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What does The Line's 98% Scope reduction mean for NEOM?
67 Plays6 months ago
In this week's episode of the Off Site Podcast, Jason is joined for the last time by guest host, Mike, to breakdown the latest news surrounding NEOM's The Line.
The duo discuss the feasibility of this new reduced scope, the potential reasons for such a big change in direction as well as the impact this news will have on NEOM's other projects.
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Transcript
Introduction and Farewell
00:00:00
Speaker
Righto, ready to get ourselves cancelled? Well, it's my last hurrah, maybe anyway, so we might as well go out with the fact. Yeah, so this will be the last episode with Mike, possibly the last episode ever.
Offsite Podcast Overview
00:00:16
Speaker
Two weeks.
00:00:21
Speaker
You're listening to the Offsite Podcast with Jason and Carlos, where we talk all things construction and technology. Join us for discussions with industry leaders and insights into latest trends in construction. Welcome
The NEOM Mega Project Introduction
00:00:34
Speaker
back to the Offsite Podcast. Mike, last one of your fill-in episodes, mate. How are you feeling about recording and then being one and done?
00:00:47
Speaker
Mate, very good. Pleasure to be back again. Last time, maybe keeping the seat warm for Carlos, but no, it's... And this is a topic that I have been interested about ever since I joined AFX, so I'm excited to talk about it today. Cool, yeah. We're going to talk about, let's say, a controversial topic, but we're definitely not going to be critical or controversial in any way. No, sorry.
Ambitious Plans vs. Reality
00:01:14
Speaker
No, absolutely. So for those that have been listening to podcasts, we occasionally talk about and last year more so than this year of this project in Saudi Arabia called Neon. It's the name of it. It's the amalgamation of two words. It means new something, new future or something like that. As Elliot from our team would say, it's not a word, it's a sound, but that's not me being critical. It's like the sound of a cargo. Neon. Neon made to change.
00:01:45
Speaker
But so for those who don't know about it, to give some background, this is a giant mega, mega project in Saudi Arabia in the Neom region. So it's kind of like up the top left in 100% desert. The idea was like this futuristic city stretching 170 kilometers through the desert in the big glass structure.
00:02:15
Speaker
It was supposed to house, I think, 9 or 10 million people. And the overall structure's concept was 200 meters wide, 500 meters tall, and 170 kilometers long. So as we'll go through this, it holds a lot of records, conceptually. But one of them is that it's the only city that is taller than it is wide.
00:02:38
Speaker
So it was supposed to have artificial moons, robot maids, flying taxis, glow in the dark sand, and was kind of like an idea as part of the Crown Prince's Vision 2030 project, which is part of the idea to move Saudi Arabia away from an oil-based economy into the future and diversify.
00:03:02
Speaker
So the line part of NEOM, so it's made up of a couple of different projects. So this big glass line in the desert, there's like a floating manufacturing and industrial city in the ocean, some big dam ski resort in the mountains, a whole bunch of these things. The line itself was
00:03:24
Speaker
supposed to be kind of the centerpiece of this they estimated like 500 billion dollar investment mega project. The reason we're talking about is in the news recently they've announced that the it's going to be scaled back a little bit so it's being the line is being scaled back from its original 170 kilometer length
00:03:44
Speaker
down to 2.4 kilometers. And the target population from like 9 or 10 million to 300,000. So a slight reduction in scope. Slight's very generous. That seems quite large in scale back.
00:04:00
Speaker
I think it's like 3% of this. So not 3% reduction, but like a 97% reduction in scope. And why is that? Well, it turns out building an entire city that's got all these, I won't say crazy because that would be critical. We're not critical, but like adventurous concepts is really hard. The timelines
Challenges and Comparisons
00:04:21
Speaker
are really hard and the cost keeps blowing out. So it's been reduced in scope.
00:04:28
Speaker
And so I guess there's a lot of things that we could dive into, Mike, on that. I guess as an entry point to a couple of different topics, we could talk about where construction's at at the moment. Yeah. And it has always been tough, I guess, to understand from not just this project, but others as well, the marketing engine of where things are at and the real-time updates of where things are actually at.
