 I'm Yochai Benkler. For those of you who don't know, I hang around here as faculty. This is Marvin Amore. I don't think there's anyone in the world of whom I can say with greater pride, he was my student here. That's just a fact. No offense to anyone. Marvin probably led the battle on that neutrality from the first day when he led the Comcast suit in the mid-2000s, all the way to the final political battle when he played a central role in conceiving, organizing, pushing, nudging across all sorts of dimensions and has, this is not just me quelling, this is the public record as it stands. Really amazing influence on the way in which we all might have under different political conditions, experience the internet. So, Papepa, again, absolutely central role as a political legal thinker, and now is the General Counsel of Hyperloop. Has decided that instead of speaking, we'll have a conversation. So, we will very quickly open this up to questions and answers as the main mode rather than speaking at. Correct me if I'm wrong, you should feel free to ask everything from what on Earth does the General Counsel do when he gets up in the morning to what is Hyperloop and what specifically will it do on this or that date which you will respond, I have no idea. But I also, I would say, invite into thinking about how we think of the world of internet regulation in the next four years which one or two of us may care about, if that's okay. So, what is Hyperloop and why should we care? So, thank you, Yochai. Hyperloop, I think most of you know that a few years ago, Elon Musk proposed a new transportation mode. He essentially was asking how do you go really, really fast in a way that we haven't done it before. And so, the thinking was, well let's say you put something on wheels and went really fast, eventually the wheels will just blow up from centrifugal force so you'd have to fly or be on magnets or on air. And once you go fast enough, the air pressure will slow you down. So, let's get rid of the air pressure. We'll just have a pod on magnets in a tube and we'll build a tube between two cities and we'll fire people between them. And so, the first example he gave was Los Angeles to San Francisco. His comparison was the high speed rail that has been proposed for San Francisco to LA. And his proposal was, we could do Hyperloop and for 35 minutes you could be door to door. Now, after that, he gave the idea, he open sourced the idea, right? No intellectual property in the idea. And several companies have been born to try to build Hyperloop. And my company has 220 people, three facilities and sort of an R&D headquarters in LA and a manufacturing facility and test facility in Las Vegas. And it's an interesting kind of moonshot, right? So, you've got one, this private company trying to do something that's like basic infrastructure or invent a new kind of technology. We spend most of our time trying to invent new components and energy systems in order to invent the final product, right? So, it's sort of like the space program. And then, we go around the world and we say, hey, you should buy a Hyperloop, Mr. X government official. And then they'll say, gee, how do we regulate this thing? And is it like a train or like a plane? What rules does it fall under? And so, it's a Hyperloop, why is it interesting? It's interesting because I think it could be, we always make an analogy to the internet everyone does where everything's like the next internet. But we talk about it as sort of connecting cities and connecting sort of neighborhoods in a way that we just haven't been able to do it before where you could live in Chicago and commute every day and work in Detroit or vice versa. And even when it comes to, if you were in DC and you wanted to fly to Paris, rather than taking an hour long trip to Dulles and then flying to Charles Zagala and taking an hour long trip, you can cut those into five minute Hyperloop trips. And change the way freight is distributed. It can really affect the economy. And it's all part of a wave of kind of the future of mobility. Drones, self-driving cars, Uber's investing in flying cars. We just sort of see it as sort of, by the time we build one of these things, mobility will be pretty different. So let me push you a little bit on that last piece. Yep. Uber, drones are all attributes of let's think of it as artificial intelligence combined with physical control of processes. As the critical change, and that's coming on through a process of generations now of increasing computation speed at lower prices. Hyperloop sounds like fundamentally the civil engineering component is going to be a major. It's going to take the problem we have with fiber deployment and make it vastly more complex. So for example, we talk about neighborhoods. The idea of actually. So what's the technological, you say you're inventing technologies, what's the technological moment that makes this the moment? And what is it connected to that we can imagine is growing fast enough to matter? Yeah, okay. So the idea of something like a Hyperloop was proposed in the, maybe in the 1930s by Goddard, rocket scientist. And I'll tell you about a few of the information processing changes that are necessary to do Hyperloop at scale. And then I'll talk about some of the civil engineering. So the concept behind what we're doing is imagine you're not sending like a giant train from, and I'll just keep using LA to San Francisco. You're not sending a floating train through a tube. Because the Hyperloop pod doesn't have an engine, it doesn't need an engine. The motor is essentially magnets on the track that shoot it forward. It's very light. It's almost like a floating bus as you're shooting buses back and forth. And there are no stops. So if you wanted to stop off in, I don't know, San Jose, there'd be a little turn off like a highway overpass and you'd deposit there. And all the stations can be a lot smaller and spread out through a city because you're having essentially floating buses instead of a giant train. In order to have the kind of throughput you need