So the doors close. We enter an airlock, we go down a tube.
The tube has a vacuum in it. It's not a perfect vacuum, but it's perfect enough vacuum.
And what happens after 25 miles an hour?
The pod levitates, the wheels folded, and it goes down the middle of the tube held in place by electromagnets at up to 500 miles an hour.
Not having enough work. Climate change, funding, finance and shortages of fresh water.
Energy transition. Large scale social disorder.
Antibiotic resistant diseases. Education and deployment of private capital for social needs.
Quantum computing. Hello and welcome to the Feature Business Podcast from Site Business School.
I'm Emily Baron and each week I host a conversation on a topic that will define the future of business and wider society.
Speaking to experts from Oxford University, leading businesspeople and entrepreneurs.
The way we travel has a profound impact on both how and where we live.
Currently, there are competing visions of the future of transport.
One advocated by industry heavyweights, including Musk, is that we still travelling conventional vehicles, but that that time is not productive.
We work, eat, sleep in our cars without having to worry about driving.
The alternative is hyper fast travel either over or underground.
To understand what this might look like today,
I'm speaking to Nicole from Hyperloop one Virgin Hyperloop one is the company leading the development of Hyperloop,
and they recently signed a contract in India for a link that would connect Mumbai and Poona in around 25 minutes.
Hi. My name is Nicole. I'm the senior vice president for Virgin Hyperloop One, the company that's building a new mode of transportation.
I'm sure we're going to be talking about this in the UK and I've worked for them for two years,
but I've got a 30 plus year track record in I.T. technology.
I've worked for three start-ups and I've worked for two very big companies, Hewlett Packard and Cisco Systems.
So I'm a guy now trying to reinvent transportation.
Okay. So the Hyperloop, as you said to me earlier, when you did a previous podcast, you mentioned Crash, the website.
So many people who are looking and interested in the public and we hear a lot about it, but we like to make things very simple.
So if you're talking to the right thing, if you are trying to we're going to explain the Hyperloop to a ten year old.
How would you explain what the Hyperloop is? You know, Emily, it's funny you should answer that.
I have actually done an event like ten year old.
I could start off by like I did an event recently at the National Geographic Society in London, and it was sort of TEDx for kids, really great idea.
And the average age was ten years old.
I didn't know you were going to say that. And to this day, after giving hundreds of speeches,
the single best question I ever got asked about the Hyperloop was from a ten year old girl, and I repeat it now.
I was talking about how just to project in the UK to build, to upgrade the rail system is going to cost £100 billion and it's going to take 17 years.
And at the end of the day, what do we get? Another train?
And I said, Well, you know,
why don't we spend £50 billion and get something that's four times faster and completely greener and and has all these benefits, etc., etc.
And a hand went up and this ten year old girl said, if you had £50 billion, would you spend it on a Hyperloop?
And and I thought about it. That is the single best question I've ever been asked.
And because kids are wonderful, they have no filter. Right. Ask you the question and I posed probably for what was a little too long.
And I said, well, first of all, if I had £50 billion, I probably wouldn't be standing here.
I'd probably be doing something else.
But if I had 50 billion, if I could reframe the question about £50 billion and I had to spend it on transportation system, then, then yes, I would.
So what is it? Transport is terrible. We all know it's terrible and it's getting worse.
And I don't have to give examples because everybody knows it.
In particular, trains are still steel on steel, steel wheels and steel rails, which was a system invented in 1814.
What I say to children is namely one other area of your life that has been unaffected by digitisation.
You know, kids are growing up with the with the iPhones, they're growing up with Netflix,
they're growing up with all of this amazing content and all these amazing capabilities.
And then they get on a train. So what Hyperloop is it's a cross between an autonomous car and a spaceship.
Right. And essentially, you book a journey through your phone.
And let's say you get on the pod. The vehicle is called a pod. You're going to go to Edinburgh.
I'm going to go to Leeds. We get in different parts. The pods aren't connected together.
There's virtually a couple, right? So the doors close, we enter an airlock, we go down a tube.
The tube has a vacuum in it. It's not a perfect vacuum, but it's perfect enough vacuum.
And what happens after 25 miles an hour?
The pod levitates, the wheels folded, and it goes down the middle of the tube held in place by electromagnets at up to 500 miles an hour.
And then when it gets to the destination, my pod switches off to Leeds, your pod carries on and eventually you arrive in Edinburgh.
So it's direct to destination.
So unlike a train, high speed train, high speed rail is only high speed when it's moving, but it still has to stop by the timetable for trains.
