to get back towards my hotel, and
I was the only person on it for the whole
entire ride. I had the street car to myself going
downhill the whole way and the driver. I was up
near the driver and he kind of talked to me
the whole way, and it was like as if I
were Elvis and I had rented this thing. That's your

(35:22):
go too. Yeah, I mean he's he's the one that
used to like, I want to run out six flags man.
Oh yeah he did. Yeah, sure he'd rent out everything
to see he didn't have to be bothered. But you
didn't even have to lay out any extra money for that,
So no, even better. It was really great. It was
just one kind of one of those moments. Did you
just keep singing the Rice of Roney theme song over
and over to the driver? I did, and he finally

(35:43):
kicked me off and I rolled downhill the rest of
the way. It was great, all right, So nostalgic travel
memories aside. Let's take a break and I will take
another espresso shot and we'll finish up here with the
hyper loop. Okay, so before we left, we didn't quite

(36:23):
finish um. Once you get on this thing. They're only
they're a little under seven feet at tall, so if
you're a tall person or you have claustrophobia, it might
not be for you. Well, there's no bathroom on board either. Yeah,
there's no bathroom as of yet, because you know, unless
you have like a medical condition, you should be able
to hold it for thirty five minutes. I yeah, yeah,

(36:43):
you never probably have to be a lot of bathrooms
at the station, just in case. Well you can't bevy
up like you'd like to know, That's what I'm saying. Um,
and then uh, there you have your own little, you know,
personal entertainment system of course, to occupy you for the
thirty five minutes, because God forbid anyone just be alone
with her thoughts, Oh my god, for that long. That

(37:03):
would make the Hyperlop the most terrifying ride on the planet.
And I think that it would make periodic stops along
the way to right. Um, it's like that's proposed that
you could have stations that branch off right. I mean,
I don't think it would be a lot. There's probably
in there may be an express model kind of like
a subway, but it's not like, you know, we're gonna

(37:23):
stop in Bakersfield in Modesto. Maybe we can get a
sandwich or something. See the site. Yeah, that's what the
buses do. Yeah, this is the opposite of that sentiment.
It's just like just get there, all right. So, uh,
they ended up talking to um, this guy named Jim
Powell who was he was I think he designed the

(37:44):
first mag left train, didn't He yes, he was one
of the designers, and they just want to get his
take on it. And he said, well, he's definitely onto
something with this closed system, he said, because part of
the problem with the maglev is the drag that we get.
And he said, but he said, I still think you
might have some problems achieving those speeds personally, Um, and

(38:06):
ideally like you're going in a straight line, because who
knows what it's going to be like going around a curve.
Well that's these people. Yeah, that's a big thing. Like
if you go around a curve at these speeds, you're
gonna feel the g's And that's not the point of
this is not to be scary or terrifying. What what
they're trying to do is get the sensation of g's

(38:28):
two about point five and um, that's like a tenth
of like a scary roller coasters gees um. So it's
it would be something that you wouldn't even necessarily notice
unless you're taking a curve. And this is where they
deviate from the I five median. Right in some cases
where I five takes a bend with the radius of

(38:51):
I think less than a mile, that's too much of
a turn. So the UM hyperloop will actually the route
will just keep going straightish until it picks up by
five again, because if it turns too much, you know,
to even more than a mile radius, that's a big
wide swing. Well not when you're going that fast. Right,

(39:13):
when you're going that fast, you feel it and you'll
just throw up and and um puke all over your
fellow passengers. But they won't care because they'll be puking
on YouTube and everybody will get everybody else's vomit and
everybody else's mouth. Yeah, they'll go it was worth it.
It was so fast, I love you must. I imagine
they could slow it down a bit on those curves too.
They'd work it out, you know. Sure, But apparently he

(39:34):
is personally guaranteed that um every passenger that throws up
on his hyperloop. He will be at the station to
receive them with a warm towel to clean their face off,
and he will clean their face off with it and
then pat them, pet their head and tell him it's okay.
What a guy, Yeah he is. And then Richard Branson
will anoint their feet with oil. That's another great guy.