with all these small pods being fired back and forth, you're not going to be sending them once every 20 minutes on a schedule that you see in the train station. They're going to be fired off once every 30 seconds, almost on demand. And if people are showing up to the Hyperloop station and these buses are taking off back and forth to get the kind of throughput you need that you'd have on a mass transit system, you need. And we have an entire team that's just devoted to the software controls which relies heavily on artificial intelligence. And just think of it as almost a souped up air traffic control with a lot of autonomous components to it. So the head of our software team is on the Department of Transportation's autonomous advisory regulatory board to try to think through, one, the air traffic control internally. And then how would it plug into an API so that you can order a Hyperloop, land somewhere, and then plug into an Uber and keep going? So the door-to-door piece of the communication would be a lot more complicated if you had to hail a taxi or rent a car on both ends. So that's the software piece of it. And then, on the sort of civil engineering hardware side, I guess I can give, I mean, I don't totally know, actually. But I think the examples that I would give, one of our engineers was on the founding team of Tesla. And he helped design the battery for Tesla. And the Hyperloop would be pretty energy-intensive. And so he, I mean, it's his job to invent new things, right? And you see, you read about every day these innovations in batteries, just reducing the price of batteries, making them cheaper, making them easier, and making them lighter, which has probably been driven by smartphones. And that translates over into making it easier for Tesla and us. So you talked about talking to government bodies in Europe. You talked about the issue of essentially a private company doing something that sounds like it's the space program. How do you think about that as somebody who's spent time on thinking of communications as a public utility, or at least as a common carrier, on this trying to harness a public will to do something that is a basic public good when you find yourself in this company that needs to, on one hand, make all of these basic innovations, think of building basic civil engineering infrastructure, and on the other hand, doing it as an investor-owned company. Are you given up on the stage? I would never let you down like that, Yochai. So when I joined Hyperloop 1, I joined as assistant general counsel in charge of regulatory and government affairs. I was then promoted to general counsel. And I didn't even realize when I showed up that for a company like Hyperloop 1, I think we realized the giant challenge we have ahead of us. And it turns out that governments play a pretty interesting role for the company. One, we have some governments that are investors in the company. So SNCF is the French-owned railway. They're an investor in the company. DP World, which is Dubai Port's world, is owned by Dubai. And the strategy of getting governments to invest in the company as investors or sovereign wealth funds is definitely a strategy we have. And our board of directors and our CEO and our CFO, getting the financing and the partnerships with the government is a key thing that we realized we needed to do, just on the stakeholder side. In addition, usually you go to a tech company and the policy guys are not that important. I remember when I used to be organizing letters and putting other coalitions, and the policy guys would have to talk to someone on the business side. This discussion, you try to figure out a way to get to their CEO and see if he cared. And in this company, because it's a transportation infrastructure company, from the beginning when new government mattered, they're not only our investors, they're also pretty much our customers. We're going to the Finnish government and meeting with the Minister of Transportation and saying, hey, you should have a hyperloop. Here's why you should have a hyperloop in your country. Here's why we should put the first hyperloop in Finland. And we explain, and it usually has to do with the local geography. But there you have this town called Salo that had the Nokia headquarters. Nokia was acquired by Microsoft, and that didn't go too well. So there's this giant headquarters and all these really smart engineers who might move to Berlin or Paris or somewhere else once their two-year severance paid by Microsoft through the government is over. So our pitch is, hey, we'll take over the Nokia campus or something to that effect. We'll hire all these brilliant software engineers to help create our software controls that we need. And we'll build the first test loop in Finland connecting this town Salo to another town kind of 40 miles away. We'll get all the certifications, the safety certification. We'll build up some expertise, suppliers, software developers, there'll be a whole ecosystem. The Silicon Valley of hyperloop technology will be in Finland. And so that's the pitch we make to one government. We make that pitch to multiple different governments, connecting airports in a way to make sure as airports become more and more centralized in a few hubs, if you were to connect two airports in a country and create a super airport that could compete with the large airport in another country, you sort of have a narrative that you can tell governments. And so I'm hiring somebody who worked at the State Department and had done a lot of interesting policy work and helped implement the Iran deal, really interesting stuff. And I told her you're gonna be helping the business development team, the sales team. So it's kind of an unusual place where the geeky lawyer is actually kind of core to both the investment team and the sales team. And then there's obviously the fact that governments are regulators. And so we can't even try to do what Uber did, which is, hey, we're just putting cars on the street and we should be unregulated and then wait for cities to shut them down and