Elon Musk: SpaceX, Mars, Tesla Autopilot, Self-Driving, Robotics, and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #252
the following is a conversation with Elon Musk his third time on this The Lex Friedman podcast yeah make yourself comfortable oh wow okay do you don't do the headphones thing no okay I mean how close do I get each to get this thing the closer you are the sexier you sound hey baby up Can't Get Enough Le you up baby I'm going to clip that out anytime somebody messages me about body and you think I'm sexy come right out and tell me so so good okay serious mode activate all right serious Mode come on you're Russian you can be serious everyone see us all the time in Russia yeah yeah we'll get we'll get there we'll get there yeah it's gotten soft allow me to say that the SpaceX launch of human beings to orbit on May 30th 2020 was seen by many as the first step in a new era of human space exploration these human space flight missions were a Beacon of Hope to me and to Millions over the past two years as our world has been going through one of the most difficult periods in recent human history we saw we see the rise of division fear cynicism and the loss of common Humanity right when it is needed most so first Elon let me say thank you for giving the world hope hope and reason to be excited about the future oh it's kind of you to say I do want to do that Humanity has uh obviously a lot of issues and and uh you know people at times do do bad things but you know despite all that um you know I I love humanity and I think we should uh make sure we do everything we can to have a good future and and an exciting future and one where that maximizes the happiness of the people let me ask about uh crew Dragon demo 2 so that that first flight with humans on board um how did you feel leading up to that launch were you scared were you excited was going through your mind so much was at stake yeah no that was extremely stressful no question um we obviously could not um let them down in any way um so extremely stressful I'd say uh to say the least but we did I was confident that at the time that we launched that no one could think of anything uh at all to do that would improve the probability of success um and we we racked our brains to think of any possible way to improve the probability of success we canot think of anything more and and nor could NASA and so that that's just the best that we could do so then we we had we went ahead and launched now I'm not a religious person um but I nonetheless got on my knees and prayed for that mission were you able to sleep no how did it feel when it was a success first when the launch was a success and when they returned back home or back to Earth it was a great relief yeah it it's for for high stress situations I find it's it's not so much Elation as relief um and um you know I think once as as we got more comfortable and proved out the systems because you know we really um you know you got to make sure everything works um I was it was definitely a lot more uh enjoyable with the subsequent uh astronaut missions and I thought the the inspiration mission was was actually very inspiring um inspiration for Mission um I I'd encourage people to watch the inspiration documentary on Netflix it's actually really good um and it really is I was actually inspired by that um and I I I so that one I felt I I was kind of able to enjoy the the actual Mission and not just be super stressed all the time so for people that somehow don't know it's the all civilian first time all civilian out to space out to orbit yeah and it was the I think the highest orbit that uh in like I don't know 30 or 40 years or something the only one that was higher was the one shuttle sorry Hubble uh servicing Mission um and then before that it would have been um Apollo in 72 it's pretty wild so it's cool it's you know I think uh as you know as a species like we want to be you know continuing to do better and and reach Higher Ground and and like I think it would be tragic extremely tragic if um Apollo was the high watermark for Humanity you know and that and that's as far as we ever got um and it's um it's concerning that here we are um 49 years after the last mission to the moon and so almost half a century uh and we've not been back um and that's that's worrying it's like is that does that mean we've peaked as a civilization or or what so like I think we we got to get back to the moon and build a base there you know a science base I think we could learn a lot about the nature of the universe if we have a proper science base on the moon um you know like we have a science base in Antarctica and you know many other parts of the world and um so that that that's I think the next big thing we've got to have like a a serious like moon base um and then get people to Mars and you know get get out there and be a space faing civilization I'll ask you about some of those details but since you're so busy with the hard engineering challenges of everything that's involved are are you still able to Marvel at the magic of it all of space travel of every time the rocket goes up especially when it's a crude Mission or you're just so overwhelmed with the all the challenges that you have to solve and actually sort of to add to that the reason I I wanted to ask this question of May 30th it's it's been some time so you can look back and think about the impact already it's already at the time it was an engineering problem maybe now it's becoming a historic moment like it's it's a moment that how many moments will be remembered about the 21st century to me that or something like that maybe inspiration for one of those would be remembered as the early steps of a new age of uh space exploration yeah I mean during the launches itself so I mean the thing I think maybe some people know but a lot of people don't know he like I'm actually the chief engineer of SpaceX so um the you know I've signed off on pretty much all the design decisions um and you know so if there's something that goes wrong with that vehicle it's it's fundamentally my fault you know so um so I'm really just thinking about all the things that like so so when I see the rocket I see all the things that could go wrong and the things that could be better and the same with the dragon spacecraft it's like other people will see oh this is a a spacecraft or a rocket and that's this looks really cool I'm like i' I've like a readout of like this is the these These are the risks these are the pro problems that's what I see like so it's not what other people see when they see the product you know so let me uh ask you then to analyze Starship in that same way I know you have you'll talk about in more detail about Starship in the near future perhaps you we talk about it now if you want um but just in that same way like you said you see when you see a uh when you see a rocket you see a sort of a list of risks and that's same way you said that Starship is a really hard problem so there many ways I can ask this but if you magically could solve one problem perfectly one engineering problem perfectly which one would it be on Starship on on sorry on Starship so is it maybe related to the efficiency the uh the engine the weight of the different components the complexity of various things maybe the controls of the the crazy thing has to do to