(39:58):
I really hope. I'm not like digging must up in
a whole five ten years from now where it turns
out that, oh they both enslaved the world together. But
Josh sure liked them, you know, kind of the opposite
of my Jared focal prediction exactly. So check. Another another
issue that people have raised is well, what about energy consumption?
And Elon Musk actually has that pegged. First of all,

(40:20):
he's like, there's not a lot of energy you need.
Most of this is coasting. Something like eighty or ninety
percent of the of the actual trip requires no energy whatsoever.
The stuff that requires the most energy is the compressor
that's on the front of each pod that compresses the
air to shoot out to the jets or shoot behind
the pod, and the personal like entertainment system and lighting

(40:43):
on board the pod itself, and the rest is well
like you've got the linear induction motor that doesn't require
any energy, it just requires movement. And again Elon Musk
is gonna personally shove off each pod. He's gonna be
hands on in this project from what I understand. And
then UM any other energy sources that are needed can

(41:07):
be covered, and then some by solar arrays that are
going to be built on top of the UM hyper
loop tube. So the whole thing, the whole system will
actually capture and generate more energy than it actually uses. Yeah.
I mean, this is the guy who invented the Tesla
and this battery bank that they're going to be using

(41:30):
on solar home. So I think people would be foolish
to try and call him out on energy consumption. So
he'll probably be like, they'll just divert some of the
electricity to UM power irrigation systems and crop land along
the way. Who knows, you know a road signs for
I five saying like, suckers, get out of your car, Yeah,

(41:51):
get in the hyper loop all right. So you sent
me this article. I think that was from January. It's
very recent UM called these are the first images of
what will soon be the world's first hyper loop tube
a little wordy um, but there is, like you said,
because it was open source, there were a bunch of

(42:14):
companies and but you know, startups mainly that were like,
you know, we want to get on this thing, because
if you get on the Elon Musk train, you know
you're headed for goodness. I think that's what the hyperloop
tagline will be. Uh. And so there's this company called
hyper Loop one and they are apparently the sort of

(42:34):
out in front on this race so far to make
this thing a reality by um having a test site
where else in the desert of Nevada. Yeah, it's pretty
flat and straight and you can go real fast and
the only thing out there are buried bodies, right, and
what's the decompose You're fine? So they have this test

(42:57):
site called the devl Loop and the only thing I
don't I mean, it's got pictures of it and looks
exactly what you would think like it looks like a
tube on pylons, um and right now it's long five um.
But apparently they're going to top it out for testing
at one point eight six miles, which seems way too

(43:22):
short to me. Yeah, for sure, but I think you
could probably like You probably couldn't test the actual maximum conditions,
but you could probably test everything enough to see if
to to prove mathematically that you could do these these
top conditions, you know what I mean. But it would
be like alright, start test, test over right. What happened? Yeah,

(43:48):
no one knows. I mean, you couldn't even get up
to speed at that. Yeah. I'm not exactly sure what
they're what what they'll be capable of proving with that,
but basically just that the machine can run. I think
what they're gonna do is prove to the United Arab
Emirates that it works, because they're apparently in line too
to say, yes, if you guys can show that this works,

(44:10):
we want one immediately from Abu Dhabi to Dubai, which
apparently is a trip that you'd be able to make
in about twelve minutes. Normally it takes two hours or
so by car. Yeah, I mean that that is. When
I read that, I was like, well, of course they're
exactly who's gonna build the first one of these? They're like,
how much is it? We're just joking, we don't care, yeah, exactly. So,

(44:31):
So hyper loop one is from what I understand at
the forefront of this. There are a number of companies
and startups that have formed that are um working on
the project, but hyper Loop one, I think is at
the forefront, so much so that they're not now they're
starting to show off. They've released like um c g
I video of what it will look like when they
dropped the hyper loop underwater, because you know, why not

(44:54):
do that, um And you know, they, like I said,
they've got at least one customer just waiting in the wings,
if not more so. Apparently they're going to test it
this year in the spring or the summer, and man,
if it works like it really would be a revolution
and transportation like it would change everything, especially if it