There's no timetable for the Hyperloop believes like an Uber, it leaves when you're ready.
Okay. And as a result of that, it's kind of like a physical version of the Internet.
So when I say ten years, well, it sort of works like the Internet.
They go, well, like the Internet. So in other words, it comes to me, right?
And I use my phone to book it and I can go anywhere I want.
And I say, Yeah, that that's exactly how it works.
And you know, there's no paper ticket, there's no timetable, there's no stopping where everybody else wants to stop.
And at the end of the day, you can enter at the end of the journey, could interoperate with an autonomous car taking the last mile.
Or if you're a parcel, you could have a drone at the beginning and a drone at the end.
So you could deliver all of these Amazon Prime parcels that are exploding as they kill the retail industry and all of those white van.
Come off the road. And then the final thing you say to them is, by the way, it's carbon free.
It's carbon free. And then they go, Well, why haven't we implemented it?
And that's a very good question. That is a very good question. So we're going to come on to those.
I just want to ask a few more questions about the technology, because it's really interesting.
How is it carbon free? Okay. So first of all, it's fully electric, right?
There's no carbon fuels. Secondly, we take power off the grid.
So you plug it into the grid, so principally by renewable energy.
But let's just say ordinary electricity, we step it up to a certain voltage frequency in order to make the levitation system work.
We have a linear motor, which is the same as a rotary motor that we recognise from our physics courses.
But instead of it going round and round and round, it goes forward, linear motor forward, and when it gets to 25 kilometres per hour, it levitates.
It creates a electromagnetic differential which actually causes the the pot to lift.
Now the way I explain this, if we go back to the the ten year old event, we actually stated that if you think if you think, you know,
why do aeroplanes take off which is something that still to this day after hundreds of flights still I still think that the reason
is because the air goes up forward propulsion and the egos fester over that little curve top of the wings and it goes underneath.
It creates a physical pressure, air pressure differential which causes lift.
We create an electromagnetic differential which causes it to lift.
So. So once it lifts, we turn all the power off.
There's no air in the tube, so it glides. It's like, then it's a spaceship.
Turns out it's really cool that it turns out.
Now, what we have to do is keep it.
Keep it in exactly the middle of the tube on the horizontal and vertical plane, which we do with with electromagnetic magnets.
So electromagnetic capabilities.
But it turns out that we believe you don't need a repeater station to give it into the propulsion or the boost about every 20, 25 kilometres.
So it only uses electricity to initially accelerate it.
Once you get to the velocity you want, the power goes off.
There's power in the pod lights, cooling, heating power for your iPad, but that's just like a jet aircraft.
But outside the part, there's no power. And then when it breaks, it uses regenerative braking like a Tesla, so it generates electricity.
And we actually use something which many of your listeners will know is whose adequate braking.
Right. Which essentially, if you if you hold two really powerful magnets and you hold them a certain way and you move them past each other,
you feel a bit of friction. The current got it.
So we use any current braking. So on, on a 500 kilometre journey to net it out, we would use electricity for about 10% of the journey.
So it's not completely green, but it's certainly about ten x greener than any other existing form of transport in
the Middle East where we're very active because I run for the worldwide go to market,
I think I've done 15 trips to Dubai in the Middle East,
of course, with a few solar panels, not at not an opportunity we have here in the UK on this snowy day in Oxford,
but in other parts of the world with a few solar panels, you can actually make it net energy positive.
No, it's it can be the world's first transportation system that generates energy through solar panels.
Good example. One, I just want to ask you a little bit jumping back to the individual experience.
So I book it on my phone. Do I go to a police station?
Do I get out of my station? So let's do it.
Let's just take the first version of the technology, which is forget the autonomous car.
You're not a parcel set, forget the drone. Let's say you go to a station.
By the way, we don't call it a station, we call it a portal multicolour.
Yeah, it is much cooler. But also think of what a railway station looks like.
I mean, these things are about 100 to 200 acres, all these tracks side by side.
So Hyperloop doesn't need any of that. It needs a tube.
Right. And the biggest issue we've got is actually just having an off boarding platform.
Some people can board concurrently because the issue is the elapsed journey time,
not the point to point journey to the biggest component of time for a journey is actually how long it takes people to get on and off the pod.
But you can solve that by having multiple parallel platforms, platforms at different levels underground,
like the London Underground, when you switch lines that way.
Okay, so you walk or you cycle to the station, you, you, you, you leave your bike there, you walk and your phone says, go to gate 37.