then start a fight. We have to actually go in in advance and say, hey, we need permission. We wanna work with you hand and glove. And there we just copy other smart lawyers. We copied Google Fiber. A few years ago, Google asked America which city wants a gigabit of fiber, wants speed. And 1,100 cities applied, Kansas City was chosen and they sort of negotiated certain terms that made it, they didn't get a subsidy or anything but they got certain terms to make it more acceptable. And we had something called the Global Challenge where we asked cities and pretty much anyone from around the world, academic institutions, private companies, hey, tell us why we should put a hyperloop in your country. We got hundreds of registrations and about a hundred solid applications. We announced 35 semi-finalists but a few of them were submitted by governments. The Florida Department of Transportation submitted a Miami to Orlando route. It's a really great route. The governor of Nevada, along with the congressional delegation submitted three different routes in Nevada. And so we're trying to sort of piece something together. And this is actually kind of interesting and ironic point about government. We had always assumed that we would be, the first hyperloop would be abroad and we'd be looking abroad and that the US would be a difficult regulatory environment. And then Donald Trump comes along and says I've got a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending, et cetera and wants to shake things up and so people are asking about, maybe we could do one in the US and we're mainly pulling from the global challenge participants to try to figure that out. Cool. I'm feeling like we should open up to questions and if people are too quiet, I'll jump back in with me. Yeah. Hold on. Oh. Oh. Is this on? Good. First question I wanted to ask just because it's sort of the conversation that people having right now towards the sort of high speed trend they're building between Los Angeles and San Francisco is just sort of the economics of a project like this. It's clearly better in terms of like timing. How does something like this compare to something like the trend they're proposing to build between those two cities in terms of like costs? It's less. So we have a business intelligence team that's mainly hires from folks across the river, right? Harvard Business School students and Wharton students and they do all the math. But their math, you know, there are lots of assumptions in it, right? So we're in the middle of inventing some of the technology and trying to figure out how to drive down the costs. And so most transportation projects seem to be overestimated in terms of, or underestimated in terms of the costs. We're trying not to do that. But, you know, when I asked my engineers, can you build one of these things today? One of them gave me this analogy that I thought was pretty useful. And that is, you know, when Elon Musk invented SpaceX, rockets existed. You could see rockets that were going into outer space. And, but Elon Musk thought they were, you know, 100 times more expensive than they should have been. And so he tried to figure out ways to innovate and just drive down the costs in order to get into the market. And my engineers assure me that they could build a hyperloop today. It would just be 100 times too expensive for anyone to want to pay for it or to ride on it. And so a lot of what they're doing is trying to figure out ways to, you know, have cheaper materials that we use around the tube or less expensive power when it comes to sending it off. So the goal is definitely to be cheaper than high-speed rail. We always say like, oh, cheaper than high-speed rail in twice performance. But if we can't get to cheaper than high-speed rail, it's kind of a harder argument to make. Can I just... That was kind of a bit... Yeah, please. Because it actually connects because it connects to the... So, yeah. Flight and, flight and cars use existing rights of way. Yep. High-speed rail is dragging along because of questions of expansions of rights of way, new parts that need to be straightened. You probably need to go over land. Yes, or under land. Or under land, but in any event, you're going to need rights of way from all those people between the points, between Los Angeles and San Francisco, who have less than no interest in being fly under or fly through areas. And that's been a problem, certainly for high-speed rail in the Northeast. That's a general council question. Yeah, so two thoughts there. One, we hope that they won't be as disinterested because we're not loud, we're enclosed, it's a vacuum, sound doesn't travel through a vacuum. So hopefully it won't be quite as big a deal. And we also need a smaller right of way. The way it's usually handled when it comes to trains is you usually negotiate to put a stop in each town that's mad at you. And so then the train just takes forever because you've got to stop all those times. So, what we're looking at is the initial proposal by Elon Musk was just put it on top of a freeway. You already have a right of way there over the freeway, you negotiate with the government. And if you could just have a straight shot kind of on pillars over the freeway, that would be one way of doing it. We're also looking at rights of way that railroads hold or that have been set aside for railroads that have installed around the world. And so we're definitely looking at like, so our plan right now is low hanging fruit. We need one or two projects. We don't need to sort of, we don't have like an apple of our eye project that we need to get and we'll bang our head against the wall as long as it takes. We're sort of putting our chips widely. And if someone steps up and says, we've got, as we're talking to them, we've got a right of way, we've got all the things you need, then that, you know, it's almost like turning the tables what we're trying to do. And so once we have that in place, we're then gonna have like a cookbook. And apparently this is what they did in telecom. So my CEO had been the