Lectures: 24

Duration: 25 hours, 12 minutes

Some infrastructure works. Some doesn’t. Some keeps working for centuries after the people who built it forgot why.

Pipe Dreams is a 24-lecture, 24-hour audio course about the world’s most audacious infrastructure — projects so ambitious, so improbable, so far beyond what any reasonable person would attempt that they should not exist. And yet they do.

You’ll meet the 5,000 dabbawalas who deliver 200,000 hot lunches across Mumbai every day, sorted by a hand-painted code on metal tins. You’ll ride the pneumatic mail tubes that once shot letters beneath Paris, Berlin, and Barcelona faster than any horse could run. You’ll descend into the underground cathedral beneath Tokyo, built to absorb a flood nobody alive has seen yet. You’ll stand on the salt flats where the Aral Sea used to be, and on the rim of the borehole the Soviets drilled seven miles into the Earth before they had to stop.

Twenty-four projects, four continents, three thousand years of history. The Persian qanats still moving water through tunnels older than Christianity. The Los Angeles Aqueduct and the Owens Valley it emptied. The Dutch Delta Works, holding back the North Sea one storm at a time. The Zabbaleen of Cairo, who recycle more of their city’s waste than any municipal system on Earth. The Svalbard Seed Vault. Mexico City sinking into its own drained lakebed. A post-Soviet town still running on infrastructure built for a country that no longer exists.

This is not a course about heroic engineers and inspiring visions. It’s a course about what humans build, what those systems cost, who pays the bill, and what happens when structures keep working long after the world they were built for is gone. Some are masterpieces. Some are catastrophes. Most are both.

For listeners who want their history dense, specific, technical, occasionally funny, and honest about what things actually cost.

Syllabus:

1. Mumbai’s Dabbawala’s: Luddite Logistics Perfected

2. The Wuppertal Schwebebahn (Germany): 125-Year Old Suspension Railway

3. Hong Kong’s Hillside Escalator: Conquering Vertical Sprawl

4. The Falkirk Wheel (Scotland): Lifting Boats Without Energy

5. Barcelona’s Vacuum Garbage System

6. The Paris Pneumatic Post

7. The Berlin Rohrpost: Steampunk In The Cold War Era

8. The New York City Steam System

9. The Qanats of Iran: Tapping The Aquifer For Millenia

10. The Chicago River Reversal: Redrawing The Map

11. Mexico City’s Gran Canal: Improving Aztec Ingenuity

12. The Los Angeles Aqueduct

13. The SMART Tunnel (Malaysia): Part Road, Part Drainage System

14. Tokyo’s G-Cans: Bracing For The Flood

15. Delta Works & Zuiderzee Works (Netherlands): Raising The Low Country

16. Gaddafi’s Great Man-Made River (Libya)

17. Ultra Dams: Three Gorges (China) & Itaipu (Paraguay)

18. The Palm Jumeira & Dubai’s Artifical Islands

19. The Diseappearing Aral Sea (Kazakhstan): An Unintended Consequences Exposé

20. Cairo’s Zabbaleen: Sustainability Without Infrastructure

21. The Narva Oil-Shale Power Plants (Estonia)

22. The Geysers Geothermal Field (California)

23. The Kola Super-Deep Borehole (Russia): The Deepest We Have Ever Gone

24. The Svalbard Seed Vault (Norway): Maniacally Preserving Our Future

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