Remember you're going to Edinburgh. Gate 37 is a behind gate 37 is one part.
It takes about eight people. Okay. If there are other people who are going to Edinburgh at that exact time,
they get in the pod with you analogy being like a ski cabin that's going up to the.
Yeah. The mountain. There's another part behind you, but it's not connected to you.
Hmm. Okay. In this case, that pod could be me going to Leeds, and we'll do a high speed switch.
Engineers always ask is, how can you do that? Because you can't have anything that physically moves at 400 miles an hour.
But we believe we know how to do high speed switching, and that's actually the next bit of technological proof.
But if you assume for the moment we can do that because we've built the Hyperloop so far, you're, you know,
sitting down in this part of your pod and any other passengers who are with you is going to Edinburgh.
Lots of myths around the Hyperloop. So let me address, if I can, some shoes.
Will your face peel off? No, Emily, it won't.
That is the single biggest question I guess I see on the Internet.
It's your face will peel off. And my answer to that is, look, if you've been on an aeroplane, an aeroplane starts stationary,
the accelerated point to 5G, they go to 500 miles an hour, they slow down and they stop.
Your face doesn't peel off on an aeroplane. I just describe the Hyperloop.
Now, what's the difference? Well, the aeroplanes go up in the air, not because they want to leap over tall buildings like Superman.
What? Aeroplanes go up in the air to get low pressure so they're more fuel efficient.
Well, we bring the sky down to the ground.
So the air pressure in our Hyperloop that we built in Nevada is at about 100 Pascals, which is equivalent to the air pressure at about 200,000 feet.
So it's a sort of four or five nines vacuum in 99.99.
And I know no people have been over it yet, although I know we're going to do a live test on this podcast.
Okay. We know people have been in it because you need a safety certificate.
Right. But let's say so you didn't know I was going to ask you.
So let's say I we had 100 tests of the Hyperloop on a test track and we put sheep in there.
We put animals in there absolutely fine. And nothing happened.
And we proved that we can do it. And then I said to you, there are eight seats in the in the in the first Hyperloop and a chance to
make history and be the first person in the world to travel in the Hyperloop.
And I'm going to offer you one seat. Emily, would you want that ticket?
I'm an MBA. Of course. I do think it's a good answer.
I'm glad you said that. Otherwise, this podcast would have gone down. Exactly.
And the point is that 78% of people say yes, 20% of people say no and that's okay.
That's, you know, with any new technology, autonomous cars, no way.
I'm not the chair of the steering wheel, but there'll be a Yuri Gagarin of Hyperloop analogy and you know, people have been in it.
Yet you need regulatory approval. So we just want to project in India, Mumbai, goona hundred and 50 million people.
It's going to be a four and a half hour journey. We'll do it in 20 something minutes.
Got announced by our chairman, Richard Branson with Prime Minister Modi and for Maharashtra state,
which is the second most populous state in India and hundred and 12 million people that will could well be the world's first Hyperloop.
It depends on how quickly people in the Middle East move as part of the process of building the Hyperloop,
you work with the transport regulator like any new mode of transportation, flying cars, autonomous cars, and you have to get a safety certificate.
And so there's about a 12 to 18 month period of regulatory testing.
Once you get a safety certificate, you're approved to build safety certificates and regulatory approvals are regional.
So there's one for Europe pretty much, and we'll see what happens when the UK leaves the European Union.
But let's assume there's one for Europe. The Middle East will often accept a European one, but they do have their own regulatory testing.
The US definitely has their own. And what are you regulating as?
As a train? As a plane? What are you rewriting?
That is an excellent question. So that really is a great question, because let me tell you what we don't want to do.
We do not want to talk to the train regulator. If we talk to the train regulator, we will be in eight years of discussions.
I was with Secretary Fox in the US who used to run the Department of Transportation for the US.
Now he's no longer Elaine Chao. We've we've got a first name which is now the Secretary Transportation,
but now he's no longer in government because he could be on panels or there's nothing to be removed.
And he made this point. But this is this is videos on our website.
He he made the point that one of the problems that autonomous cars had is that they actually call themselves autonomous cars.
So the car regulator instantly went to them.
And there is a there's a series of regulations that are to do with cars.
Now, in our case, it is the train regulator comes to us. They're going to ask us where the guard is.
Right? They're going to ask us about the driver. They're going to ask us. About the signal box.
They're going to ask us about the timetable because they have, you know,
years where in the case of train, they've got over 200 years worth of regulatory rules and approvals.