(45:15):
comes even close to that initial cost projection. If it
comes even remotely close to that, you could just say
goodbye trains so long it was nice knowing you. I mean, they'll, they'll,
they'll they may still have some, but it'll be for
like nostalgic tourists. Yeah, I mean, of course, we're talking
about hundreds of years in the future when they had

(45:39):
hyper loops on every route in the United States and
throughout the world, or fifty years from now. Well, he
actually a lot of Musk made a really good point.
He said, Um, this is this would be really good
for medium length travel that um, at these at these speeds,
anything over about nine hundred miles in distance, you'd actually

(46:01):
be better off with supersonic flight. Yeah, I mean I could.
What I would see them doing is doing uh like
you know, Boston to d C and doing up the coast.
They would they would serve the coastal elites as they
call them, and forget the rest of the country. Right,
That's how it always works. Yeah, fly over, I guess

(46:21):
is what they call it. I don't know what they'll
call it when it's a hyperloop. Zoom over, yeah, the
zoom past the One of the other things that people raise,
though I wanted to say real quick, was safety. And
apparently this is one of the other ways that it's
revolutionary is that it's fairly safe and in ways that

(46:42):
other other modes of transport just aren't. One of the
main reasons that it's safe is because it's an enclosed capsule,
which means that you take weather out of the fact
out of the the the equation, yes, you're not very
good at math, uh yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, um,
and the the each car I think is going to

(47:04):
be equipped with brakes, like mechanical brakes and wheels, so like,
if something happens, if the whole thing loses pressure, Uh,
that you can just drive along. I wonder if you
would have to be strapped in Um, yes, oh you would, okay,
because I imagine going from seven miles to zero if
one of the other ones is stopped in front of you,

(47:26):
you that would be a pretty pretty quick breaking Yes.
So the air pressure sensors would control the brakes on
each car, so the UM like, Yeah, if one of
them started to stop or something, or the whole or
the things started to lose air pressure, the system start
to break down. All the cars would be directed to
put on their brakes and the other thing. I thought

(47:49):
this was pretty interesting too if you had like a
medical emergency on on board one of these things. Um
Ellen points out that, uh, you just be better off
completing the route and then having E. M. S waiting
for you when you got off because than anything else. Yeah,
way quicker. Yeah, So you just sit there and hang on,

(48:13):
stay away from the light until you got to San
Francisco or l A. So earlier on I talked about
his boring company that it was a very purposeful play
on words. Um. And like I mentioned earlier, when Elon
Musk gets aggravated, things start happening. He was in I
think it was late last year in December. He was
in traffic and he literally just tweeted out that he

(48:36):
was in traffic and uh. He said, literally said this
traffic is driving me nuts. I'm going to build a
tunnel boring machine and just start digging sad. Oh did
he say sad? Really good? And people thought, you know,
all right, Elon Musk just fired off a tweet about something.

(48:57):
So we we know he's not one to just shoot
his mouth off, um, because he he backs up what
he says in most cases, and he has done this.
What he's trying to do is build this tunnel boring
machine that would increase tunneling speed by he said, between
five hundred and one thousand percent. Uh. And the idea

(49:19):
is to go down. He's basically like, if we want
to improve traffic, you can go up or you can
go down. We're already too dense to keep building roads, basically,
and he said going up isn't a great idea. I
guess because I'm gonna have my hyper loop up there. Um,
so he said, I'm gonna start digging. So right now
they have dug under SpaceX a test trench and this

(49:40):
is this is December. This is like three months later.
They've already got a test trench that's thirty ft wide,
fifty ft long and fifteen feet deep that runs under SpaceX.
And uh, he's he's sees a future basically, and it's
problematic in cities because there's already a lot going on underground,
but basically envisions the future where they have these incredible

(50:04):
tunnels that are dug very very fast beneath cities, where
you could have highways um trains. And they even asked them,
are you gonna put You're gonna combine your hyper loop
through these underground tunnels? And he just tweeted back maybe
so I guess he you know, it was just being
a little coy there. Yeah. I took him more like

(50:26):
maybe he should have done ellipse question mark then and
then fingers crossed sign. Right, we know what he means. Um,
I got one more thing, man. So the hyper loop
was foreseen predicted back in nine Did you know that?
Why that doesn't surprise me? Some science fiction writer yep,

