“The mission of the engineer is to let people live the way they want to live without destroying the world around them.”
Josh Giegel is the CTO and Co-Founder of Virgin Hyperloop where he is leading a world-class team of engineers making the hyperloop a reality. Josh founded the company in 2014, when hyperloop was an idea drawn on a whiteboard in a garage. A little over two years later, VH built a full-scale prototype capturing the attention of governments worldwide. Today, Josh is leading the development of paradigm shifting electromagnetic, high power, autonomous technology, bridging the engineering work with unparalleled passenger experience, and working at the highest levels of government to develop a regulatory framework for hyperloop technology.
Growing up in a family of engineers opened Giegel’s eyes to a world of possibility. He learned from his dad early on to tackle any project by simply understanding the problem-solving process. An early role with SpaceX building rockets eventually led to a shift towards more earth-based interests. “We're going to do make life interplanetary, that's awesome as well, but I really started to focus on the responsibility of the engineer here on earth.”
Hyperloop aims to completely revolutionize the way we travel. “What we're trying to do is move people at airline speeds, but here on the ground.” This more environmentally-friendly technology will allow someone to live in NYC and commute daily to Washington DC with the ease of a commuter driving into the city from the suburbs.
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
SPEAKER
Josh Giegel
Chief Technical Officer & Co-Founder
Virgin Hyperloop
MODERATOR
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello everyone, and welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series that we started during this work-from-home period with leading investors, creators, and thinkers, and our goal during these SALT Talks is the same as our global conference series of SALT Conference, which you may have heard of if you're participating in these webinars, which are conferences that we hold in the US and internationally every year.
John Darsie: (00:40)
What we try to do at those conferences and on these talks is provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future. We're very excited today to feature one of those big ideas, and we're very excited to welcome Josh Giegel to SALT Talks. Josh is the chief technical officer and the co-founder of Virgin Hyperloop, where he's leading a world-class team of engineers making the Hyperloop a reality.
John Darsie: (01:07)
Josh founded the company in 2014 when Hyperloop was an idea drawn on a whiteboard in a garage. A little over two years later, Virgin Hyperloop built a full-scale prototype capturing the attention of governments around the world. Previously at SpaceX, Josh developed the world's first reusable rockets and led the successful testing of six different rocket engines. From the final frontier to horizon right on the ground. Josh shifted his focus to the power of the earth with revolutionary waste heat to power, energy technology, leading research activities at Echogen Power Systems.
John Darsie: (01:44)
Josh is passionate about the power of engineering to create solutions that enable people to live their lives how they want, where they want in a way that is sustainable. This led him to leverage his expertise in high-performance rocket engines with his grasp of clean energy generation to develop the world's first autonomous high performance electric mode of mass transportation. Josh received his MS in mechanical engineering from Stanford University, where he was a graduate engineering fellow. He holds his BSME from Penn State University, where he graduated with honors and was first in his class. I know from talking before we went live, he's a proud Pittsburgh native.
John Darsie: (02:22)
If you have any questions for Josh during today's SALT Talk, you can enter them in the Q&A box at the bottom of your video screen on Zoom, and I'm going to be hosting today's talk. Normally, I would kick it over to Anthony Scaramucci or another guest host, but today you're stuck with me. So Josh, thanks so much for joining us. We'd like to start every talk with the discussion of the guests background and sort of their personal journey, their professional journey. So how did you grow up? How did you get into the career you did starting at SpaceX, moving into renewable energies? Now, what caused you to want to start working on the Hyperloop?
Josh Giegel: (02:54)
Thanks for having me, John. I appreciate the invitation. So yeah. The part that I think it was pretty exciting but also maybe a part of a punchline to a joke is everyone in my family is an engineer. So my mom, dad, sister, sister's husband, my wife, we're all engineers. So that really gave me one of many options as you could possibly imagine, growing up to [crosstalk 00:03:22].
John Darsie: (03:21)
A lot of pressure.
Josh Giegel: (03:23)
A lot of pressure. A lot of pressure. Our vacations would be going to National Laboratories or the Air and Space Museum or the like. But the part that really got me excited about engineering was spending time with my dad, building things, working on cars and the like, and the power of being an engineer, which is I used to think like, how does my dad know all the answers to all of these different things?
Josh Giegel: (03:47)
The answer was he did it. He just knew how to problem-solve. He knew how to go through the processes. To me, it was exciting that as an engineer, I didn't know what I was going to be doing in five or 10 years, but I knew I'd be excited by it, and I could sit, and I could basically predict the future from sort of the imagination space that you have in your head through being able to calculate it, compute it on the computer as you go forward. So then it was a pretty easy pick for me to want to do engineering in school and then went to Penn State for undergrad, which it was exciting time.