And this is hundreds of safety cases. What happens if Mr. Smith gets on but gets his umbrella report in the door?
What happens if Mrs. Smith gets on but her dog is still on the platform and she's inside and the doors close?
I mean, all these things are really important, particularly to Mrs. Smith, and the dog brother's going to be okay.
But what we've said is we want a new form of regulation.
So in the case of European Union, DG Move, which is the European entity responsible for setting transport regulations for Europe,
we want to try and get a Hyperloop going in Europe,
in a host nation so that they can be proactive to get ahead of the curve,
to start to define the regulatory environment as opposed to take an existing one and apply it.
Now one of the big advantages we've got, which is high speed rail doesn't have, is that we can actually design the technology to meet the safety case.
High speed rail already exists and then you have to you have to prove that your product meets the safety case.
So in the Middle East, our customer has been RTI, which is the road transport authority of Dubai.
They're regulated. So we're saying, well, how would you want the Hyperloop to behave?
So we actually designed the technology to meet the safety case. And so that's one of the great advantages of new technology.
Fantastic. So I wanted to switch to the Middle East and India, which has been well an advance.
I mean, the UK is still arguing about HS2, Crossrail, whereas more emerging markets are really leapfrog.
And is it going to be those economies that get that fast?
Why is it so much easier there? And I guess at what point are we going to see the London or Oxford to Edinburgh?
Hopefully, yeah. You know, this is obviously a, you know, NBA audience and alumni audience.
Maybe as students of history we can look back and see patterns and you think about transport innovations and the West versus the East.
They were all in the West. I mean, I talked about, you know, George Stevens in 1840 created the train.
I like to joke that if he came back to life today and saw HS2,
he would point at it and say that's a train because it basically it's basically the same is a better train, but it's the train.
And then, of course, we had cars in the late 19th century.
We we had aeroplanes in 1903, Kittyhawk Beach, North Carolina, first plane, the Wright Brothers.
You could argue that we then had the next really big leap forward and everything incrementally improved consistently.
But the next big leap for us was arguably the US interstate system, which in the 1950s was completed and produced.
35% of the growth of the US was directly attributable to the US interstate system.
And since then, for a while we had Concorde. Mm hmm.
Was it a plane route? It sort of seemed like it sort of was a plane, but it was definitely something different.
And of course, that's probably the only example in history where technology has gone backwards.
Yeah. So, so now we've had nothing for a while and all these systems are slowly getting gummed up and they're getting slower and various reasons.
But travel is awful. Travel is awful and getting worse.
Now when I spoke to there's an organisation in India called NITI Aayog,
the National Institute for the Transformation of India, run by the Very Visionary.
It's a commercial organisation that reports directly to the Prime Minister and it's run by a very visionary man called Amitabh Kant.
And what Amitabh said is India will do this before the West and the reason is the West will be slow.
We've talked about that, but more importantly, we have a we are on a mission to bring India up to date.
And actually we've learnt a very valuable lesson in in telecoms and those leapfrog the wording is leapfrog.
India went from telegraph poles to 4G in a very short period of time and by the way, very low cost handsets with very low cost calling.
When I was in Mumbai recently as part of the deals that we've announced and there are parts of Mumbai
that you get a better 4G signal than parts of the many parts of Europe and many parts of the US.
I mean, they the 4G signal in India is really good.
They understand leapfrog and they understand that this is the way that their country will will continue to grow.
They just released their GDP figures yesterday. India is now the fastest growing economy in the world, overtaking China.
They are going to use technology to keep on accelerating.
I mean, it is it is not just an idea, it's a government strategy.
Do by which, you know, famously 60 years ago was.
Trading on pearl divers and trading by boat is an unbelievable city.
But they they they understand, as I've seen some previously, that the eye of a needle is more valuable than the needle,
which means that if you can get people to come to you on their way to somewhere else, your economy will grow.
A transport network is directly linked to the GDP and the productivity of a nation.
We've proven that here in the UK with the London Underground. Now I'm older than you, Emily.
Your podcast viewers can probably tell that from. But when I was growing up area, there used to be London and Greater London, now it's London.
And the reason is that the, the, the, the tube system has extended its tentacles all over London.
The definition of London is kind of the tube map. Yeah. So it's direct correlation for London.
The effectiveness of transportation for citizens drives economic growth.
Now, in the case of the U.K., unfortunately, that's sucked the growth away from the north of England.