00:04:53
Speaker
Yeah, it would be good to understand as best as possible your personal opinion of where do you think construction is actually at maybe with that revised schedule.
00:05:03
Speaker
Well, yeah, my personal opinion aside, because I don't want to be critical at all, I think most of the updates that people will see are like CGI. Well, allegedly, they're CGI animations of the project. And allegedly, some people have said that certain flyovers have been shown of
00:05:23
Speaker
the progress have been like looped. So it's this like one section just over and over again. Yeah. To give some context, they have awarded or had awarded quite a number of large contracts for the construction of the in the scale of most mega projects, quite a number of large contracts. So there was a
00:05:43
Speaker
a multi-billion dollar drill and blast tunneling contract awarded. There was a rail line, a couple of billion dollar rail line connecting to the floating city that I think we build and another JV partner was awarded. There was a couple of billion dollar high-speed railway that has been awarded. There is a contract awarded I think for the dams for maybe five billion dollars.
00:06:12
Speaker
$4 billion hydrogen plant that was awarded. So they've awarded a lot of these contracts and they are big value contracts, but in the context of a 9 million person city, one could argue that they're not that, that's not actually that many contracts or value that's been awarded.
00:06:29
Speaker
And they have, there's apparently 60,000 workers on site. They spent a couple of billion already on construction work, again, in the scheme of 500 billion. They're very early, is like probably the state of play.
00:06:46
Speaker
Where do we all start? Yeah, well, I guess I'm interested. So first things first, that's a massive scope production. It even feels like Elon Musk has done a few decent walkbacks in scope. They're kind of the other big ones that I remember from time frames, but this is up there.
00:07:04
Speaker
I guess what do you think they may have learned in that period of time that's led to that kind of scope reduction and thinking about let's just say ignore what it was originally planned at 170 kilometers and just thinking about the new two kilometer or three percenter that's still massive when it's 500 high and 200 wide
00:07:25
Speaker
Is that possible or more practical, even forgetting about the adventurous aspects of the moons and the robots just from a sheer construction standpoint? How ambitious is still that project?
00:07:39
Speaker
Yeah, like I think one of the articles that I read before this put in context the size of the line project by comparing it to one of the largest buildings in Southeast Asia. And that one wall of the project was like 4,000 of these buildings side by side in terms of height and width. And that was like a multi-billion dollar project. So if you got fourth, like the scope, the scale of it is very, very hard to like even fathom being real.
00:08:09
Speaker
But even if you take, even if you said that there was 3,000 people and 2.4 kilometers of this enormous building, which is still massive, in order to build a city in the desert or nothing, you need power plants, you need transport. You can look around the world at some of the big mega projects even our team would work with. And there's like, just building a single power, like a nuclear power station is incredibly difficult and takes
00:08:35
Speaker
maybe 10 years and multiples of billions, you know, 20, 30 billion dollars
Skepticism and Strategies
00:08:43
Speaker
or pounds. So the scope even just get the first bit going is crazy. And then if you stack on top of that, some of the things that were supposed to be included in this thing, like I don't, I'm not, you know, again, I'm not being negative about it. Listeners who might go back and look at previous episodes might hear someone that sounds like me saying that I didn't think it was ever going to happen.
00:09:04
Speaker
They might even hear me, someone that sounds like me, say that if I was going to pretend to build 140 kilometer city in the desert, some of the things around the like marketing is what I would do if I was trying to pretend to do it. Like, but some of the concepts that are supposed to be included just are not just like never. It takes it from like
00:09:31
Speaker
the okay suspend disbelief we're going to do something incredible.
00:09:36
Speaker
We're not trying to do another big project. We're trying to change the game in terms of what a human city looks like. Even if you believe that for a moment, then you look at the list of things that were then thrown on top, which is 170 kilometre long line in the most barren part of almost the world. No water, extreme temperatures, only sand. Lots of snow.