Josh Giegel: (04:25)
I mean, I think Penn State does well with sort of people that grow up within the state and really giving them a good kind of technical education. My eyes really got open going to grad school at Stanford about what the power of being an engineer could be, which is to imagine the future you want to live in and then go create it. You started to feel this energy, this vibe, this buzz, and I had got from a former colleague as a before who said, "You should go check out this company called SpaceX." This is when I was about ready to do some qualifications for the PhD and the like, and I went down to SpaceX. This is right before they had their first successful flight in 2008, and there was just an energy. There's just the buzz. It was a small company, interviewed with Elon, and it was kind of that transformational moment. I remember talking to my advisor, and he described what my PhD would look like. I said, "There is nothing I'd rather do less than what you just described."
Josh Giegel: (05:24)
So then ended up going over to, to SpaceX, building rockets, getting the chance to build something brand new and have more responsibility than a 23-year-old should have and successfully did that and then started to realize rockets are great. What we're going to do make life interplanetary, that's like awesome as well. But I really started to focus on the responsibility of the engineer here on earth. Started to go to some new ways to make power, some using carbon dioxide and things like that. Built some really successful things there and then really started to look at this transportation space and think like, wow, A, no one's built anything like Hyperloop before when Elon put out the white paper. B, it's going to be around long after we're gone, it can change. You can reduce emissions. It can make the environment more sustainable. More poorly, the mission of the engineer is to let people live the way they want to live without destroying the world around them.
Josh Giegel: (06:19)
This is big enough and hard enough to be fun. It's of a scale that's going to be around long after I'm gone and we're gone, and that's the part that is just truly exciting about it.
John Darsie: (06:29)
So before we dive deeper into the Hyperloop, I want to talk about SpaceX and space for a minute. You were obviously fascinated by rocketry and exploring space. What do you think the future for the human civilization is in space, and what timeline do you think it's going to be for us to really start launching mass space tourism and colonies within space?
Josh Giegel: (06:50)
Yeah, that's a good one. I think the part that we landed on the moon like 50 years ago, and we have been stuck in like low earth orbit ever since, it's not the technology. I think the technology when pushed can actually do what we want to do. I mean, we probably could have gone to Mars in the '80s if we really put our mind to it. I think the aspect of this becoming privatized though is really exciting. You see what SpaceX has been able to do. You see [inaudible 00:07:18] a dozen small rocket companies now that are popping up. A lot of them are former people I worked with that are starting them. You're seeing this kind of proliferation because people are able, the technology is there, the cost of access is reducing.
Josh Giegel: (07:33)
I think we're just tapping the surface. But I do truly believe it's going to be the private companies that are going to do it. I interned at NASA. I met my wife at NASA that I think the days of kind of this big government piece are over because there's profit to be made, there's money to be made, whether it's mining asteroids or doing something else. I mean, I think the opportunity is going to be private. I would suspect by the end of this decade, so like 2030, you're going to start to see some of the advances. You're going to start to see things move away from chemical rockets, which is really kind of keeping us parked here into some more exotic technologies that I think will take us to mars and to the stars.
John Darsie: (08:16)
Well, between SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic, you have some well capitalized individuals that are pursuing these goals in space. So hopefully, that'll lead us to a more rapid development than we would if it was a public sector government project. Well, I want to jump into Hyperloop. So your ambitions went from space to, what can I do here on the ground on earth? You started a Hyperloop company. Could you explain for people who are less familiar with Hyperloop first what it is?
Josh Giegel: (08:46)
So what we're trying to do is move people at airline speeds, but here on the ground. So if we just dive that a little bit more, we want to move at the speed of an aircraft. We want to have fully electric propulsion direct to your destination. So unlike a train, you're going direct to where you want to go. You're not stopping at every place along the way. Then doing that again in a on-demand sense. So you're not waiting for a timetable. You're showing up when you want to show up. So it's sort of taking the advantages of air, which is speed, the advantages of rail, which is capacity, the advantages of like ride sharing, which is this on demand. It's trying to put them all together. So what we do is we create a tube and that too, we take out most of the air, not all of the air, like flying at 50 kilometers of altitude or 200,000 feet of altitude.
Josh Giegel: (09:36)
So you can go those speeds with really little drag, and so very low energy consumption. So you can go these feeds. Then we use electromagnetic propulsion and levitation that gives us contact lists, high speed, basically the ability to move it a those speeds without touching anything on the sides of the track, all things that we've developed and invented here at Virgin Hyperloop over the last really two to three years as we've progressed the technology. Then the goal really is to let people move at these speeds for a cost that's not any different than a bus ticket or a train ticket, but you get this much wilder, much more inventive space where you can live in one city. You can work in another. You could live in New York. You could work in Washington DC, and you could take this in a daily type of setting. But to do that, we have to do it at scale. We have to do that at speed, and then more importantly, we have to do it safely.