president at Cisco. And after the 1996 telecom acts, which you teach, and I studied in your class, Cisco apparently realized they had to sell their routers and other equipment to the competitors because they can come into and buy it. So they went around the world with here's the cookbook, the 1996 telecom act, you should implement this, right? The CEO and then the regulatory folks did this. And that's exactly my CEO's model. We come up with the cookbook essentially by working hand in hand with the Dubai regulator or the Finland regulator. And we kind of learn almost like a lean startup like learning, lean regulatory. And then once we have that cookbook, we then go around and say, this is what we need if you want a hyperloop, this is the framework. Interesting. It's a fun job for a lawyer. It sounds like it. I'm not sure if I'm understanding the way this works correctly. The idea is that one company would build and maintain the infrastructure and then all the vehicles would be owned by other people and companies and organizations, but they would all have to play nice so you don't have wrecks at 450 miles an hour inside your tubes. You know, I was unclear on both of them then. So one, I imagine lots of companies sort of being part of the ecosystem to build and operate a hyperloop system. And two, I would imagine that the control system around the pods would be more sort of controlled and unified under one operator. So let's say, so we've done a lot of, it's weird kind of creating a company from the ground up because a few months ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell you this, but we've done a lot of thinking about how would you sell a hyperloop somewhere? And so imagine you're just sending someone an IKEA manual, like how to build a hyperloop, pretty, pretty thick. And you might say, go buy steel on the open market, this much steel, go buy this much concrete on the open market, go buy 100 pods from hyperloop one, go buy 100 motors from hyperloop one, and then you buy them, they'd be delivered and then you put them together. But there'd be some sort of general contractor that is putting it together, buying all this stuff, and we'd be more like a Boeing selling airplanes into the system than the actual organizer of the construction. Then at some point, there's an operator and that could be the city, that could be the state, that could be a private operator. It's probably not us, we're more on the invention, license IP, sell key components portion of the value chain. Is that useful? That's very useful, although it raises the question of the Edison company, which is to say Edison, first coming up with a light bulb and then realizing that he ended up having to sell the centralized electric grid because you needed the grid in order to connect the light bulb and ended up being, in addition to later on GE, also being consolidated Edison and all of these things. But the structure was, we think light bulb, but in fact, it was the entire grid. And you described yourself as now, we're going to be in the light bulb business, but we're going to tell you how to build grids. Edison certainly found that he needed to build grids in several cities before he could get other companies into the grid building business. We definitely think that we'll be more involved in the building early on. That's right. And maybe we will determine that we should be in the grid building business. I think we've always thought of it as we would learn, again, we'd have almost a cookbook for how to build it, and then we'd be able to provide this cookbook to other contractors who could do the building much more quickly so we could scale quickly. But I mean, GE Ventures is an investor in our company and we rely on them for a lot of advice when it comes to project finance and project structure. You can repeat the question, because I think people were listening online. The question I was just wondering if underwater is feasible and the example I used was Providence to New York City, though it writes away issues. Cool. So if you were to come to my office, the R&D headquarters, you would see a drawing that has a water route from San Francisco to L.A. And we wrote it down in a way that it was easy to do. We wrote a blog post, we have a marine engineer who's trying to solve this exact issue. And he wrote a blog post about two or three different ways to do it. So one way to do it is you would have a tube underwater that would be on pylons on the continental shelf, right? So with this strategy, you couldn't connect like the US and Europe because it would get way too deep. But on the continental shelf, you could have these pylons. The other example, there were a few other examples. One was sort of weighted, oh no, one was tunneled, sort of tunneled under the ocean shelf. And the third one just seemed really complicated, like floating with multiple different sensors to try to keep it up. And so as I understand it's a pretty difficult engineering challenge. Our first routes will not be underwater. Even though the government challenges might be lower, the engineering challenges are pretty high, the blog post is pretty amazing. You mentioned in the beginning, when you are talking to folks about this, they're often holding on to either trains or airplanes as sort of the framework that they're approaching this different type of transportation. And in Cambridge and many other places, that's a similar issue we have with bicyclists and sorry, I'm losing my voice, but been part of talks about redoing intersections and trying to think about bikes as something that's independent of both pedestrians and cars. And so I'm just wondering from your perspective, it's obviously a very different level of technical needs that go into these things. But if you have any feedback for folks who are trying to advocate for better bike legislation in cities like Cambridge. Okay, got it. It's interesting, because when you come from the internet world, and when you think about what is internet law, and part of it is what do people at Twitter and Google, et cetera, deal with