00:10:02
Speaker
Yeah, a bit of sun. We talked about offline this like claim that you could travel from one end to the other in 20 minutes in like a train that would have to go over like 500 kilometres an hour as a train. Yeah, I think a few times the speed of sound to be able to... Concluding stops. Yeah, maybe 400-ish stops if you want to split it out like the London Underground.
00:10:28
Speaker
Yeah, the artificial moon, the glow and darks and the like, there's supposed to be all these robots everywhere, inventing like new human gene editing, like cameras, drones, facial recognition to like get you in and out of different areas. I like the whole city that's supposed to float on the water. So it was like, it goes from, it quickly goes to like, one would say, not me, one would say that it's ridiculous.
00:10:55
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess to put in context, like a lot of big constructions do feel like a zero to one effort. Like it's never been done before. It's saying that it's not possible until it's been proven possible. This feels like maybe zero to 100 if you were to use the same.
00:11:12
Speaker
Same relative. It goes past 100. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the how big things get done book always talks about like the last thing you want to do if you're trying to build a mega project is be the first person to try something. Yeah. Because you're asking for trouble. Best thing to do is use proven methods, proven technology. This has gone f that.
00:11:34
Speaker
We'll do 50 and run them in parallel.
Realistic Outcomes and Debates
00:11:37
Speaker
We'll run them in parallel and we'll change the game. And unless the rest of the world has been taking the piss for whatever period of how we do construction, it doesn't seem like it was ever a real concept. What is probably interesting to think about is realistically what happens from here. So I don't know if you're a betting man, Mike, but if you were to be.
00:12:03
Speaker
Yeah. I was doing some quick napkin maths on the big tower. I think it might've been in Taipei, that one was like the equivalent of say 4,000 of those. Let's say it's only 3% now and you've got 120 of those to get built, still in a really inhospitable place.
00:12:23
Speaker
Is that possible in any kind of timeframe? Because we're, what, we're talking another five, six years. Like, is it possible to run hundreds of those in, like, can you even mobilize a team that big before you even think about, let's park all the adventurous complexity that we're talking about before and just talk about building. Even building that's like crazy because you've got none of the infrastructure. So
00:12:49
Speaker
So if you're going to build that in where if it's in type A, that job, for example, you've got infrastructure of a supply chain. You've got people that live in the city that can house them. You've got materials like batching plants and quarries. Unless you build everything out of sand, because that is the most abundant
00:13:10
Speaker
resource you need to get there's like a whole supply chain there's like ports you probably have to build you have to build a port for sure because you got to get stuff in there you have to build a rail line in you have to build roads in you have to build so just to even get to like let's say turning the first sod is
00:13:27
Speaker
Yeah. A whole city of infrastructure in and of building a whole city almost. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Before you even get the first bit of the city built, you have to build the infrastructure that supports a 9 million person city, which is like just adding to like power stations, rail, road, the airport, like in a big airport. Yeah. Need a way to get to the airport.
00:13:49
Speaker
And do they have they talked about much of that because obviously even if I were to say that the other original plan was more of a marketing thing to get attention and to
00:14:02
Speaker
Just double click on it. If one was being cynical, because this is the bit I haven't been off to answer, even if I was hypothetically cynical in the past, why hypothetically pretend? Why would one hypothetically pretend to build a 140 kilometer long city with moons and whatever? I think it definitely reminds me.
00:14:27
Speaker
again the scale is crazy compared to what we're talking about but it reminds me of kind of landing on the moon and it reminds me in a watered down version of some of the things that Mask has been known to do you try and set this big hairy audacious goal that's so unbelievable put a crazy time frame on top of that and use that to try and galvanize and bring together the best and brightest
00:14:55
Speaker
If you got a lot of money to throw at it, that helps. If all the money that you have possible, you know that you were never really going to get that spot, that kind of scope complete or within that timeframe. But by trying to set that anchor, you're hoping to still build something that's crazily incredible and like is a true zero to one, zero to 100 kind of thing. But you try and set the anchors so far out and use the marketing flywheel and visibility that it garners.
00:15:23
Speaker
Then why take the foot off the gas? Yeah, that bit doesn't really make sense. Because if that was the intent, you would run that for at least a few years. Yeah, yeah. Because there's lots of examples. You take Dubai. There was lots of examples of things that looked kind of like that, but never on this scale.
