 Last week, California's absolutely cursed ice field rail project, allegedly connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco, one of these decades, the head of it, told lawmakers in Sacramento that he's going to need another $100 billion of taxpayer money before a single Chuchu rings its whistle or something. The original price tag on the project back when the first bond measure was passed by California voters was supposed to be at $33 billion. They had already quadrupled that at the very least. I don't have all the numbers in front of me, but it's certainly that and that's before the $100 billion. It feels like, Nick, that there are some some public policy lessons in this story that might have a broader application, even to California, but I know that you know a lot about California. Do you have some thoughts about this project? Yeah. It's first off the slow motion suck that this is on California taxpayers is amazing. In 2015, I wrote an article for the Daily Beast about true detective season two, which and about it was the most libertarian show on TV and actually that whole HBO at the time was the Sunday lineup was true detective season two, Veep and the Brink, a show which was like a dark version of get smart about how fucked up and stupid American foreign policy, particularly in Afghanistan was. It was kind of amazing, but true detective season two was Vince Vaughn's character is trying to get in on what everybody agrees is just the massive grift of the high speed California rail project. And that was like 10 years ago, right? And it just keeps kind of, I would say keeps chugging along, except like nothing is moving on it. And the one thing that I want to call attention to for people, I talked to Annie Duke, author of quit, the former poker player who wrote a book a year or two ago called quit. And in it, she discusses how there's a thing called when you when you have tough engineering problems or tough business problems come up, but there's a concept that was pioneered by a guy at Google named Astro Teller who talked about monkeys and pedestals. And he said, you know, like, let's say you want to do an act where you have a chainsaw juggling monkey who stands on a pedestal in Times Square. And you know, and like, OK, you want to do that. You want to put that act together. And it's like, OK, well, it's really hard to train the monkey to juggle chainsaws. So let's start with the pedestals and we're going to build a bunch of pedestals because we can get that done. And but it's like, it doesn't matter. You can build great pedestals and multiple pedestals until you get the fucking monkey to be able to juggle. You've got nothing. And she talked about that in the context of the California high speed rail problem because beyond everything else and they have really barely laid any track in anything. But everything they've done is the pedestal part of the project where they're laying track in inland California on flat areas where even that has proven to be impossible to do without massive cost overruns. And they have not even figured out the engineering of getting over the mountains in Southern California and Northern California to connect to the Bay Area and L.A. Which means that everything that they're doing now is never going to work because they have not even addressed the actual hard part of the project. An astro teller this Google skunk works genius is like when you have a monkey and pedestal problem problem, you have to start with the monkey because the pedestals like don't matter. It's the monkey and like California just hasn't even come close to licking all of that. So it's mind boggling and it is amazing that Jerry Brown was so hard. You know, he had such a hard on for this project and he knew it was bullshit. And this is a guy who at various points in his life was a real cost-cutting, you know, penny wise governor and he laid into this again and again. And then Gavin Newsom when he came into office, he had the perfect opportunity to say, you know what? This was a great idea, but it's not our future. And the fact that he didn't it makes you think there is something going on in California where like there must be the worst cash of blackmail photos from whoever is building this railroad on politicians because it just it is a it's a project that can never be finished and never be successful. And yet it continues to kind of ooze out slowly, you know, soaking up more and more California taxpayer dollars. Steve Manukin is putting together a group of investors. Yeah, right as we speak to take over this project. No, no problem. Don't worry. Peter, I remember you juggling monkey of American transportation policy. The next reason foundation public policy paper. I look forward to reading it. The long ago far away, Peter, you wrote a piece. I think it was during the botched Obamacare rollout about how governments really, really bad at I.T. Like colossally bad at I.T. Projects is our rail projects the I.T. of rail. Well, I hadn't thought about it that way, but it makes a lot of sense. The these are both complex engineering projects that are difficult under any circumstances and just kind of inherently, the government is not going to hire the best people and is not going to create the best conditions for them to do high quality work. And you see that in California with the rail project with all of the environmental review. And this has been a huge problem for California's high speed rail is it's not just that it's a hard engineering problem. It's that the environmental review, which is a separate thing from doing the building and figuring out how to get that monkey to juggle the chainsaws over the mountain on the train. The environmental review is just taking years and years and years and adding billions and billions of dollars. And this is one of the interesting things I think about American politics right now is that this is happening in conjunction with a mostly center left versus left conversation about building costs generally specifically with regard to home prices and home building. But a big part of the argument that the abundance of gender liberals are making right now is that well, it we it's too hard to build things. We have just made we've made it too hard to build. It's too slow. And one of the big reasons why is that all of the environmental review all of the opportunities for environmental groups to just block these projects right with and this is again, it's mostly in the context of home projects, but it's true of rail as well. And there is a kind of interesting split right now that's happening on the American left and center left between the folks who think that the environmentalists are just making it really impossible to do anything and the environmentalists who are like, yes, we are and that's good. I mean, that might be an interesting intellectual split, but isn't the facts on the ground that, you know, the abundance chin strokers lose all the time and have no power. I don't know that they lose all the time and have no power. They certainly are not doing a great job of offending off the environmentalists on projects like this. A lot of the time they talk about transportation projects in addition to the housing stuff, right? This is about walkable cities, dense urban areas, that sort of thing. And you see Gavin Newsom in California has said, well, we're going to pass some zoning reforms. We're going to make it a little easier to build. We're going to try and get rid of some of that and speed up some of these projects. At the same time, you have this absolutely interminable California high speed rail project that has been going on forever is now going to be what, eight, nine, ten times? Not probably not quite ten times the budget that was initially announced. But once they ask for another hundred billion, which they will eventually, it'll be ten times. I mean, this is, it just reminds me of that incredible onion segment from, I don't know, 10, 20 years ago, back when the onion was doing a fake cable news panels. And there was one that was like in the know, should the government keep dumping money into a giant hole? And California's answer and California's answer is like a resounding yes. That was a clip from the latest Reason Roundtable. If you want to see more clips, go here. If you want to see the whole episode, go here. Make sure to subscribe at Reason's YouTube channel or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening, watching or both.