land no it's actually the by far the the biggest thing absorbing my time is uh engine production not not the design of the engine the i i how I've often said prototypes are are easy production is hard um so we have the most advanced rocket engine that's ever been designed um the cuz I say currently the best rocket engine ever is probably the Rd 180 or Rd 170 um that that the Russian engine basically um and um and still I think an engine should only count if it's gotten something to orbit um so our engine has not gotten anything to orbit yet um but it is it's the first engine that's actually better than than the the the Russian R engines which were amazing design so you're talking about Raptor engine what makes it amazing what what are the different aspects of it that make it like what are you the most excited about uh if the whole thing works in terms of efficiency all those kinds of things well it's bar raptor is a a full flow uh staged combustion um engine and it's at operating at a very high chamber pressure so one of the key figures mer perhaps the key figure of Merit is um what is the chamber pressure at which the engine can operate that's the combustion chamber pressure um so a Rapter is uh designed to operate at 300 bar possibly maybe higher that's 300 atmospheres so um the record right now for operational engine is the Rd engine that I mentioned the Russian Rd which is I believe around 267 bar um and the the the difficulty of the chamber pressure is increases on a nonlinear basis so 10% more chamber pressure is more like uh 50% more difficult um but that that chamber pressure is that that that is what allows you to get a very high uh Power density for uh for the engine um so uh enabling um a very high thrust to weight ratio um and um a very high specific impulse so specific impulse is like a measure of the efficiency of a rocket engine or um it's it's really the the the uh exhaust the effect of exhaust velocity of of the gas coming out of the engine um so uh with with a very high chamber pressure you can have um a a compact engine that nonetheless has a high expansion ratio which is the ratio between the uh um exit nozle and the uh throat so you know engine's got like you see rocket engine's got like sort of like a like a hourglass shape it's like a chamber and then it next down and there's a nozzle and the ratio of the the exit diameter to the the throat expansion ratio so why is it such a hard engine to manufacture at scale uh it's very complex so a lot of what do complexity mean here is a lot of components involved there's a lot of a lot of components and a lot of uh unique materials that uh so we had to invent a um several Alloys that don't exist in order to make this engine work um so a materials problem too it's a materials problem and um in a in a stage combustion full flow stage combustion there there are many uh feedback loops in the system so you uh basically you've got uh propellent and and and uh Hot Gas flowing um simultaneously to so many different places on the engine um and uh they they all have a recursive effect on each other so you change one thing here it has a recursive effect here changes something over there and and it's it's it's it's quite hard to control um like there's a reason no one's made this before um but um and the reason we're doing um a stage combustion full flow is is because it it has the highest the highest uh theoretical possible uh efficiency um so in in order to make a fully reusable rocket um which that's the really the Holy Grail of orbital rocketry um you have to have everything's got to be the best uh it's got to be the best engine the vest airframe the vest heat shield um extremely light uh avionics um very you know very clever control mechanisms um you've got to shed mass in in any possible way that you can um for example we are instead of putting Landing legs on the booster and ship we are going to catch them with a tower to save the weight of the landing legs legs so that's like I mean we're talking about catching the largest flying object ever made uh with on a giant Tower with with Chopstick arms it's like Cy kid with the fly but much bigger I mean pulling something like this probably won't work the first time uh anyway so this bananas this is banana stuff so you mentioned that you doubt well not you doubt but there there's days or moments when you doubt that this is even possible it's so difficult the possible part is well at this point we'll I think we we'll get Starship to work um um there's a question of timing how long will it take us to do this uh how long will it take us to actually achieve uh full and Rapid reusability um because it will take probably many launches before we are able to have full and Rapid reusability um but I can say that that the physics pencils out like the like we're not uh like at this point I'd say we're confident that that s like let's say I'm very confident s success is in the set of all possible outcomes right it's not set of for for for a while there I was not convinced that success was in the set of possible outcomes which is very important actually but so um um you're saying there's chance I'm saying there's a chance exactly um uh just not sure how how how long it will take uh but we have a very very talented team they're working night and day to make it happen um and uh and like like said the the the critical thing to achieve for the revolution in space flight and for Humanity to be a space Frank civilization is to have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket opal rocket um there's not even been any op rocket that's been fully useful ever and this has always been the the the the Holy Grail of rocketry um and uh many smart people very smart people um have tried to do this before and they've not succeeded so um because it's such a hard problem what's your source of belief in situations like this when the engineering problem is so difficult there's a lot of experts many of whom you admire who have failed in the past yes and um a lot of people you know the a lot of experts maybe journalists all the kind of you know the public in general have a lot of doubt about whether it's possible and you yourself know that even if it's a non-n set non-empty set of success it's still unlikely or very difficult like where do you go to both personally um intellectually as an engineer as a team like for source of strength needed to sort of persevere through this and to keep going with the project take it to completion a source of strength h i i justes really not how I think about things um I mean for me it's simply this this is something that is important to get done um and we we should just keep doing it um or die trying and I I don't need a source of strength so quitting is not even like um that's not it's not in my nature okay and I I don't care about optimism or pessimism fuck that we're going to get it done GNA get it done can you uh then Zoom back in to specific problems with Starship or any engineering problems you work on can you try to introspect your particular biological neural network your thinking process and describe how you think through problems through different engineering and design problems is there like a systematic process you've spoken about first principles thinking but is there kind of process to it well um you like saying like like physics is a law and