00:15:44
Speaker
I think the original estimate was $200 billion and then it blew to $500 billion. Given the scope of all of the out there stuff in this, I think one of the stats was estimating that to do that would cost $7 trillion to build a city of that scale if you take the best market rates for power, infrastructure, whatever. On that scale, that's more than Saudi Arabia generates in GDP by multiple.
00:16:11
Speaker
If you take a project like The World, which was that archipelago of islands, I dug into the history of that just before this. And so it was conceived in 2003, was constructed between 2003, 2008, stopped basically in GFC in 2008. And then since then, and basically now, nothing
00:16:35
Speaker
There's been some development of some of the islands, but most of them are still totally empty. There's an issue with subsidence of the islands. And so there's the second palm was in a very stagnant state in Dubai for a long time. And those, while massive projects, pale in comparison to the scale of this, it's almost like a bet the house. You never intended to do it, or it's a bet the house gamble.
00:17:05
Speaker
Yeah, there's definitely been some realization that that is impossible. It's hard
Economic and Cultural Implications
00:17:11
Speaker
to know what the intent was at this start. I see a lot of signals that peak my marketing brain of going, I see what you did there and there and there. But yeah, you're right. That doesn't explain the walk back from that. Like if you use just some of the Tesla or SpaceX examples, like it's pretty much just full throttle the whole way through.
00:17:32
Speaker
timelines get blown, but then you eventually deliver something that is crazy compared to what people thought was possible. And sure, it wasn't in budget or in timeframe, but there's something that comes out. But I don't think there was many walk backs from any of the like target timeframes or expectations, because that was used to hold the team to account and to try and get them reaching for something impossible.
00:17:58
Speaker
In those scenarios as well, when you think about the goal that was maybe set by say like an Elon Musk, you could, you could connect with, okay, if they did the million robo taxis or whatever the goal was, that's super valuable and transformational for the world or for the company. I guess the other question that I've never been able to answer is this country or this kingdom that generates all this money through oil.
00:18:27
Speaker
What does building the city do in terms of generating income? How do you ever pay off building a $7 trillion or whatever the cost ends up being city in the hardest place? Why the hardest place to build it? It seemed like a crazy challenge.
00:18:46
Speaker
Like I want to climb Everest. That's super challenging and I get the end and I go, okay, I've done it. But in terms of return on investment, how does it ever stack up? The only bit that I could see directionally at least was the intention for the genome work and to try and be this hub
00:19:09
Speaker
that would draw in like best and brightest in all of these verticals. So I guess trying to create the next version of Silicon Valley and hope that that would be like the new economic driver and engine. And so maybe they thought then it is something that was so out there and crazy to even attract like to put on the radar this country that
00:19:33
Speaker
for other reasons might not be as appealing to that cohort of people and to try and create a magnet that's big enough to draw them in. But even saying that, if you look at said Dubai's income tax approach and those kind of things, I don't even really like tax the talent that then comes in to become the income driver. So
00:19:55
Speaker
And you could build that floating city kind of near Riyadh. You don't have to build it in. You don't have to build it in. And you don't need a mountain resort. It's hard to connect the project with the value that would be generated. Yeah. There must be sign to be said for the
00:20:16
Speaker
whatever the cultural significance would be of being able to accomplish something that everybody thought were, or a lot of people thought were impossible, not you or I. Other people. Yeah, but other people. And so there must be something in that. But yeah, it's hard to say. It sounds like you're suspending disbelief. Like you've been reading the, I think you've been reading the propaganda. Not propaganda.
00:20:44
Speaker
I feel like that bit is quite telling in that it tries to let... I think you understand more of maybe the psyche or intent that was intended to happen through what they're trying to communicate. But yeah, it seems like it was to be a massive magnet and to be a very large, crazily large bit of cultural significance that would put them on the map. Would you have lived there?