John Darsie: (10:32)
So you talked about how you started this company back when the concept of a Hyperloop was just something on a whiteboard. Elon Musk basically sketched it out and said, "We need to build this. I'm going to make this open source. I want to allow anyone to work on this technology." From when you started the company to today, what are some challenges that you've faced that you either expected and some that you might have not expected as you've been on this journey, and what do you think the opportunity is in terms of how widely we can adopt Hyperloop going forward?
Josh Giegel: (11:01)
Yeah. Every now and then, I think back in those garage days, and the garage days were filled with technology development, right, which is like, "Oh, we're going to do this. It's going to look like this. This is how we're going to achieve that." The white paper talked about a particular way that you could make a Hyperloop. Unfortunately, that way is not as energy efficient, economical as it needs to be. So we had to develop a brand new way of operating them. But I think the biggest challenges were it's one thing to build a technology. It's something completely different to build a company, something completely different to build a team, something completely different to build an industry.
Josh Giegel: (11:39)
We're trying to do all of those in addition to building a technology. That piece I think in a way has actually made the fact that the technology has worked, and we've done all that more rewarding because you had to do all of these things as we've gone through. But at the same time, it's not the first thing that comes to mind as an engineer when you're thinking about a new technology.
Josh Giegel: (12:04)
Those days in the garage, really, I think were some of the best days of my life, some of the most exciting days of my life, where you have infinite possibilities. You're unconstrained in terms of vision. Sometimes you could be paralyzed without constraints. But that view of in its raw form like, what is the future that we want, and how can technology get us there? That was what I signed up for. Then the part that's been actually fun is... So the thing that sets sort of the research scientists or the physicists from the engineers is the engineers make things practical. I want to build things. I love building things. That's ultimately what's setting us apart from some of the other people in the space and ultimately from just this idea is that without actually building it, without actually getting in it, without actually showing the technology works, no one's going to believe you.
Josh Giegel: (13:01)
Over the last six years, we've had plenty and plenty of [inaudible 00:13:03]. Each time, each new milestone is just like another kind of arrow in the quiver of like, "Hey, we know how to build technology. We know how to do it." This is not decades away. This is going to happen in the next decade.
John Darsie: (13:18)
So when we talk about the future of Hyperloop and how it can transform public transit around the world, is this something where we're going to be traveling from San Francisco to Los Angeles or from New York to Philadelphia, or is this something that can be built such that we can travel between continents, and it's going to be the primary source of on-ground public transportation?
Josh Giegel: (13:40)
My goal is that this turns into the primary source of ground transportation. I'll be even more specific. I hope my little two-year-old comes to me in 20 years and says, "Dad, how did you get around before Hyperloop?" That's the level of ambition that I'm trying to-
John Darsie: (13:57)
What? You rode an Amtrak train that averages 30 miles an hour and takes longer than it would take to drive to go between major cities?
Josh Giegel: (14:04)
Yeah. You're going to pay like $300 to ride that train or something like that. Yeah. That's not the future I want for him nor myself. So what we view is, if you look kind of throughout history, you could say every time we've connected with each other faster, there's been a massive economic growth and massive GDP growth. You could say Roman roads. You can say Spanish ships. You can say the transport at the road, the airplane, even the internet, all forms of connectivity. But we haven't seen the same level of innovation, same level of developments on the mass transportation space, as we've seen with some of these other areas. So we want to keep growing, want be more connected, but yet our infrastructure, the speed of our infrastructure is actually restraining us.
John Darsie: (14:52)
We've gone backwards actually. We had supersonic airplanes, and for a variety of reasons, those were shelves, and we've actually gone backwards, especially in the United States.
Josh Giegel: (15:01)
Yeah. The transatlantic time by flights has actually gone down because the energy consumption needs to be lower. So they're slowing the speeds down. So when you look at what this could be, if you sort of taking people off of the road and started connecting, we'll call it just the US for right now, imagine you had a couple of basically Hyperloop highway systems that maybe two or three routes that went East to West, and you had a couple that went North to South sort of crisscrossing the grid, you could have same day connectivity for goods, for people and then do it in a way that's actually environmentally sustainable.
Josh Giegel: (15:39)
So you could take all of the pollution that comes from transit of air of road of that. You can move it to electric, which could be powered by renewables, and you could do that in a way that's actually satisfying the needs. Right now, it takes four or five days to go from Los Angeles to Chicago on a train. So you can't really ship too many things in that case. But if you look at the package you buy from Amazon, you want same day. But what if I could do same day from a central place and just make it up Nebraska, four corners of the US, and I can do that at the speed of flight at the energy efficiency. You can combine that with autonomous last mile solutions. You have a huge amount of opportunity. Then you could start to say in the US it's big enough that we could do that. Our cities are farther apart. You want that speed. You want that benefit. In Europe and India and China, all of these places are doing it.