everything else is a recommendation um like I've met a lot of people who can break the law but I haven't met anyone who could break physics so uh so first for you know any kind of Technology problem you have to sort of just make sure you're not violating physics um and you know uh first principles analysis I think is something that can be applied to really any Walk of Life uh any anything really it's just it's it's really just saying um you know let's let's boil something down to the most fundamental uh principles the things that we are most confident are true at a foundational level and that sets your your sets your axiomatic base and then you reason up from there and then you cross check your conclusion against the the axiomatic truths um so um you know some basics in physics would be like are you violating conservation of energy or momentum or something like that you know then you it's not going to work um so uh that's you know so that's just to establish is is it is it possible and then another good physics tool is thinking about things in the limit if you if you take a particular thing and you uh scale it to a very large number or to a very small number how does how does things change um both like tempor like in number of things you manufacture or something like that and then in time yeah like let's say say take an example of like um like manufacturing which I think is just a very underrated problem um and and uh like I said it's much harder to take a an advanced technology product and bring it into volume manufacturing than it is to design it in the first place my ERS magnitude so um so let's say you're trying to figure out is um like why is this this uh part or product expensive is it um because of something fundamentally foolish that we're doing or is it because our volume is too low and so then you say okay well what if our volume was a million units a year is it still expensive that's what I mean like thinking about things in the limit if it's still expensive at a million units a year then volume is not the reason why your thing is expensive there's something fundamental about design and then you then can focus on the reducing complexity or something like that in the design change the design to change change the part to be something that is uh uh not fundamentally expensive but but like that's a common thing in tree cuz the the unit volume is is relatively low and so a common excuse would be well it's expensive because our unit volume is low um and if we were in like Automotive or something like that or consumer electronics then our cost would be lower I'm like I'm like okay so let's say we SK now you're making a million units a year is it still expensive if the answer is yes then uh economies of scale are not the issue do you throw into manufacturing do you throw like supply chain you talked about resources and materials and stuff like that throw that into the calculation of trying to reason from first principles like how we're going to make the supply chain work here yeah yeah and then the cost of materials things like that or is that too much exactly so um like another like a good example of thinking about things uh in the limit is um if you take any uh you know any any product any machine or whatever um like take a rocket or whatever and say um if you've got if if you look at the raw raw materials in the rocket um so you're going to have like uh I know aluminum steel titanium inconel uh special specialty Alloys um copper and and you say what are the how what what what's the weight of the constituent elements of of each of these elements and what is their raw material value and that sets the ASM totic limit for how uh low the cost of the vehicle can be unless you change the the materials so and then when you do that I call it like maybe the magic wand number or something like that so that would be like if you had the you know like just a a pile of these raw materials here and you could wave magic wand and rearrange the atoms into the final shape um that would be the lowest possible cost that you could make this thing for unless you change the materials so then and that is always a US almost always a very low number um so then the the what's actually causing things to be expensive is how you put the atoms into the desired shape yeah I actually if you don't mind me taking a tiny tangent had uh I often talk to Jim Keller who's somebody that work with you as as a friend Jim was yeah did great work at Tesla so um I suppose he carries the flame of the same kind of thinking that you're you're talking about now um and I I guess I see that same thing at Tesla and and uh SpaceX folks who work there they kind of learn this way of thinking and it kind of becomes obvious almost but anyway I had um argument not argument uh he educated me about how cheap it might be to manufacture Tesla bot we just we had an argument what is how can you reduce the cost of scale of producing a robot because so I gotten a chance to interact quite a bit um obviously in in the academic circles with robots and then my bosson Dynamics and stuff like that and they're very expensive to to build and then uh Jim kind of schooled me on saying like Okay like this kind of first principal thinking of how can we get the cost of manufactur down um I suppose you do that you have done uh that kind of thinking for Tesla bot and for all kinds of all kinds of complex systems that are traditionally seen as complex and you say okay how can we simplify everything down yeah I I mean I think if you if you are really good at manufacturing you can basically make at high volume you can basically make anything for a cost that ASM totically approaches the raw raw material value of the constituents plus any intellectual property that you need to license anything right but it's hard it's not like that's a very hard thing to do but but it is possible for anything anything in volume can be made of like I said for a that ASM totically approaches as raw material constituents plus intellectual property license rights so what'll often happen in trying to design a product is is people start with the tools and and parts and methods that they are familiar with um and then and try to create a product using their existing tools and methods um the other way to think about it is uh actually imagine the try to imagine the platonic ideal of the perfect product or technology whatever it might be um and say what is this what is the perfect arrangement of atoms that would be the the best possible product and now let us try to figure out how to get the atoms in that shape I mean it's it sounds um uh it's almost like Rick a Morty absurd until you start to really think about it and it you really should think about it in this way cuz everything else is kind of uh uh if if you think uh you you might fall victim to the momentum of the way things were done in the past unless you think in this way well just as a function of inertia people will uh want to use the same tools and methods that they are familiar with um they just that's what they'll do by default yeah um and then that that will lead to an outcome of things that can be made with those tools and methods but is unlikely to be the um platonic ideal of the perfect product um so then so that's why it's good to think of things in both directions so like what can we build with the tools