on a daily basis. Things like copyright and privacy. When it comes to transportation law, one of the main things that people think about, bless you, and focus on is safety. So how do you certify the safety of any new or existing transportation system? And we have an engineer focus entirely on safety standards, et cetera. And part of our story is we think we'll be safer because most fatalities in terms of ground transportation are the result of human error, and we're gonna be largely autonomous, at grade crossings, right? So if you're a bicyclist and you have your own lanes and your own sort of world where you're a part, you don't really have crossings with other modes of transportation, which is, I'm guessing, where a lot of the harm can be. And we're also kind of weatherproof if we're enclosed. But I would focus on safety. I'd make that the argument. And to give a recent example, right, I was talking to some folks about Uber's lobbying. And Uber had largely been popular among Republicans and unpopular with Democrats, partly because of their labor issues. And in one state, probably in many other states, they're flipping it because they focused really heavily on safety and security. Let's make sure that all the Uber drivers have the background checks they need. Would you want your daughter to get into a car with someone who hasn't been vetted, right? This was their story and whether it's true or not, it's pretty effective. So I take your question as how do I be effective? And so I won't comment on the morality of the argument, but I would use safety as a main argument. And my answer to the last question actually reminds me, I should actually tell you what it's like to be at Hyperloop One, like the company itself. It's not at all like a transportation company, it's like a whole bunch of people inventing stuff. So a whole bunch of people like with big, like I don't know, engineering textbooks, trying to come up with different invent, like different physical, different ways to apply physics to the challenges we have at the speeds we have, banking, turning, materials in a space with such low pressure. And it's just a whole bunch of walls covered in equations I don't understand. People sort of debating over lunch how to do different things. And someone hates somebody else's motor design and somebody else has a more brilliant idea for it. So it's very much, it's more an R&D company at the moment than even a transportation company. Can I pose you the question? How many people in the room are law students thinking about their own future careers? I don't want to ask a question. Okay, enough for me to then ask this question. Sure. You've done lots of different things. You've been counsel at an advocacy group. You've been a professor. You've been- I had my own firm. You had your own firm. You've been a political organizer. What's a trajectory of building an interesting life that's not traditional for a large law school? And my apologies to those who aren't law students in that. But it looks like half the room is. And I bet they'll be interested even if they don't know that they're interested. Yeah. So when I look at my friends who have had good careers, they're people who took giant risks. And if you go to Harvard Law School, you can actually take good risks, right? I hire lots of lawyers. I've hired like five lawyers in less than a year. And having gone to Harvard Law School makes people think you're probably smart and interesting. And so you can take more risks than other people. And so if I were just to go through my closest friends in law school, one of them dropped out of a law firm and went to the military. He's now a senator, oddly enough. One of them dropped out of a law firm and ended up becoming an FBI agent. And one of them was thinking about his career once. He told me this. He said, I was thinking about my career. And I was like, when it comes down to it, anything you want in life, you actually have to like manage and think through how do I get from here to there. And he moved to the Middle East where he could get a job in V.C., which is what he wanted. A lot of my friends made a move to nonprofit despite the pay cuts that come with it. And I mean, often people would meet me and say, oh, you're a lawyer. That sounds boring. And I was like, I have one of the coolest lawyer jobs out there. And I almost always did. But early on it wasn't. Early on I went to Kirkland and Ellis. It was a great law firm. I had a lot of fun there. But it was just a big, big firm. And then I took a fellowship with you, which my mom thought was crazy. I sort of gave up this sensible job to go write some papers with you. I took a fellowship in Georgetown in a clinic, which was also seen as pretty nuts if you're going to be a law professor, as I plan to be, because it was clinical. And so I had to convince people that I wanted to do academics instead. And then I got a professorship, and I deferred for a year to take a job as a general counsel of a small nonprofit named FreePress. And I just thought these people were really smart. And I remember you thought it was a bad idea. Do you remember this? I don't, but I trust you. That sounds right. Yeah. I mean, it was actually a bad idea when I'd heard of these guys. And that was when I handled the Comcast BitTorrent case. Which turned out not to be a bad idea. It turned out to work out well for me. And I also worked on the Obama campaign, and it was a fun year. And so I think a lot of people are just kind of not willing to take a risk. And I just wanted to get it in telecom. That's what I wanted to do. And it took a few years to get there. And then I kind of had my break with Comcast. But what I see is, you know, if you're one of those people who complains about law school, those people end up complaining forever about their job even though they could easily change it. So I don't know. Just have a positive attitude. You don't enjoy your career in law. It's your fault. That's amazing. 