Josh Giegel: (16:31)
You can see the massive potential because The Silk Road in China being invested something on the order of about $100 billion right now to increase the average speed on that route from about 30 miles an hour to about 60 miles an hour. We're talking 10 X that. They're willing to put that kind of money in for that type of connectivity. So I do think you can, again, let people live the way they want to live but not destroy the environment. You can get them the speeds that on demand without having a massive energy [inaudible 00:17:07].
John Darsie: (17:07)
So what type of speeds are we talking here at the upper end of what you think we can achieve?
Josh Giegel: (17:12)
So we could go 1,000, 2,000 miles an hour in theory. You don't want to do that in practice because the tube would need to be too straight. So in reality, between big runs between, say Denver and Chicago or something like that, your top speed would be something on the order about 500 to 600 miles an hour.
John Darsie: (17:32)
Earlier this month, you were the first ever human to travel in a Hyperloop. So like you said, in theory, and in practice, this is a little bit different because in theory, it would demand perfection of the construction, every element of the project. What did it feel like to be in the Hyperloop? Do you think it's something that everyone is going to feel comfortable doing?
Josh Giegel: (17:51)
So I do think it'll be something that everybody feels comfortable in. One of the reasons I wanted to be the first passenger in it is I subscribe to a leadership philosophy of this kind of the adage of the Roman architect, right? The Roman architect, when you took the scaffolding out, how to stand under the arch to measure his worth as an architect. For me, if it wasn't safe enough for me, it wasn't going to be safe enough for everybody. Safe enough for me is I've got a wife and a kid who, by all accounts still enjoy my presence and wanted me... As much as they wanted me to get in, they wanted me to get out even more.
Josh Giegel: (18:30)
So the goal of what we were trying to do is also show that this is not for astronauts. This is not for risk-takers or adventure-seekers or whatever you want to do. This is for normal everyday people. So typically, if you're in an environment like in that tube, which is low pressure, you're in a space suit in case something goes wrong. But Sara, my co-passenger and I, Sara is our director of passenger experience, we were just in normal clothes because we designed the system to be safe enough to deal with whatever could go wrong and do that in a way that allowed us to just be in normal everyday clothing.
Josh Giegel: (19:06)
So that was a huge piece for us is that we wanted to show that we can build great technology. We can build great products, but we have to build safe products. The goal here was to show that like, "Hey, this is safe enough for two people to get in. I'm an engineer. Sara's not." She didn't need to know all of the things that could go wrong or that we made to make the system safe because she's trusted in the process, and that's the same thing we have to do to get something eventually certified.
John Darsie: (19:35)
So what did it feel like? You went what, a hundred miles an hour? Did it feel like you were on a rollercoaster? Did it feel like you were in a very low stress type of environment? What was the sensation when you were in the tube?
Josh Giegel: (19:47)
Aside from I would describe myself not as excited but giddy. So I was giddy getting into. Sarah and I were both giddy. Sensation-wise, it was kind of overwhelming to have the history of building the company, getting to a spot where we were sitting in something that used to be an idea. That was profound before you even went down the track. But once you're sitting in, you felt it was a little bit harder than our... It was faster than our normal acceleration would have been. So you feel a little bit of force back in your seat, like you would on an aircraft taking off. But once the Maglev is on, you're not being jostled about. You're not being shaken in the same way like you feel on a rail. It's almost floating in a pool of water or something like that.
Josh Giegel: (20:33)
I mean, I think the only bummer was that it was only about 400 yards lon. So it was about a 22nd test. It was kind of like, can we go again, guys? Can we go again?
John Darsie: (20:45)
As we get into winter here, I'm yearning a Hyperloop that can take me from New York to where you are in California for a little better weather. So hopefully, you can get speeding up on your development. But you talked about the fact that you wanted to be the first one to step into the tube. It's the same thing, Richard Branson, who we know well has spoken at our SALT Conference several times, he wants to be the first one with Virgin Galactic. He's going to be the first one to go into space as part of their space tourism.
John Darsie: (21:11)
So it's certainly a noble stance to take in terms of safety, and it's one of those things where... As soon as Tesla has an accident with one of its self-driving cars, it's splashed all over the newspaper, but they don't write about all the different accidents and the dangers that exist inherently with our current infrastructure, whether it be cars or their current technology behind trains. So hopefully, this becomes a zero-risk proposition, which I think it has a much better chance of doing than traditional forms of transportation.