00:21:11
Speaker
No, not me. Um, I like, I like my city's fractal. Um, but yeah, it's a, um,
00:21:22
Speaker
It's a unique, oh yeah, if I thought about from a marketing standpoint, it's a very narrow target market that you're trying to go after and you've got a very- Well, it has to be at least 9 million people, but yeah. Yeah. It's a very, I don't know if the market fit is there for what they were trying to do. And to, yeah, I guess you would typically do a proof of concept or a pilot.
00:21:47
Speaker
before you would do something that large, they tried to go all in. So maybe this is a bit of a 180 going, let's do pilot phase first. But pilot phase is still maybe the most complex construction project of all time still. Yeah, the thing that convinces me that I wouldn't live there is for many years I lived in London and I used to catch a central line to work each day. And that's
00:22:10
Speaker
quite a busy train line, but one of many underground lines in London. The concept of this line, which is literally a straight line, that there's this kind of like one-way train that just goes up and back for 140 kilometres or whatever.
00:22:27
Speaker
I get cold sweats thinking of the train station getting on and off of a city, I don't know the population of London, but it's up there on one train line.
00:22:43
Speaker
And the tube acceleration and deceleration would feel pretty good. It's already up. I've fallen over for sure on the tube. If you're not holding on and you're kind of wedging yourself into a little corner. But yeah, if you're trying to get up to 500 kilometres an hour or whatever it was, there might be a couple of G-forces involved. Yeah.
00:23:05
Speaker
The other thing is not, this project isn't like the only thing that the kingdom's doing. There's like all the sports stuff. They're investing a ton in all these global sports. There's other infrastructure projects. I think in Riyadh, there's like a 60 or 70 billion dollar project at the Durya gate. There's like King Salman Park. It's just like, it does feel like, okay, you get the idea of diversification away from oil and gas.
Credibility and Lessons Learned
00:23:32
Speaker
It seems like a crazily big bet the house and not really sure if you did do it. Do you ever then you get the money back? Yeah, you have to get it back through tax. Yeah, surely of the city of the income generated by companies that are there.
00:23:48
Speaker
But then you're competing against other places that don't have that same capital cost and can have lower tax rates. Yeah. And it's probably not big enough to draw in those ones. Like if you think about say Ireland's magnet of pulling for large, like you're not probably going to dislodge them or not without more competitive than that by an order of magnitude.
00:24:13
Speaker
And so you got diminishing returns. And then your payback periods even longer. Yeah. Well, I guess what about if you took the other side and said, because yeah, you're right. There's plenty of, not to say that this construction project was not legitimate in any way, but the other ones. Not to say that at all. There's a lot of other ones that are
00:24:34
Speaker
back to your book on how big things get built. There's a lot of more traditional mega projects going on that are clearly still ambitious, but are scoped, resourced, make sense, have big contracts awarded, all those kind of things. Is there the risk that this, because of how adventurous it was, diminished the credibility of all of the works going on in the area?
00:25:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. I think like as an industry, the infrastructure construct, there are lots of people and companies that were and are doing work on that project and lots of people. The articles are reporting like mass layoffs of people, people leaving because of the scope reduction or pausing. Anecdotally, we've seen lots of
00:25:26
Speaker
companies, consultants, other software companies invest a lot of money trying to get on to those type on that project in particular. And so it might become a like once bitten twice shy thing, yeah, it becomes harder to pull them back or everyone's a little bit more cautious. The next contract that they try to award might, you know, people will be double checking on the consequences of changes or termination or de scoping would would be
00:25:56
Speaker
Yeah, which would be a decent cost across that breadth of projects that's going on over there. If that started to occur, that would add time and cost to almost every little decision point.
00:26:09
Speaker
Yeah, it just I think it adds complexity to the contracting process. And I think you probably lose leverage in the negotiation. If you were trying to get like a big US contractor to sign a contract to build, I don't know, 3000 of these towers next to each other to be one part of the wall or whatever.
00:26:30
Speaker
They're going to be kind of one eye looking at the exit thinking about, okay, we'll sign this contract, but probably doesn't happen. What happens when it doesn't happen? What's our exit strategy? Like anyone signing a contract, if they weren't already, I'd be surprised if they weren't already. But if they weren't already, they're definitely when pricing the next scope.