that we have but then but but also what is the what is the perfect the theoretical perfect product look like and and that that theoretical perfect product is going to be a moving Target because as you learn more the definition of or for that perfect product will will change because you don't actually know what the perfect product is but you can successfully approximate uh a a a more perfect product um so the thing about it like that and then saying okay now what tools methods materials whatever do we need to create in order to get the atoms in that shape but people very rarely think about it that way but it's a powerful tool I should mention that the brilliant Siobhan zillis is hanging hanging out with us uh in case you hear a voice of uh wisdom from uh from from outside from up above okay so let me ask you about Mars you mentioned it would be great for science to put um a base on the moon to do some research but the truly big leap again in this category of seemingly impossible is to put a human being on Mars when do you think SpaceX will land a human being on Mars h best case is about 5 years worst case 10 years what are the determining factors would you say from an engineering perspective or is that that not the bottlenecks uh you know it's it's fundamentally um you know engineering the the the vehicle um I mean Starship is the most complex and advanced rocket that's ever been made by I don't know order of magnitude or something like that it's a lot it's really Next Level so um and the fundamental optimization of Starship is minimizing cost per ton to over it and ultimately cost per ton the surface of Mars um this may seem like a mertile objective but it is actually the thing that needs to be optimized um like there is a certain cost per ton to the surfice of Mars where we can afford to establish a self- sustaining uh city um and uh and then above that we cannot afford to do it um so right right now you couldn't fly to Mars for a trillion dollars doesn't no amount of money could get you a ticket to Mars so we need to get that above uh you know to get that like something that is actually possible at all um um but but then but that's that's we don't we don't just want to have you know with Mars flags and Footprints and then not come back for a half century like we did with the moon uh in order to pass a very important great filter I think we we need to be a multiplet species um that's sounds somewhat esoteric to to a lot of people but uh like eventually given enough time uh that something the Earth is likely to experience some Calamity um that could be yeah something that humans do to themselves or an external event like happened to the dinosaurs um and um but but you know eventually and and if if n if none of that happens and somehow magically we keep going uh then the sun will the Sun is gradually expanding um and will engulf the Earth um and probably Earth gets too hot for uh life in uh about 500 million years it's a long time but that's only 10% longer than Earth has been around and so if you think about like the the current situation is really remarkable um and kind of hard to believe but uh Earth been around 4 and a half billion years and this is the first time in 4 and a half billion years that it's been possible to extend life beyond Earth and that window of opportunity may be for a long time and I hope it is but it also may be open for a short time and we should uh I think it was wise for us to uh act quickly while the windows open just in case it it closes yeah the existence of nuclear weapons pandemics all kinds of threats yeah should uh should kind of um give us some motivation I mean civilization could get um could die with a bang or a whimper you know if it's a if it dies a demographic collapse then it's more of a whimper obviously um but and if it's World War III it's more of a bang um but but these are all risks um I mean it's important to think of these things and just you know think of things like probabilities not certainties um there's a certain probability that something bad will happen at on Earth I like I think most likely the future will be good um but there's like let's say for AR M sake um a 1% chance per Century of of a civilization ending event like that was Stephen Hawkings estimate um I think he's he might be right about that uh so then uh you know we should basically think of this like being a multiplan species as like taking out insurance for life itself like life insurance for life um W this turned into infomercial real quick life insurance for Life yes um and you know we can bring the the the creatures from you know plants and animals from Earth to Mars and breathe life into the planet um and and have a second planet with with life um that would be great um they can't bring themselves there you know so if we don't bring them to Mars then they will just for sure all die when the sun expands anyway and then that'll be it what do you think is the most difficult aspect of building a civilization on Mars terraforming Mars like from engineering perspective from a financial perspective human perspective to get to get a large number of folks there who will never return back to Earth uh no they could certainly return some will return back to Earth they will choose to stay there for the rest of their lives yeah many will um but uh you know we we need the space sh back like the ones that go to Mar meet them back so you can hop on if you want you know it's like but we can't just not have the spaceships come back those things are expensive we need them back like to come back and do another trip I mean do you think about the terraforming aspect like actually building you're so focused right now on the spaceships part that's so critical to get to it's just we absolutely if you can't get there nothing else matters yeah so and like said you we can't get there with at some extraordinarily high cost I mean the current cost of um let's say one ton to the surface of Mars is on the order of a billion dollars so because you don't just need the rocket and the launch and everything you need like heat shield you need you know guidance system you need uh deep space Communications uh you need some kind of Landing system so like rough approximation would be uh a billion dollars per ton to the surface of Mars right now um this is obviously um way too expensive to create a self-sustaining civilization um so we need to improve that by at least a factor of a thousand a million per ton yes ideally less much less than a million ton but if it's not like it's got to be you have to say like what well how much can Society afford to spend or want to just want to spend on a self-sustaining City on Mars the self- sustaining part is important like it's just the the key threshold um the the great filter will will have been passed when the city and Mars can survive even if the spaceships from Earth stop coming for any reason doesn't matter what the reason is but if they stop coming for any reason will it die out or will it not and if there's even one critical ingredient missing then it still doesn't count it's like you know if you're on a long sea voyage and you've got everything except vitamin C it's only a matter of time you know you're going to die so so we got to get Mars a Mars City to the point where it's self sustaining um I'm not sure this will really happen in my