Josh Giegel: (21:41)
Yeah. Certainly, we don't have people that can run across our street chasing a ball. We don't have weather. We're autonomous. But we're also actually an easier form of autonomous, right? Because we're in a confined environment, and I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, progress requires mistakes, and we have grown rightfully so very risk-averse to those types of mistakes, essentially when people can get injured or worse. So we have this ability to learn how to do these things faster in this kind of confined environment, which is actually a lot easier than the autonomous car companies have at these days.
John Darsie: (22:18)
So what's it like raising capital for a company that has such a moonshot type of mission? We've talked about some of the space travel companies. They're obviously well capitalized by their founders. But when you're raising capital for a business that's financial strength is going to be long down the road, soometimes it can be a little bit challenging, and you have to get people to buy into that story. What's been the reaction from the Genesis of your Hyperloop company to today and how investors reacted to the recent developments that have taken place with your first test ride in the tube?
Josh Giegel: (22:55)
So it's been quite a journey with that. I mean, I've been called a lot of things, and I've been caught a lot of things in those type of investor meetings. I'll keep most of them to myself. But at the beginning, we really had kind of these, as you said, moonshot believers like, "Hey, this could be a truly transformative technology." We raised over $400 million today. That really funded kind of the first a hundred million or so. But we all knew that this is not a software company. We're not building apps and things like that. This is a company building hardware, and that requires a lot of capital.
Josh Giegel: (23:29)
So we moved from some of those moonshot investors, some of those big guys, which huge risk-takers, but smaller checkbooks, and started moving into more of the strategic partners side of the fence. So the strategic partner where people who are looking to diversify some of their business interests or diversify some of their manufacturing capabilities. So started looking at a different type of investor. The biggest one that we've had to date is a group called DP World, which is Dubai Ports, and they wanted to move up. They typically move shipping containers. They own about 75 ports around the world. But they wanted to move up into logistics chain.
Josh Giegel: (24:07)
The chairman Sultan bin Sulayem, who's our chairman as well, he saw the opportunity that like, "Hey, this is going to transform the way goods can move." I want to get in on that earlier. I want to use some of the automation technology, the magnetic levitation technology and some of these other areas that can do that, certifying these strategic partners. We've had ups and downs on the fundraising piece, and the part that's been challenging has been they want to see, does the technology work? Can it be made safe? Do you have a regulatory pathway? Do you have a customer?
Josh Giegel: (24:41)
So about three years ago, we didn't have very many of those things. We had the path, the technology, but did not working yet. In the last three, we've shown that the technology works. Here in the US, we've done a lot of work with the Department of Transportation over the last two years. About four months ago, they issued like, this is how a Hyperloop would be regulated. This is the agency. So that was great, kind of clarified that. The third is we made it safe with a test that we did two weeks ago. The last piece is finding that customer, and the part that's been really exciting is since that test, people are saying like, "Oh, I thought that was 10, 20 years away that you would be able to get into a vehicle."
Josh Giegel: (25:23)
Now, I don't want to say my phone's been ringing off the hook, but the excitement from regulators, the excitement from people that are like, "Hey, I can use this for my project that's happening in the next five years, in the next 10 years, not a project in 2035 or 2040. This is something I should look at now." So I think we're just starting to scratch the surface of the aftermath of that test, really incentivizing, accelerating the idea that we can change the way that people are moving today and in the next decade, as opposed to 15 or 20 years from now.
John Darsie: (25:54)
So California is an example. They had a high-speed rail project that's now sort of been scrapped or at least postponed for the time being, because the thought is they're going to spend billions of dollars, and the technology potentially would be obsolete by the time the project is done. How close are we to whether it's California or Dubai or China or other places? What has been the reaction from governments? You talked about how it's been very positive since you did the test run. How close are we to getting to the point where governments, whether it's in the US or internationally are to actually appropriating funds to diligently build out a Hyperloop infrastructure?
Josh Giegel: (26:31)
So in the US, we're targeting passenger certification of our commercial system. We did a two-person test that's growing, pods getting bigger to about 28-person pod. We're targeting that certification around 2025. But the big key that came from the announcement four months ago from the department of transportation is that by saying that we're officially a mode of transportation that's subject to regulation, but also subject to public funding and the like is a huge kind of leap for us. So now we have access to things like RRIF loans and TIFIA loans to develop projects.
Josh Giegel: (27:08)
But you also look at where some of the incentives lie. So in the US, the Department of Defense basically funds technology development, right? Department of Energy funds technology development slightly differently. But the Department of Transportation really doesn't. But for every dollar spent on better forms of connectivity, you get $3 or $4 worth of GDP growth that comes out of it. But I think that view of high-speed rail is accurate, right?