100%. That is my message. So someone in this room, unless like a tragedy follows you, or like you could probably take a risk and end up exactly where you want to be. All my friends who actually made a move to where they wanted to be ended up there. Okay. Questions on that? Is that too harsh? That's very harsh, but you're in a position to say it. So that's okay. It's legitimate. You've certainly taken risks and done many different things over time. You're in a position to be entitled to say it. But I would say most of my friends have done the same thing. Most of my friends who are happy, really happy with their jobs and their careers, made that kind of move. And so I was here for my 10-year reunion. And the 10-year reunion was really funny. We're kind of in a room like this. It might have even been this room. And TJ DeWayne, who was one of my classmates, was sitting here and going around the room asking people what they had done since going to law school. And there was sort of a similar trajectory for some people, which was, graduated from law school, went to a big firm in New York, hated it, left, did something they loved. It was like repeated. It was just everyone had that kind of path. And the people who, everyone seemed pretty happy. No one said they were unhappy. But the people who seemed happiest had taken a sort of risk that you wouldn't expect. So that's an even stronger statement. No, that's okay. Just clarifying. Okay. Pushback, comments, or shifting back to Hyperloop One or other things. Yeah. There's a question there in the back. Do you have somebody at the company doing environmental impact kind of assessment, whether to do with emissions or infrastructure? Where does that figure in? And also I was just curious if you had buy-in from the aviation industry in any form or whether you predict they'll see this as an enormous threat to their industry. So we do not have someone full time at the company doing the environmental assessments. We've used outside law firms for that. So on my team internally, I'll just tell you who I have on my team internally. So I have an IP lawyer who does all of our patents and trademarks and things like that. Who owns the word Hyperloop is actually kind of a contentious point, oddly enough. And then we have a lawyer who focuses on contracts. It's kind of unusual how many contracts we need in our company compared to, say, a software company. If you were a developer, a software developer, you would write something up, I guess, and then it would be able to push it to the web and you wouldn't need to do anything else. Here they've designed something on their computers, like a design of some sort. And then we've got to usually pay some vendor to make the device. And then we test the device, then we send it back. And if the device isn't made well or not made quickly enough, there are issues, right? So there's all these contracts we have. And I've got a poor overworked chap just working on all the contracts. Then I've got two people focused on financings because this is pretty capital-intensive. One on getting money into the company, corporate financings. So those are the people who go to pretty much every general counsel seems to have a corporate financing background and worked at Fenwick, or Wilson-Sincini, or Gundersen, or Cooley. There's just a few firms that are in all the deals. And I've got three people from Gundersen that I hired who all are sort of trained in that way. And then we've got a project finance person. And project finance is something I didn't know anything about in law school or until recently. That's sort of financing big projects like solar farms, oil pipelines, airports. And that's usually done with tons of bank debt from particular bankers who want a really long-term horizon and get paid back based on 50 years of revenue. So I've got one of those. Those are the lawyers on the team plus two political folks. The former, the most recent chief of staff of the Department of Transportation. I just hired him on to join our team and to help us think through all the regulatory issues. But a lot of the other stuff we do outhouse, but not in-house, like litigation. I don't have a litigation lawyer on staff yet and a whole bunch of other things. I just have outside lawyers for employment, real estate. And then eventually, if we get big enough, I'll hire someone in. As for the aviation industry, that's a great question. I don't totally know. I've met with a few folks from a few of the airlines. I think we haven't proven enough for them to focus on us. You had your hand up before? But one day, one day they will focus on us. And then I will charm them. So thank you so much for your talk. So I'm a 1L and I know I recognize a few other 1Ls in their room as well who are currently thinking about career plans. And I know a lot of us, myself included, are seriously considering really want to go into a technology company that's really on the cutting edge as hyperlubes. And so I was just wondering what your career advice would be to someone who's just starting out. The reality is I'm not supposed to go to big law firms or go to government, that kind of thing. Your advice on how to get to basically where you are and what things that you would do differently perhaps if you had a chance to start again. OK, sounds good. So I realize I gave a harsh answer. I'm going to give the same answer in the exact opposite light, hopefully, which is I now remember what it was like as a 1L or a 2L. And you're sort of wondering what your career will be like and if you'll have a good career. And it's kind of like stressful. It's almost like you're overwhelmed with options. And you want to make sure you choose the right one. And what I meant with my previous answer is don't worry about it too much. Take a risk, go for it. And if it doesn't work, you'll be OK. Even when I offer jobs, people are like, look, if the company goes under in two years or something because something goes wrong, you'll be able to get a job. Look at your resume. And then I think you can probably take risks. So to be sort of more specific, take risks and don't worry about it, is a more general answer. And part of that general