lifetime but I I hope to see it at least have a lot of momentum and and then you could say okay what is the minimum tonnage necessary to uh have a self-sustaining city um and there's a lot of uncertainty about this you could say like I don't know it's probably at least a million tons um because you have to set up a lot of infrastructure on on Ms um like I said you can't be missing any anything that in order to be self- sustained you can't be Miss like you need you know semiconductor Fabs you need iron or refineries like you need all lots of things you know uh so um and Mars is not super hospitable it's it's the least inhospitable Planet but it's definitely a fixer oper of a planet outside of Earth yes Earth is pretty good Earth is like easy yeah and also I should we should clarify in the solar system yes in the solar system there might be nice like vacation spots there might be some great planets out there but it's h too hard to get there yeah way way way way way too hard to say the least let me push back on that not really a push back but a quick uh curveball of a question so you did mention physics as the the first starting point so um general relativity allows for warm holes uh they technically can exist do you think um those can ever be leveraged by humans to travel fast in the speed of light well are you the thing is is debatable the we currently do not know of any means of going faster than the speed of light um there there is like like there there are some ideas about having space like so so you can only move at the speed of light through through space but if you can make space itself move that that that's like that that's Waring space um space is is capable of moving faster than the speed of light right uh like the universe in the Big Bang the universe expanded at much much more than the speed of light by a lot yeah um so um but the if this is possible the the amount of energy required to Wolf space is so gigantic it's boggles of mind so all the work you've done with propulsion how much Innovation is possible with rocket propulsion is this um I mean you've seen it all and you're constantly innovating in every aspect how much is possible like how much can you get 10x somehow is there something in there in physics that you can get significant Improvement in terms of efficiency of engines and all those kinds of things well as I was saying like the really the Grail is a a fully and rapidly reusable orbital system um so uh right now uh the falcon9 is the only reusable rocket out there but it but the the booster comes back and lands you've seen the videos uh and we get the nose coal fairing back but we do not get the upper stage back so uh that means that we have a minimum cost of of building an upper stage um you can think of like a two-stage rocket of of sort of like two airplanes like a big airplane and a smaller airplane um and we get the big airplane back but not the small airplane and so it still costs a lot you know so that upper stage is you know at least $10 million um and then the degree of the booster is not as reuse is not as rapidly and completely reusable as we'd like in order of the fairings so you know our kind of minimum marginal cost our counting overhead for per flight is on the order of 15 to $20 million maybe um so uh that's that's extremely good for it's by far better than any rocket ever in history um but uh with full and Rapid reusability we can reduce the cost per T to orbit by uh a factor of 100 just think of it like um like imagine if you had an aircraft or something or a car um and if you had to buy a new car every time you went for a drive there would be very expensive every silly frankly but um but you in fact you just refuel the car or recharge the car and that's uh makes your trip like I don't know a thousand times cheaper so it's the same for Rockets uh if you very difficult to make this complex machine that can go to all it and so if you cannot reuse it and have have to throw even any part of any significant part of it away that massively increases the cost so you know Starship in theory could do a cost per launch of like a million maybe $2 million or something like that um and uh and put over 100 tons in orbit which is crazy yeah so that's incredible so you're saying like it's uh by by far the biggest bang for the buck is to make it fully reusable versus like some kind of brilliant breakthrough in theoretical physics no no there's no there's no bring break no there's no it just got to make the rocket reusable this is an extremely difficult engineering problem got it uh but no no new physics is required just brilliant engineering let me ask a slightly philosophical fun question got to ask I know you're focused on getting to Mars but once we're there on Mars what do you what form of government economic system political system do you think would work best for an early civilization of humans is I mean the the interesting reason to talk about this stuff it also make helps people dream about the future I know you're really focused about the short-term engineering dream but it's like I don't know there's something about imagining an actual civilization on Mars that gives people really gives people hope well it would be a new frontier and opportunity to rethink the whole nature of government uh just as was done in the creation of the United States so uh I mean I would suggest um having uh direct democracy like people vote directly on things as opposed to representative democracy so uh representative democracy I think is too uh subject to special interests and you know a coercion of the politicians and that kind of thing um so I I'd recommend uh that that there's just um direct democracy people vote on laws the population votes on laws themselves and then the laws must be short enough that people can understand them yeah and then like keeping a well-informed populace like really being transparent about all the information about what they're voting for absolute transparency yeah and not make it as annoying as those cies where you have to accept accept cookies like always like you know there's like always like a slight amount of trepidation when you click accept cookies like I I feel as though there's like perhaps like a like a very tiny chance that it'll open a portal to hell or something like that it's exactly how I feel why why do they why do they keep wanting me to accept what do they want with this cookie like somebody got upset with accepting cookies or something somewhere who cares like so annoying to get keep accepting all these cookies to me this is just great trying accept yes you can have my damn cookie I don't care whatever you heard it from meon first he accepts all of your damn cookies yeah and stop asking me it's annoying yeah it's uh it's one example of um implementation of a good idea done really horribly yeah it's it's somebody who was like there's some good intentions of like privacy or whatever but now everyone just has to accept cooking and it's not you know you have billions of people who have to keep clicking except cookie it's super annoying then we just accept the damn cookie it's fine there is like um I think a fundamental problem that we're because we've not really had a a major uh like a world war or something like that in a while and obviously we would like to not have C Wars um there there's not been a cleansing