Josh Giegel: (27:36)
We're potentially spending billions of dollars on something that goes slower than a plane, costs more than a plane, and is a technology that's derived from stuff that's a hundred years old. That's what we're trying to sell something different is like, instead of doing that, you can build a 21st century solution to 21st century problem. With that, I think you're starting to see the government's move. You're starting to see some of those applicability get there, and now we're laying out those steps to certifications. So really, that first person that's going the same way at the very beginning of the company, investors, those moonshot investors looked across the table, and they said, "This is a great idea, but I'm believing in you and the team that you're going to build to actually execute on it."
Josh Giegel: (28:19)
I think we're moving away from it being a moonshot idea to something that's actually... It's about execution. That I think is actually fairly exciting and actually part of the purpose of doing the test that we did two weeks ago.
John Darsie: (28:35)
Yeah. I mean, a lot of people have just learned about something like SpaceX in the last several years because the rockets have been taking people to the space station, and it's gotten more public attention. But as you talked about, that effort goes all the way back to 2008, and it feels like the Hyperloop project is on a similar type of trajectory.
Josh Giegel: (28:52)
Yeah. Couldn't agree more.
John Darsie: (28:53)
So you talked about your two-year-old son. I have a two-year-old. I have a couple more as well in that similar age category. Let's say 30 years down the road, you want to build this for our children. So that, like you said, in the future, they look back at regular cars and these slow trains, and they say, "Dad, how the hell did you ever ride in that?" In 30 years, when this is fully mature, just create a vision or an image for our audience about what does that going to look like? Is it going to be, I have my smart, my smartphone, and there's an app, there's a version of Hyperloop app that acts like Uber, and I say, "You know what, bring me a car. I want to go to Chicago," and then two hours later on-demand I'm delivered onto a street corner in Chicago? When it's fully mature, what is it going to look like?
Josh Giegel: (29:36)
I think that an ethos that I've been really going for and really trying to understand is like my personal mission statement is I will change the world to the technology I build. But the vision for this company is really to be the fastest mode of transportation, not from when you leave your door but when you think about leaving your door, when you think about where you want to go to your ultimate final destination. So I think in 30 years, you're going to have something that is going to kind of look something like this. I don't think there'll be smartphones anymore. I think there'll be something implanted somewhere deep seated into your brainstem somewhere. You'll have this notion of, "I want to go." Let's just say, I'm living in New York. "I want to go to DC."
Josh Giegel: (30:20)
So you're going to go to DC, and then you're going to get basically this information of where you need to go. It's going to be seamless. It's going to be basically you step outside of your house. There'll be something, your last mile solution, whether that's an autonomous vehicle, whether it's a scooter or something like that that takes you to the Hyperloop station. The whole time it's basically telling you when you're walking in the station, turn left, turn right. Here's your pod.
Josh Giegel: (30:47)
You get on your pod, you sit down, you can pull out whatever entertainment work, whatever it might be. It's taking you again directly to this destination. You're getting out. You have that final vehicle or your last mile at the destination side waiting for you because it knew and tracked you through the whole journey. There's no key because that's tied into basically your personal identity as you go through, securely obviously. When it comes to actual physical security, I think you're starting to see less intrusive, less bulky types of security measures. You're not going to be taking bags out and things like that. There'll be ways for that to be seamless as you walk through and really this idea that Washington is no longer a city that... It's not 200, 300 miles away. It's four hours away.
Josh Giegel: (31:36)
The thought is Washington becomes a suburb of New York, and really anywhere becomes accessible as a suburb of where you're at. So this thing you talked about coming to Los Angeles for the weather, growing up in Pittsburgh, there were two things that you'd need to do if you want to do activity. What's the activity, and what's the weather going to be. Here in Los Angeles, it's, what's the activity? Weather is always the same. When you're going somewhere, you always think like, "How do I get there?" That's what I think will actually no longer be a piece. I don't think, how do I get there when I go downstairs? Right? That type of thought process is going to be now extended to hundreds of miles in further destinations than we ever thought possible before.
John Darsie: (32:20)
It's a COVID friendly way to travel where you're not having to potentially intermingle with quite as many people. I want to talk about the pandemic and the impact it's had both on your business and your vision for what Hyperloop can do. There's a lot of data out there, recent stories about how many people have left San Francisco and New York City and other big cities around the country and moved to more remote areas. Remote work is becoming more popular. Secondary cities are expected to get a boost from this. Steve Case is someone who's been at our conferences and been on SALT Talk and hit one of his big theses is the rise of the rest. You're going to see these secondary US cities and areas around the country see a boom in entrepreneurship.