answer is, obviously, do something that you really love doing. I had to find someone who just loved contracts. I don't love contracts. This guy Han loves contracts, loves tech transactions, loves VIP portions of the contracts. Laura on my team loves doing equity financing, loves living in an Excel doc with cap tables. Loves this. And if you love doing it, you'll be really good at it. And someone will want to hire you to do that. So more specifically, I actually began at a law firm. And when I went to Kirkland and Ellis, it was always rank number one in training or top five in training. And I don't really know if their training programs taught me all that much. Everyone was just so busy that work was pushed down. And I got to do a lot of work. And I worked with really smart people. And I felt like I learned a lot at Kirkland and Ellis. And then when I spent two years at Georgetown, as part of a clinic there, they have a whole bunch of clinics at Georgetown. And this was kind of like the cyber law clinic, but more like TV and communications law as well. There was Angela Campbell's shop. One of the shops next door was David Vladek. And David Vladek is just like an amazing lawyer. And just sort of watching him and working with him occasionally, I got to learn a lot. So I would pick firms where it's hard to tell when you're a $1 or two, what firm you should be at. They all seem the same kind of. They all say the same thing. Even when they pitch me to hire them, you know, outside counsel, they say the same thing. So it's kind of hard to pick. You might want to think about what lawyers you also would want to work under and sort of read about and try to think through. It's a lot easier for, you know, pellet lawyers are pretty well known. Some corporate lawyers are pretty well known. So I would think about who you'd want to work under. And then I think I named a whole bunch of firms that tend to do a lot of startup work. Gundersen-Dettmer is a good firm. Seems like lots of general counsels worked at Gundersen-Dettmer. They're outside general counsel to hold into small startups. And, you know, if I were the CEO of a small company and you were at Gundersen-Dettmer and you were doing all my work and I was paying $400 an hour for you and I could hire you at a cheaper rate to do the same exact work in-house. That's what happens all the time. And Gundersen people are brought in. Wilson-Sancini is a great firm. You know, the firms I mentioned, Cooley, Goodwin Proctor is a really good startup firm. I would go to a firm like that where you're going to be doing startup work for startups and you're going to be in the scene and everyone will know you. Right? If you were interested in doing internet policy, sort of internet freedom work, et cetera, I'd recommend going to EFF, going to New America in D.C., going to Free Press where I worked. EFF is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And these guys have pretty amazing lawyers, really amazing talent, very influential. And you'll get far more substantive work there as a young lawyer than maybe anywhere else. But, you know, if any of... You know, I don't even use Gundersen, but I steal all of their lawyers. So I probably owe them. So if anyone wants to be introduced to my favorite partner at Gundersen, let me know. I'll just introduce you to him as a favorite to him. He'll get like 20 Harvard Law students emailing him saying, Marvin says you're awesome. So his name is Ward Breeze, if this is being recorded. Sorry, I stole all your good lawyers recently. Wow, lots of questions. Yeah, so I feel in this country we think of our transportation systems as primarily government run. And so I'm just wondering kind of what you first see the government or the public's role with Hyperloop going forward in terms of delegating, operating, maintaining and financing of the infrastructure. So one of the things that we're doing, which is kind of interesting, is that we're trying to do everything at once. So the levitation team is trying to invent the levitation that's really energy efficient and energy elegant and that works really well. The... Can I just say the coolest sentence of the levitation team is trying to... Yes, forget about everything else. The propulsion team is trying to build the propulsion system. The tube team is trying to build an efficient tube. The braking team, the energy team. So all the teams are trying to invent all this stuff immediately. And while that's going on, the government and regulatory and legal team is trying to come up with legal framework and how to interact with governments. And at the same time, the business development team is going around trying to sell a Hyperloop. And one of the things that's interesting is they're all kind of... They're all interrelated. So when we talk to governments about what their appetite is, what they'd want to do, in some places, the idea is the more private money, the more private operation, the better. And other... Excuse me, in other places, the notion is, of course, this is a government-run function. And it's kind of fascinating because we're talking to customers as we're trying to invent the thing. And a lot of the engineers on our team have worked on things where they've invented something and then tried to sell it and no one wanted it. And so we're trying to avoid that. And so if a government came to us and said, we want to operate it and we want to be involved in these ways, we would be amenable to it. Then kind of... Everything kind of pushes back, though, because let's say that there was... Let's say that Dubai government said, hey, we want to route this long. You know, whatever that is, 50 miles. It's not going to go 700 miles an hour if it's a pretty short route. It's going to be much slower, you don't need to be that fast anyway. It doesn't save you a lot of time and just adds way too much complexity and cost for such a small route. So if you're going to have a lower speed, it then changes every piece of the engineering. The levitation might be different, the propulsion might be different. You might