function for rules and regulations um so wars did have uh you know some sort of lining in that there would be a a reset on rules and regulations uh after a war um so World Wars 1 and 2 there were huge resets on rules and regulations um now as if the society Society does not have a war and there's no cleansing function or garbage collection for rules and regulations then rules and regulations will accumulate every year because they're Immortal there's no actual humans die but the laws don't uh so the we need a garbage collection function for rules and regulations they should not just be immortal um because some of the rules and regulations that are put in place will be counterproductive done with good intentions but counterproductive and sometimes not done with good intentions so um if you just if rules and regulations just accumulate every year um and you get more and more of them then eventually you won't be able to do anything you're just like guliver with you know tied down by thousands of little strings and we we see that in um you know us and like like basically economies that uh have been around for for a while uh and and regulators and legislators create new rules and regulations every year but they don't put effort into removing them and I think that's very important that we put effort into removing rules and regulations um but it gets tough because you get special interests that then are dependent on like they they have a you know a uh vested interest in that whatever Rule and Regulation and they then they fight to not get it removed um yeah so it I mean I guess the problem with the Constitution is it's it's kind of like C versus Java cuz it doesn't have any garbage collection built in I think there should be I I when you first said the the the metaphor of garbage collection I love from coding standpoint from the coding St yeah yeah I it would be interesting if the laws themselves kind of had a built-in thing where they kind of die after a while unless somebody explicitly publicly defends them so that that's sort of it's not like somebody has to kill them they kind of die them themselves they disappear yeah um not to defend Java or anything but you know the C++ you know you could also have great garbage collection in Python and so on yeah so yeah something's something needs to happen or or just the the civilization arteries arteries just Harden over time and and uh you can just get less and less done because there's just a rule against everything um so so I think like I don't know for Mars or whatever I'd say or even for you know obviously for Earth as well like I think there should be an active process for removing rules and regulations and questioning their existence just um like if we've got a function for creating rules and regulations because rules and regulations you can also think of it's like they're like software or lines of code for operating uh civilization that's the rules and regulations um so it's not we shouldn't have rules and regulations but the you you have code accumulation but no code removal um and so it just gets to be become basically archaic bloatware after a while um and and it's just it makes it hard for things to progress so I don't know maybe Mars you'd have like an you know any given law must have a sunset you know and and and uh and require active voting to keep restore to keep it up there you know um and actually also say like and these are just I don't know recommendations or thoughts um ultimately will be up to the people on Mars to decide but I I think um it should be easier to remove a law than to add one because of the just to overcome the inertia of laws so maybe it's like uh for argument sake you need like say 60% vote to have a law take effect but only a 40% vote to remove it so let me be the guy you you posted a meme on Twitter recently where there's there there's like a a row of urals a guy just walks all the way across sure yeah and he tells you about crypto list I mean that's happened to be so many times I think maybe even literally uh yeah do you think technologically speaking there's any room for ideas of smart contracts or so on because you mentioned laws um that's an interesting Implement use of things like smart contracts to implement the laws by which governments function like something built on ethereum or maybe a dogcoin that enables smart contract somehow I don't I don't quite understand this whole smart contract thing um you know I mean so I'm too downtown down smart contracts um that's a good line I mean my general approach to any kind of like deal or whatever is just make sure there's Clarity of understanding that's the most important thing right um and and just keep any kind of deal very very short and simple plain language um and just make sure everyone understands this is the deal does everyone is it clear um and uh and and what are the consequences if various things don't happen um but usually deal deals are um you know business deals or whatever are way too long and complex and overly lawyered and pointlessly you mentioned that uh doge is the people's coin um and you said that you were literally going SpaceX may consider literally putting uh a do coin on the moon is is this something you're still considering uh Mars perhaps uh do you think there's some chance we've talked about political systems on Mars that uh Dogecoin is the the official currency of Mars at some point in the future well I I think Mars itself will need to have a different y because you can't synchronize due to speed of light or not easily um so it must be completely Standalone from Earth well yeah cuz the the Mars is at closest approach it's four light minutes away roughly and then at furthest approach uh it's roughly 20 light minutes away uh maybe a little more um so you can't really have uh something synchronizing you know if you got if if you got a 20- minute speed of light issue if it's got a 1 minute blockchain uh it's not going to synchronize properly um so Ms need would I don't know if Ms would have a cryptocurrency as a thing but probably seems likely um but it would be some kind of localized thing on Mars um and you let the people decide yeah absolutely the future of Mars should be up to the Martians um yeah so um I mean I think the cryptocurrency thing is an inter approach to reducing the um error in the the database that is called money um you know I think I have a pretty deep understanding of the of what money actually is on a practical day-to-day basis because of PayPal um you know I really really got in deep there um and right now the system actually for practical purposes is is is really a bunch of heterogeneous uh main frames running old cobal okay you mean literally that'sit that literally what's happening in batch mode okay in patch mode yeah pretty the poor bastards who have to maintain that code okay that's a as a pain that's pain not even Fortran it's Cobalt yep that's Cobalt like and they still the B banks are still buying mainframes in 2021 and running ancient Cobalt code uh and uh you know the the Federal Reserve is like probably even older than the what the banks have and they have an old Cobalt main frame and so now and so the the government effectively has editing privileges on the on the money database um and they use those editing privileges to um make more money when if they want and this increases