(50:49):
and actually a science science fiction comic strip. Guy um
who his name was this? This name is amazing Athelston Spillhouse. Wow, Yeah,
pretty good name, right. He decided to create a comic
strip back in the sixties called Our New Age because
he wanted to get American kids interested in science to

(51:10):
keep up with the roos Keys, right, And in one
of the comic strips, he basically talks about the hyper loop.
This this pod carrying passengers floating on air, traveling at
hundreds of miles an hour within a tube to solve
traffic jams. It's just it was. It's like the hyper loop.
It's pretty cool. I for some reason thought that would

(51:30):
be like ten different comic books that did this. It
just seems like back then that would be such a
sort of obvious thing to do. Yeah, I guess so,
but hey, maybe it was. It was just Spillhouse, just
Ethelston spell House. It sounds like a It sounds like
evil Simpsons character or something that would come into town
to do something bad. I'd like to hear Sylvester the

(51:53):
Cat say that name you anything else? Nope? Okay, well, everybody,
let's um apply some pressure on Elon musk too, get
some dog seats made for cars. Okay, yes, help me
out if you want to know more about the hyper
loop type that word in the search part how stuff

(52:14):
works dot com? And since I said that, it's time
for administ details, all right. Uh. If you don't listen
to the show ever, maybe we should set this up.

(52:36):
Every once in a while, we get nice gifts from
people and more and more from companies. Uh, and we
like to read them on the air every few months. Yeah, uh,
in a in a little weirdly awkwardly titled segment called
administrative details. You know, I came up with that name.

(52:58):
It's the worst, but I love it. It is pretty bad,
isn't it. Yeah? So uh, here we go with our
special Is the music already queued up? Oh yeah, all right,
here we go with administrative details. We want to thank
Matt and Kim of Mincing mocking Bird Art and Design Company.
They sent a book of his painting, plus some really
fun journal type notebooks. They look like, uh, they look

(53:22):
like these vintage journals, but then it says things like
dope rhymes or my favorite one was strange ideas and
impure thoughts. And I love a good journal. So they
were really cool. Yeah, thanks a lot for that, you guys.
I want to give us special thanks to Tyler Murphy,
our buddy. He likes to send me Highlander grog coffee

(53:44):
and um it's been so long since he did administrative details.
He's actually sent me two packages so far, so thanks
for both of them. Tyler, uh Will and Dave from
Bully Boy Distillers in Boston sent us well, they sent
us a bunch of booze, some rum, and some gin um.
It seems like there was one other thing in there.
There was a old fashion, old pre made, old fashioned

(54:07):
bully old fashioned. Did you have that? I bet yes
there was. They were apparently the first craft distiller in
Boston since Prohibition times and they opened up in two
thousand ten. So thank you Bully Boy Distillers. Yeah. Thanks
to Taylor Newton for the awesome stoked socks. Did you
get some of those? Uh no, dude, I've been rocking those.

(54:28):
They're like super eighties just pop art socks that have
like like their teal blue with lots of pink um
palm trees all over them stuff like that. You know,
They're they're like something d J Jerzy Jeff would have
worn back in the day. Well, you love your wacky
socks so yet. Yeah, thank you Sarah Austin. She sent

(54:49):
us some fine leather work. Nice. Uh, thank you Mark
Hicks and family for the very nice Christmas card. That
was nice of you, guys. Colin Flay hive fly five
Um interesting name. Dolly d A l I bars from Kunming, China,
that's what they sent us. And a book called Great

(55:10):
Leaps Nice. Thanks cute Thanks dudes. Uh. Karen Johnson's everyone's
a while. Somebody will find something or just come across
some weird article and and be like Josh and Chuck
would love this, and they nail it every time. And
Karen Johnson was one of those people. She sent us
a series of articles about the dreaded outhouse peeper who

(55:33):
kept Montana in his grip of fear in n Yeah,
thanks for those articles. Uh. Bob Ticken or of way
Back w E Y b A C H Way Back
guitars um which are handmade here in Atlanta. He sent
t shirts. That was my way of building up suspense.