00:26:51
Speaker
follow me down the path then that feels like maybe the most plausible hypothesis to start with and so if that is the case like it's a we want to reset to some possible and a 97% scope reduction is a decent like scale back
00:27:10
Speaker
If that is the intent though, it's like reinstate a little bit more believability and not just that, but ensure that like there's good faith going on with all the kind of projects around. Is that enough of a scale back? Like is that new scope possible?
00:27:28
Speaker
I think prior to the scale back, you have kind of like, you keep referencing some of the Elon Musk. You've kind of got this like, hold your nose, it might happen. They've got a lot of money. Sometimes some people would say it's a little bit murky about how much money they have. It's not all in the books, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:27:47
Speaker
So people are going, any other country in the world, no way this happens. But in this case, maybe they might get a floating moon and robot maids. But once you have
Impact on Construction Industry
00:28:00
Speaker
the chink in the armor of
00:28:03
Speaker
Okay, we are going to scale it back. It kind of might, I think it probably starts to diminish the ability for people to suspend disbelief. So I think it makes it worse. I don't think the scale back in any way, it could be a messaging thing as well. So to be clear, the scale back isn't, I don't think it's the scale back of the project full stop. It's a scale back by what they intend to achieve by 2030. Yeah.
00:28:26
Speaker
But I don't think anyone thought it was going to happen by 2030, because that's like, that's six years time, man. So like, we're not going to do my backyard innovations by 2030. A normal country can't even knock out an airport in that time. And this is like the entire nine million person city. So I think anyone that thought it was happening by 2030 was, I don't think anyone thought that. So I don't know why you need to announce it. I don't know if there's like also the strategies get back in the news.
00:28:53
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it definitely, obviously you get a little media spike every time you do something, but yeah, that's interesting. So you think potentially like of how unbelievable the original one was your believability score or like likelihood of success in that new scope, maybe even hasn't gone up much.
00:29:16
Speaker
No, I think it's gone down wildly. Yeah. Yeah. It's like once you miss your forecast and you admit you miss it, it's like the yeah, just never admit to fate and keep going. Yeah. Like you said at the start, you've never you've never heard Elon totally reevaluate the goal. It's just like it's hard. We're still going to get there. It'll take longer. And I don't know. Either it's like a messaging or what they intended to say it was along those lines that it's been reported.
00:29:44
Speaker
as like, I think the media were possibly waiting for like this kind of scale back or delay announcement. So it could be that they just pounced on it and the narrative is totally going out of control. And they intended to do the, we're just, this is where we think we'll be in 2030.
00:30:05
Speaker
So given that then, it sounds like if you had the crystal ball out at might, I was probably thinking that this was like the first big course adjustment, hopefully of all. That sounds quite naive. This might be the first in a series of adjustments and it's just the scale is so unfathomable a little bit. Yeah, a 97% dial back on infinity isn't much.
00:30:31
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I've scaled back from something that I could never, not I could never do. People would say that could never be done ever in a million years. Yeah. And I've gone now I can do 10% of that. It's still like I think what I say target population of 300,000 by 2030.
00:30:50
Speaker
300,000 people need water, they need power, they need transport, they need homes, they need jobs. That's still a lot of infrastructure to build. And you're right. Airport to get in, roads to get to the city.
00:31:07
Speaker
than the transport within. Jobs, where are they going to work? Medical schools, a bucket load of actual building work once you get the frame up. Yeah, 500 metre high walls of glass. Yeah, you'd need plan window cleaners.
00:31:23
Speaker
Yeah. Well, you've got the robot. What is it? Robot made. So yeah, if you crack that one, you're on, you're onto a winner. But yeah, I, I think, I think my reader situation is they, the intention internally is we're just still going ahead. This is just restating where we would be at 2030. Not any real announcement, but possibly everyone's taken to it. Might've been a slow news day. Yeah. And it's been seized on.
00:31:51
Speaker
I guess more practically, what does it mean for the rest of the initiatives around there? So not just the line, but yeah, the city, the ski resort, I think that might be a cube, but there's a bunch.