John Darsie: (33:00)
So you talked about how improving the speed of physical infrastructure, as well as the speed of internet infrastructure helps create economic growth in different areas. What do you expect to be first the impact of the pandemic on your business and the growth of Hyperloop in general? Two, what do you think the impacts of a more proliferation of Hyperloop technology, bringing people more quickly to different areas of the country, what do you think that has in terms of its impact on the economy and the future of work?
Josh Giegel: (33:34)
So it's certainly been an interesting time, and we build hardware. We are a company that's kind of company all working in a spot. We didn't have anybody really working remotely before the pandemic hit. It's certainly been an adjustment to my leadership style. I really liked being in there. I like building things. I like being out in the shop seeing what's going on. So it's been a challenge to do in this remote setting. So we've changed the way that we've worked some things. We have our test facility in Nevada. It's been getting okay, but there's going to be a... It's okay in kind of the short-term sense. If this lasts for another year, we're really going to have to start considering how do we adjust kind of long-term because our goal is to get back to each other.
Josh Giegel: (34:20)
At the end of the day, what we're doing, we might be engineers, but it's a creative endeavor. Instead of paint, our canvas is technology, and our paintbrush is science and math and this idea of how we actually work, a musician works really well with other musicians. With all the conversations being forced, it becomes a bit challenging. So we're trying some new ways. We're getting smaller groups together outside of some of our facilities to do that. Obviously, the latest surge is probably going to put that on hold again. But I think it's going to continue to be challenging for companies like ours building hardware, as opposed to doing software, to keep it together.
Josh Giegel: (35:05)
It is becoming interesting, right? Especially, I've got a big software team doing controls and the like, and now they can get pulled from anywhere to work anywhere, and they can move to these rural areas, lower cost of living's, and they can get to work on pretty much any place in the world that they'd want. So maybe we start looking at what we can do in a competitive space from the software team versus some of the hardware team that needs to be there to build things. That's a challenge for us as a business. But then long term, the effects of the pandemic, the one thing I always heard is like, "Well, travel is never going to be the same afterwards."
Josh Giegel: (35:43)
But they said that when the dot com-bubble burst, when 9/11 happened, when the financial crash in 2008 happened, and it was at its highest levels before this. It's going to come back. There's a growing middle-class and a large parts of the world that want to experience the world, want to see the world. I think the biggest thing about a Hyperloop is that when you connect these places, for example, in Missouri. You have Kansas City. You have St. Louis. They're about three and a half hours apart right now. You can connect those in 30 minutes. Now, all of a sudden, you have basically a seven or eight million population center in the Midwest connected fast, and you can get across Uptown New York.
Josh Giegel: (36:26)
So you could create the dynamic that exists on the population centers on the East and West Coast. You can click that in Heartland. Then you could more importantly... There's lots of things I like about Los Angeles, but there's lots of things I love about Colorado too. That ability to have this kind of quick on demand type of setup back and forth I think is going to allow people to work in some of these more remote settings, and maybe when they have to come into the office two or three days a week, not five days anymore, they're going to be able to do that from a more disparate or more distant place, and I think that's only going to be enabled if the transportation mode is fast, and it's economical, and that's what we're trying to do.
John Darsie: (37:05)
Right. So we have a question from a member of our audience about the ability to use existing infrastructure. So existing rail lines, existing highway routes. Is that going to be something that we can do to accelerate the build-out of mass infrastructure for Hyperloop, or is it going to be a heavier lift where we're having to dig or build new areas where we run the Hyperloop tubes through?
Josh Giegel: (37:28)
I think in the cities, you're probably going to have to start... The benefits of the cities are getting to the city centers, right, or connecting to the existing infrastructure that might be there. So that's probably going to be where you do some tunneling. Our tunnels are a lot smaller than high-speed rail tunnels with a much higher level of service. But the other thing is really interesting, that route I talked about in Missouri on that highway corridor is basically along the I-70 Highway, right?
Josh Giegel: (37:55)
The majority of what we're doing, because we're inside of a tube, we need a much smaller width, much smaller right of way, and you could actually put it in a highway meeting. The fact that we can bank an aircraft instead of a train means we can go higher speeds on tighter right of ways. We're looking at one between Chicago, Columbus, and Pittsburgh, and you can use existing right of ways as much as possible. So you won't necessarily be able to build on the infrastructure that's there. You do need new infrastructure. But you could build on the existing right of way, which would mean this would actually be quite a bit faster to get in and having to go not in my backyard type of setup.
John Darsie: (38:35)
We have another question from our audience about what it's like working with Elon Musk. So is he as smart as everybody thinks he is? Tesla, after a brief dip in terms of its market value is now trading back at all time highs. He helped lay the groundwork for Hyperloop technology. He's building one of the preeminent space exploration companies in addition to the work that he's doing with Tesla. So what's it like working with him, and is he the genius that we all think he is?