the error in the database that is money so if I think money should really be viewed through the lens of information Theory and uh and so it's U you kind of like uh like an internet connection like what's the bandwidth uh you know to Total bit rate uh what is the latency jutter uh packet drop uh you know errors errors in the network uh communication just money like that basically um I think that's probably right way think of it and and then say what what system uh from an information Theory standpoint allows an economy to function the best uh and you know um Krypto is an attempt to reduce the the error uh in uh in money that is contributed by uh government's uh diluting the money supply as basically a pernicious pernicious form of taxation so both policy in terms of with inflation and actual like technological Cobalt like cryptocurrency takes us into the 21st century in terms of the actual systems that allow you to do the transaction to store wealth all those kinds of things like I said just think of money as information people um often will think of money as having power in and of itself um it does not money is uh is infation and it it does not have power in and of itself uh like you applying the the physics tools of thinking about things in the limit is helpful if you are stranded on a tropical island um and uh you have a trillion dollars it's useless because there's no there's no resource allocation money is a database for resource allocation but there's no resource to allocate except for yourself so money is useless um uh if you're tring on desert island with no food you uh all the Bitcoin in the world will not stop you from starving yeah so um so like I just just think of money as as a database for resource allocation um across time and space and um and then what what what system uh is what what in what form should that that database or data system what what what would be most effective now there's a there is a fundamental issue with um say Bitcoin in its current form uh in that it's the transaction volume is very limited um and uh the latency it's the the latency for for a properly confirmed transaction is to is too long much longer than you'd like so it's not it's actually not great from um transaction volume standpoint or latency standpoint um uh so it is perhaps useful as as to to solve an aspect of the money database problem uh which is a sort of store of wealth or an an accounting of relative obligations I suppose um but it is not useful as a currency as a day-to-day currency but people have proposed different technological solutions yeah lightning Network and the layer two technologies on top of that I mean it's it's all it seems to be all kind of a trade-off but the point is it's kind of brilliant to say that just think about it information think about what kind of database what kind of infrastructure enables that exchange like you're operating an economy um and you need to have some thing that it uh allows for the efficient to to to have efficient uh value ratios between products and services so you got this massive number of products and services and you need to you can't just bar barter just like that would be extremely unwieldy uh so you need something that gives you the the a a ra ratio of exchange between goods and services um and and then something that allows you to uh shift obligations across time like de debt and Equity shift obligations across time then what does what what does the best job of that um part of reason why I think there some um Merit Dogecoin even though it was obviously created as a joke um is that it it actually does have a much higher uh transaction volume capability than Bitcoin um and the you know the the cost of doing a transaction the the the Dogecoin fee is is very low like right now if you want to do a Bitcoin transaction the price of doing that transaction is very high so you could not use it effectively for most things um and nor could it even scale to a high volume um uh and when Bitcoin was you know started I guess around 2008 or something like that um the internet connections were much worse than the rday like order of magnitude I mean there's the way way worse you know to in 2008 so so like having us you know a small uh block size or whatever is you know and a long synchronization time is made sense in 2008 but to you know 2021 or fast forward 10 years it's like it's it's like economically low you know it's uh so um and I think there's some value to having a linear increase in the amount of currency that uh is generated um so because some amount of the currency like like if if if a if a currency is too deflationary or or like uh or should say if if if a if a currency is expected to increase in value over time there's reluctance to spend it because you're like oh I if I I'll just hold it not spend it because it's scarcity is increasing with time so if I spend it now then I will regret spending it so I will just you know hle it MH um but if there's some dilution of the currency occurring over time that's that's more of an incentive to use it as a currency so um those coin somewhat randomly has uh a um just a fixed a number of of sort of coins or hash strings that uh are generated every year so this there some inflation but it's not a percentage base it's it's so that the it's a fixed number so the percentage of inflation will necessarily decline over time um so just I I'm not saying that it's like the ideal system for a currency but I think it actually is uh just fundamentally better than anything else I've seen just by accident um so I like how you said um around 2008 so you're not uh you know some people suggested you might be Satoshi Nakamoto you previously said you're not let let me ask you're not for sure would you tell us if you were yes okay uh do you think it's a feature a bug that he's anonymous or she or they it's an interesting kind of Quirk of human history that there is a particular technology that is a completely Anonymous inventor or creator well I mean you can you can look at the um evolution of ideas um before the launch of Bitcoin and see who wrote you know about those ideas um and then like I don't know exact obviously I don't know who who created bitcoin for practical purposes but the evolution of idea is is pretty clear before that and like it seems as though like Nick zavo uh is probably more than anyone else uh responsible for the evolution of those ideas so yeah he claims not to be Nakamoto but I'm not sure that's that's neither here nor there uh but he he seems to be the one more responsible for the ideas behind Bitcoin than anyone else so it's not perhaps like singular figures aren't even as important as the the figures in involved in the evolution of ideas that led to a thing so yeah yeah it's you know most perhaps it's sad to think about history but maybe most names will be forgotten anyway what is a name anyway it's a name a name attached to an idea what does it even mean really I think Shakespeare had a thing about roses and stuff whatever he said rose by any other name would smell of sweet I got to on to quote Shakespeare I feel I feel like I accomplished something today shall I compell you to a sum day I going to clip that out um not more tempered and more [Laughter] fair autopilot Tesla autopilot um Tesla autopilot has been through an incredible journey over the past six years um or