00:32:08
Speaker
Are you seeing a similar like is it are they each on this same kind of spectrum or is this the most out there one or are we is this the first in a long line of readjustments and phasing announcements.
00:32:25
Speaker
A couple of them are on Mars and this is Pluto. This is out there. In addition to the consequence for contracting and how people that would actually do the work will see things,
00:32:43
Speaker
The other factor that comes into play is the politics of it all. And we've seen this in other countries on some of the big mega schemes in the UK, in Australia, when a certain part of an infrastructure plan or investment plan starts to go over budget.
00:33:04
Speaker
that sucks any contingency that was kind of put to a side until you run out of that contingency. And then it squeezes funding for all infrastructure. Yeah. And then someone doesn't want to, you know, rebaseline or re-forecast that spend immediately. So they are, you know, you go through a rebaseline and re-forecasting exercise and during that period in the negotiation, every one of these project is asking for more money.
00:33:29
Speaker
And they're in this holding pattern while they're not sure if they're going to get more funding or if they are, how much. And Australia, like last year, or earlier in the year or late last year, earlier this year, they basically paused a whole bunch of infrastructure because of cost blowouts on things like suburban rail loop.
00:33:50
Speaker
and Northeast Link. And the same thing happened on Crossrail and HS2 in the UK.
Final Reflection and Farewell
00:33:56
Speaker
And so that could be occurring, that will probably occur here, which is, I think I even read it in a number of the articles that while they're trying to work out what the new budget is, yeah, many of the projects are in kind of like a, we're not sure where our funding is situation.
00:34:11
Speaker
which again doesn't help with the situation with the contractors and stuff. There's like European contractors, there's American contractors that are going to be working on it. They're not going to like the idea that the funding's up in the air. Yeah, not 100%.
00:34:24
Speaker
So I think we've covered some ground. This definitely wasn't a critical discussion. Anyone that probably thinks of it that has maybe misheard what we covered. I think it's still, I don't think it's going anywhere. I think they'll still stick with it. I think that we might see a situation similar to some of the projects in say Dubai where
00:34:42
Speaker
five times the time frame and then 10 times the cost and at one fifth the scale, it gets done. I look forward to seeing you move there in 2050. Well, I was going to say, one last question for you to wrap up because I feel like I got most of them.
00:35:01
Speaker
You feel like we haven't been cancelled yet, so you're going to go for one more? One more, why not? Park the relocating permanently there, pack the family up, but if you cast your mind back to when you were the agent over in London and the job ad comes up to jump on and go continue construction on the line, do you look at taking the job to move over?
00:35:27
Speaker
No chance, but I would definitely visit to see it. There's no way I'd take a job on it. Again, so I look at the same way that the contractors would look at it, like you don't know if it's going to get rug pulled, you don't know if the scope's going to get, why would you move, you know, if you've got family, why would you do all that if it's unsure, your future's unsure for it? Yeah. The second that there's a 500 metre glass wall there, I'm there in a hot minute with your welding mask on.
00:35:58
Speaker
Yeah. My air conditioned suit staying out of the way of the reflective death ray from the glass wall. Yeah. And back to you. Are you moving there? Are you going to go work in the marketing? I don't even my creative prowess. I don't think it's strong enough to keep up with what the team's churning. I don't think you do enough psychedelics. No.
00:36:27
Speaker
far too practical and too traditional in my creative marketing beliefs. So now I'd be interested to go see it. I don't think I'd get offered the job. I'm too far believability-weighted, I think.
00:36:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think software companies get slated a lot for over-promising and under-delivering and AIs and then use a ton for that at the moment. I don't know. I still think that they're miles closer than the floating moon, several floating football stadiums.
00:37:04
Speaker
I think we've covered that very well, Mike. Thanks again for spending the last couple of weeks filling in for Carlos for listeners. Carlos is back in the next episode. So yeah, Mike, thank you very much. And I think Carlos would say the same thing. No worries, mate. It's been good fun. Thanks for having me on. Been a pleasure. Thanks, mate.