have already, if you're the lawyer who sees all the contracts, you might have already bought too many motors or certain things that we're testing that we don't need anymore. So a long way of saying, I envision them to be operating in most regions, but we're not dead set on, you know, not having private partners operate. There was a hand up there in the back. By the way, I apologize for my long answers. I feel that my... If you need me to shorten them, just let me know. You kind of touched on this in the last question, but I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about the really long-term vision for Hyperloop, like maybe 50 years out. I don't know how much of that conversation you have on a day-to-day basis, and I imagine it changes a lot, but if you could just provide some insight, that would be great. So I think the initial routes are going to be sort of short routes that are manageable, that are between high traffic sites, maybe within a city or connecting airports or connecting two cities that are nearby. The long-term vision is just sort of nations crisscrossed with Hyperloops. People could live in whatever, Pittsburgh and work in Chicago and it would be a simple commute. It wouldn't be that long. That's, you know, where people would live in D.C. or they'd live in New York and they'd commute to D.C., right? Including Melania. That'd be really convenient. And there are some things that, you know, it's hard to predict. That's your 50-year projection. You know, I do think it'll be eight rough years. And so there's certain, you know, imagine, even the route from L.A. to New York I think will be a more manageable, doable route. And so then, let's say you have, I'm just talking about sort of connecting point-to-point cities. I think you then have cities where, you know, it's nothing but an industrial town and everyone lives 20 minutes away, right? You could set up just an industrial town outside of Chicago. That's like an easy commute for everyone rather than have people live and work in the same place. You know, some of the newest towns in America are kind of quirky, right? There's a new town called The Villages in Florida. I don't know if you've heard of it. It's bigger than Charlotte. It's like a brand new town. And it was, it's like a retirement community. It's very, very, very planned. And, you know, if there are towns like that that are going to be sort of sprouted up, they're kind of pretty homogenous towns, actually. And you could connect them to different regions. You could end up with sort of rethinking how cities are structured. It could be more diverse. It could be less diverse. More diverse sounds more favorable to me. I guess I'm not good at, I mean, the vision is it's hard to predict, right? And when Steve Jobs held up the iPhone and said, you know, here's this awesome thing. It's an MP3 player and a phone and a browser and one. You couldn't have really predicted Uber. That was kind of an unlikely prediction. So it's not totally clear to me what will happen in 50 years, other than hopefully there are hyperloops everywhere connecting lots of cities to each other. Right? I think this may be, unless it's a very short one, this may be the last. I had a question about the sort of long-term consumer impact of something like this in particular. The idea of being able to get from LA to San Francisco in 30 minutes sounds wonderful, but it also sounds like the kind of thing that would be probably fairly expensive. So for people who could afford to buy that ticket, they could do that. And for everyone else, they would take the current options. And so part of what it sounded like you were saying was a pitch to governments to take taxpayer money and sort of helping to build this high-speed option that would be available for people who can afford it. So my question is, when you talk to governments, how are you pitching this as a part of a larger transportation ecosystem that doesn't take money away from other areas where someone who can't afford a $100 one-way ticket can still get to work through other forms of public transportation? Got it. I guess we give them two answers. Answer number one, you could work in San Francisco, but live what would now be an hour and a half away, or 10 minutes away, where the housing would be a ton cheaper. So if you think of how expensive properties have gotten in a lot of our major cities, and there's all this traffic to get in, you could really reduce a lot of that. And our MOU with Moscow was to build a sort of new Moscow where people could just hyperloop in and out. It's kind of stalled at the moment, but that's the idea of property and congestion are really bad in the city. You could create a satellite city like a new kind of suburb. So that's one, a lot cheaper housing. Two, in terms of pricing, we've talked about as being competitive with existing options. And so think of a ticket costing $20, not $100. The idea is to be high volume, high traffic, low price. You probably have time for one more if people want. Yeah. I was curious what kind of timeframe you're thinking of how immediate in the future is the first type of loop going to be. I know there's a lot of variables to that, but what's the internal prediction of the implementation plan? Our target is 2021. And it would be a short 20 to 30 miles. Wow, that was such a short turn around. Okay, three things. One, more of innovation is moving into the real material world from the information and communications world and seeing you move in that way is part of it. Two and three are really two things for the students here. I look at you, I listen to you, I say this institution gives you enormous power, which you can use based on Marvin's story at least in two valuable ways. One is doing something for the public, not just for yourself. And the other is using the immense privilege that it gives you to take risk to your life and be interesting rather than to play it safe. It's a great pleasure to listen to the General Counsel of Hyperloop One, Marvin Amore, and to have you back here. Thanks very much. Thank you.