Josh Giegel: (39:03)
I mean, I certainly learned a lot from him and then certainly watching him do his thing. The thing I think is really profound that I've really tried to adopt is I'll say the steadfastness of his vision. So when I first interviewed with him in 2008, he told me in the interview process like, "I want to make a rocket that can land 10 times." Right? That was-
John Darsie: (39:31)
What did you think when he said that? Did you think he was crazy?
Josh Giegel: (39:34)
I like the idea. I just never heard anybody say it. Right?
John Darsie: (39:38)
Right.
Josh Giegel: (39:39)
So 10 years later it did. There is a reason. The way he set out both the vision kind of for Tesla and for there and the way he stuck to it, I think has been remarkable. I think Tesla's probably the most interesting one is that you see the struggle that some of the other big OEMs are having right now, because they have the supply chain that's based on internal combustion engines, they're trying to move it over to electric. That same thing that made them so successful for the last a hundred years is also the same thing that's making it really hard for them to shift the next piece. You look at Tesla. Tesla's been building electric cars for like 15, almost 20 years now. The other car companies have really only been doing it for maybe three, four, five.
Josh Giegel: (40:24)
So the way they've picked a certain technologies to invest in first, like the battery technology, I think, has been really, really exciting. So when you look at what we're trying to do, a Tesla can always pull over if something goes wrong. A Hyperloop can't. So when you start to say, where does the future look? When we want to electrify aircraft, when we want to electrify these things in aircraft, can't pull over. So the systems that we're building for Hyperloop are going to be some of those first type of fully electric, safety critical type of systems.
Josh Giegel: (40:57)
So I think we're starting now. We started that a couple of years ago, and we're going to be at the forefront of that for the next like five or 10, and that's going to give us a huge opportunity. But the thing I really appreciate is the grandness, the boldness of his vision. But there's lots of people that you see that have vision. There's much fee, like maybe two orders of magnitude less that actually are able to execute, and I think that's a testament to his ability to find the right teams that can actually execute that vision, and that's what set him apart.
John Darsie: (41:27)
So let's talk about the future for Virgin Hyperloop. So you had the test track that was a smashing success. Your phone's ringing off the hook with people that are interested in investing. What are the next immediate goals, and what are the next milestones that you're looking to achieve?
Josh Giegel: (41:42)
So we're looking to move from this two-passenger vehicle to this 28-passenger vehicle. Basically, as we do that, that's going to require kind of a scaling of infrastructure, scaling of the safety, the safety features to make sure we can do this. The biggest thing is we showed two weeks ago that we can make a vehicle or a vehicle can work, and now we need to show that a fleet of vehicles must work. That's really kind of the biggest difference that we need to move. So we need more capital to do that. So we'll probably be at some point out in the fundraising space. I think I've been keeping an eye on this backspace. That's been pretty fascinating to me to see how that... Compared to two years ago with the ice coin offerings versus what specs are doing and how companies with long runways, with big ambitions, how they're bridging some of their Valley of death gaps to get to where they need to go.
Josh Giegel: (42:38)
So I think that that's actually fairly interesting. But really right now, it's about finding that person that's going to look across the table and say, "I like the value of this technology. I like what it could bring." Because that last question those investors were asking us was, "Show me a project." I think we've checked off all these other boxes and really, how can we get in the next really year, two years? How can we sign up for that first project? Because once we get operating, once we get all of the learnings that come from that, it's going to transform our analytics team, our machine intelligence team with all the data that we could get.
Josh Giegel: (43:16)
So it's projects. It's the regulatory piece. Then probably soon, it's about how do we scale? We're about a 300-person company now. We're building the airport, the airplane, the air traffic control, and the sky all at the same time with less than about 230 engineers. So I think we [crosstalk 00:43:33]-
John Darsie: (43:33)
Well, they're trying to fly their plane, as they say. So Josh, it's been a pleasure to have you on. Hopefully, we can be helpful from a SALT perspective in terms of connecting you with those people who understand the power of this vision. It's a pleasure to have you on SALT Talks. Maybe next time we have our SALT Conference in Las Vegas, which is our traditional home for our annual conference, we can bring some people over and do a test track ride on the system you guys have built out there [crosstalk 00:44:01].
Josh Giegel: (44:00)
I think we would definitely love to have you guys inside that. It's magical. You can touch, feel, lick whatever you want to do. It's a visceral experience.
John Darsie: (44:10)
All right. Hopefully, the licking can be safe after the pandemic is over, but all the other stuff sounds good. Josh, thanks again for joining us.
Josh Giegel: (44:17)
Thanks, John.
John Darsie: (44:17)
It was a pleasure having you on.
Josh Giegel: (44:19)
Thank you.