(55:55):
They sent me a guitar. Huge thanks to Norell, who
gave us a bounty of Australian candy and thanks to
a lesser degree for the tube of vegemite. Uh, snowdrop gin.
Thank you Tim from Saxton's River Distillery in Vermont for
the snowdrop gin. Nice? Is that good? Delicious? Uh? We

(56:18):
got a another Christmas card, handmade Christmas card from the
Hoy family in normal, Illinois. It was very normal. Adam
Pobiac he's a screenprinter and graphic artist and he said,
remember those awesome Repo Man posters. Those were very sweet,
So thanks Adam for those. Yep. Uh, Cyrus Ahman or amon.

(56:40):
I never asked him how to pronounce his name. He
interviewed me for his sight. He's got a really cool
site where he just interviews people he likes UM and
it's see why are U s A M A and
dot com? And he just a total class act. Just
to say thanks for the interview, sent some homemade chocolate
chip cookies that were a may easingly delicious, So thanks Cyrus. Uh.

(57:02):
We got an assortment of shrubs like drinking shrubs not
for the lawn from Shaker and Spoon dot com. Oh
those are good guys. Their advertisers with us now too,
well fantastic. Thanks thanks everybody, over there. Uh. And speaking
of booze, Uh, where would we be if we didn't
thank our good friends at Crown Royal for always keeping

(57:24):
us wet. They send us. Not only did they give
us some XR which is like really really really good
um whiskey. Uh, it's almost like cognaky whiskey. It's so good. Um.
They made us personalized velvet bags like Crown Royal bags
that have our names on it, so we can say
that's mine, uh, Sally Franklin, she works for Crown Publishing Group.

(57:48):
They send us a couple of great books about women
in science, one called Women in Science and one called
Headstrong fifty two women who changed science in the world.
Good stuff, and they're on our bokshelf here at work
now and everyone like reads all these things, so it's great.
Yep um. Alex Kernow sent us some amazing prints of
states that his fiance makes. Their just beautiful and super

(58:11):
kind of old timey looking. They just have a nice
look to him. Um. And you can find them at
stampilli s t A M p I l Y on Etsy,
So go check those out. And thanks Alex, uh sky
lebrown s k I L E send us her book
to Stay Alive. She said that we inspired her with
our episode on the Donner Party and she actually researched

(58:31):
and wrote a book about it. Nice. Yeah, it was great. Um, wow,
we inspired a book. That's wonderful. Um Korty from Tokyo
who sent us a beautiful holiday card, just gorgeous and
some wonderful or gami stars. So thank you very much.
Our friend Jamie Buckner as a filmmaker and send us
a D D D copy of the indie film that

(58:53):
he made called Split, which is available also on your
Video on demand and Amazon and iTunes if you want
to check that out. Split. Matt Dragor sent us some
homebrew beer. Thank you, Matt, Raymond Busingeringer be singer, all
three of them. Uh. They sent some really cool poster prints.
These are the ones uh and I really love the

(59:15):
stuff they sent Atlanta in eighteen seventy one to me
in Toledo in eighteen seventy six to you and uh,
you know how I love my maps and these are h.
You can find his work at fifteen spelled out f
I F T E N dot c A. Uh. The
last one for me for today is from Doug Frumpkin,
Thank you Doug for sending us coins from the Nuclear

(59:37):
Regulatory Commission. Who knew. I'm assuming that they're not irradiated.
Uh in my last one, and we're going to continue
this on our next episode. UM Kevin from draw Kevin
Drawl dot com send his hand printed note cards made
from Soy Inc. And they were quite lovely nice. So
thanks everybody. Yeah, thanks a million everyone to keep them coming. Huh. Absolutely,

(01:00:01):
And if you want to get in touch with this,
you don't actually have to send us anything. You can
just say hi if you like. You can tweet to
us at I'm at Josh Underscore, UM Underscore Clark and
at s Y s K Podcast, Chuck's on Facebook dot
com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and at Facebook dot
com slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us
an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot

(01:00:22):
com and has always joined us at our home on
the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com For more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff Works dot com. M