Nick Shirley: Exposing Government Fraud, Suing California & Taking on the Media

The episode opens with a field video on California's high-speed rail. It frames the project as an opportunity-cost question: if someone were handed $15 billion, would they build a new PayPal, SpaceX or Google, or a train line? The narration says the 2008 plan promised to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, that after about 18 years nothing has been connected, and that finishing the project is now estimated at $100 billion to $200 billion.

This is all California has to show for $15 billion in 18. years of work.

The video sets this against China, which it says also began building high-speed rail in 2008 and has since connected the whole country with more than 30,000 miles of track, while California "haven't connected a single town." A person introduced as someone who knows a lot about the project describes it as concrete, rebar and roughly $15 billion spent, and calls it the most expensive infrastructure project currently under way anywhere in the world.

The cost history in the transcript runs from an original estimate of $33 billion up to a newest estimate of $236 billion. The intermediate figures are partly garbled in the transcript ("$100,000. $226 billion"). The same speaker ranks the project on course to be the third most expensive infrastructure project in history, behind the 1950s interstate program and the International Space Station. The difference, the speaker argues, is that people can drive the interstates and go to space, but "We will never ride California high speed rail."

It is probably the most expensive piece of concrete known to man and often referred to here in the Central Valley as a modern-day stonehenge.

The video also cites a private video of Governor Newsom, dated with some hesitation as "from 20, 16, I believe," in which he is said to have admitted he did not believe the project would be finished in his lifetime. The clip as quoted says: "the facts seem overwhelming that this project is not going to materialize in our lifetime." The transcript does not provide the original video or its exact date.

Asked who received the $15 billion, the expert source says one third of the project's total cost has gone to "change order delays." The explanation is that the state did not know where existing infrastructure was or how to build the train, so contractors awarded parcels were paid while they were unable to work.

contractors that got awarded a parcel to work on are owed $170,000 a day, $5 million a month for every single day they can't work.

The same source points to a delay settlement reached in February, described as the largest of its kind, of more than half a billion dollars owed to a contractor who could not work on the project. A second example of waste is that California has not bought the high-speed trains. The source presents the motive as personal opinion: the state has not bought them "because they know that there will never be a train on these tracks."

The segment then compares the cost with simply paying for travel. At current ridership between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the source claims the money could subsidize free one-way tickets for 150 years, and for 300 years under the $236 billion estimate. The conclusion drawn is that buying flights between the two cities would make more sense than building the train. The transcript does not show the ridership figures or ticket prices behind this calculation.