But Amsterdam, Holland understand that with Schiphol and Rotterdam, Dubai understands that,
Singapore understand that, and India are in a wonderful position with the way their economy is growing.
But if they if they leapfrog their archaic transportation system,
where it takes currently four and a half hours to travel from Mumbai to Poona and can get it down to 20 minutes for 150 million passengers a year,
which, by the way, is just to volumes at a price which is less than half of high speed rail.
They're going to have a national competitive advantage.
Think of the billions of hours a year the world wastes on travel and are not moving, but stationary travel, the airports, traffic jams.
So if you can change the lives of a billion people, you can actually change the productivity of that country.
And certain countries see that correlation. Certain countries don't.
The ones that currently don't are the ones that used to but now are sitting on what they've got.
And I believe that some of the most forward thinking is happening in emerging markets on this subject.
So I want to sort of end with a bit more of a kind of personal question.
You know, you described in brief your career to date some big technology companies, some start ups.
Why have you joined the IPO? Why am I so crazy?
I mean, I'll tell know how to answer that question.
So you're right, I, I was always the change manager, the disruptor, the troublemaker in the large company.
You know, when Carly Fiorina became CEO of HP, Sun Microsystems with a dot.com,
HP was Scott McNealy, famously said the big, fat, happy printer company.
So I led an incubator cross company team to actually create an Internet business inside HP,
then did a couple of start-ups and then went back, went to Cisco,
and last two years at Cisco were trying to create a model for cloud and managed services or a software based model for Cisco, because Cisco was,
you know, had the highest percentage of any tech company in the world based on pure box revenue, not the situation now today.
And the share price has responded. But yeah, I have. I've got a now I'm back in the starter.
The honest answer to the question is I had retired two years ago and I,
I was going to dabble in a whole bunch of things and I got invited to see the
Hyperloop and I went out to Nevada and I talk to them and sometimes it's,
it's just little things that cause you to make big decisions.
And I, I looked at this thing and I couldn't get I thought, well, do I want to work for a transportation company?
Oh, my God. So boring. No, I don't want to do it. And then I looked at it and I they were explaining that it's sort of like packet switching and yeah,
there's going to be switches and routers and there's going to be tubes and it's direct to destination and it'll be first and last mile.
And I suddenly thought, Oh my God, it's not a transportation system.
It's not a transportation system, it's a physical version of the internet.
I just describe the internet packet switching data, voice video, Hyperloop people, freight cars, high speed switching direct to destination On-Demand.
It'll come to your door.
The Uber will come to your door and it will take you to your destination and autonomous door to door journeys over huge distances at very high speed.
And it it's a physical version of the Internet, of course, it's a transportation system.
But if in 20 years time the Internet isn't a way of moving digital packets very
fast down fibre plus fibre Internet is the biggest disruptor we've ever seen,
all business processes. So you then start thinking, what could the Hyperloop do?
And you think about delivering, you know, in India, same day delivery of parcels in India, unthinkable.
Unthinkable. The ability for a ship to unload at sea and for the Hyperloop to take the packages inland and distribute them.
That this system we've got today where all the containers go on the dockside and then trucks drive through the city with all
the pollution to pick the containers up and drive them out one at a time to go on a freeway system that all disappears,
that all disappears. And so you change freight distribution, the ability to take to airports that are like this, like Heathrow,
Gatwick, we're having to build new runways and they cost a lot £18 billion for Heathrow's third runway.
But with Hyperloop, Gatwick is 3 minutes away. So you can now have virtual airports and have airside connections.
So you start thinking of things you could do that you could not not dream of before because you had a bottleneck.
That's exactly what the Internet did. So my belief is that it was your last question.
So my belief to finish is that in 20 years time when first of all, I hope I really have retired,
but in 20 years time we will actually be talking more about transport enabled disruption, business model disruption.
Dan, about a technology of pods in vacuum tubes.
Right. And I believe that's the big story here.
And that's why it's such an exciting time. And that's why I actually came out of retirement that I thought, I can't watch somebody else do this.
Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you. Really brilliant conversation.
It was cranky. Thank you for listening to the Oxford Future Business Podcast presented by Site Business School.
Next week I'm in conversation with Professor Richard Barker and Carter Powers discussing the
carbon bubble and the ticking time bomb on the balance sheet of the world's largest companies.
Please subscribe on iTunes and if you want to find out more about what we discussed in today's episode,
you can by following the link in the description. The Future Business Podcast was created by Brady, Patrick, Mike Klein, Paris and Emily.
Thank you for listening and goodbye.