perhaps even longer in the minds of in your mind in the minds of many involved uh yeah I think that's where we first like connected really was the autopilot stuff autonomy and the whole journey was incredible to me to watch I was um because I knew well part of is I was at MIT and I I knew the difficulty of computer vision yeah and I knew the whole I had a lot of colleagues and friends about the Dara challenge I knew how difficult it is and so there was a natural skepticism when I first drove a Tesla with uh the initial system based on mobile eye I thought there's no way so first when I when I got in I thought there's no way this car could maintain um like staying Lane and create a comfortable experience so my intuition initially was that the lane keeping problem is way too difficult to solve oh L keeping yeah that's relatively easy well like uh but not the but solve in the way that we just we talked about previously is prototype versus a thing that actually creates a pleasant experience over hundreds of thousands of miles Millions yeah so I was we had to wrap a lot of code around the mobile eye thing it doesn't doesn't just work by itself yes I mean there there's part that's part of the story of how you approach things sometimes sometimes you do things from scratch sometimes at first you kind of see what's out there and then you decide to from scratch that was one of the boldest decisions I've seen is both on the hardware and the software to decide to eventually go from scratch I thought again I was skeptical whether that's going to be able to work out cuz it's such a such a diff problem and so it was an incredible journey what I see now with um everything the hardware the compute the sensors the uh the things I maybe care and love about most is the the stuff that Andre kathi is leading with the data set selection the whole data engine process the neural network architectures the the way that's in the real world that network is tested validated all the different test sets um you know versus the imag Net model of computer vision like what's in Mia is like real world artificial intelligence so um Andre is awesome and obviously plays an important role but we have a lot of really talented people driving things so um and aoke is actually the the head of autopilot engineering um Andre is so director of ai ai stuff yeah yeah so yeah there's I'm aware that there's an incredible team of just a lot going on yeah I just uh you know OB people people will give of will give me too much credit and they will give under too much credit so and people should realize how much is going on under the under the a lot of really talented people um the Tesla autopilot AI team is extremely talented it's like some of the smartest people in the world um so yeah we're getting it done what are some insights you've gained over those five six years of autopilot about the problem of autonomous driving so you leap in having some sort of first principles kinds of intuitions but nobody knows how difficult the the like the I thought I thought the self-driving problem would be hard but it's it was harder than I thought it's not like I thought it would be easy I thought it would be very hard but it was actually way harder than than even that so I what it comes down to at the end of the day is disolve self-driving uh you have to solve uh you you basically need to recreate um what what humans do to drive which is humans drive with Optical sensors eyes and biological neuronet um and so in order to that that's how the entire Road system is designed to work with with a p basically passive Optical and neural Nets um biologically um and now that we need to so for actually for full driving to work we have to recreate that in digital form um so we have to um that that means cameras with uh Advanced uh neural Nets in Silicon form uh and and then you it will obviously solve for full sell driving that's that's the only way I don't think there's any other way but the question is what aspects of human nature do you have to encode into the machine right so you have to solve the perception problem like detect and then you first well realize what is the perception problem for driving like all the kinds of things you have to be able to see like what what do we even look at when we drive there's uh I just recently heard Andre talked about at MIT about like car doors I think it was the world's greatest talk of all time about carard doors yeah um the the you know the fine details of carard doors like what what is even an open car door man so like the the antology of that that's a perception problem we humans solve that perception problem and Tesla has to solve that problem and then there's the control and the planning coupled with the perception you have to figure out like what's involved in driving like especially in all the different edge cases um and and then the I mean maybe you can comment on this how much game theoretic kind of stuff needs to be involved you know at a four-way stop sign you know our as humans when we drive our actions affect the world like sure it changes how others behave most autonomous driving if you you're usually just responding um to the scene as opposed to like really um asserting yourself in the scene do you think I think this I think I think these these sort of control logic conundrums are not are not the hard part um the you know let's see um what do you think is the hard part of in this whole um beautiful complex problem it's a lot of freaking software man a lot of smart lines of code um uh for sure in order to have um create an accurate Vector space uh so like you're you're coming from image space which is like this this flow of um photons you're going to the camera cameras and and then uh so you have this massive bitstream um in an image space uh and then you have to uh effectively compress uh the a massive but stream uh corresponding to photons that knocked off an electron in in a camera sensor uh and and turn that putstream into into Vector space um by by Vector space I mean like uh you know you've got cars and and humans and uh Lane lines and curves and uh traffic lights and that kind of thing um once you uh have an accurate Vector space um the control problem is similar to that of a video game like a grand theft order of cyberpunk um if you have accur accurate ve Vector space it's the control problem is it's I wouldn't say it's it's trivial it's not trivial but it's um like it's it's it's a it's not like some insurmountable thing it's just a it's but but having accurate Vector space is very difficult yeah I think we humans uh don't give enough respect to how incredible the human perception system is to to mapping the raw photons to the vector space representation in our heads your brain is doing an incredible amount of processing um and and and giving you an image that is a very cleaned up image like when we look around here we see like you see color in the corners of your eyes but actually your eyes have very few uh uh cones like the cone receptors in the peripheral vision your your your eyes are painting color in the peripheral vision you don't realize it but their eyes are actually painting color and your eyes also have like there's blood vessels and all sorts of gnarly things and there's a blind spot but do you see your blind spot no your your your your brain is painting in the missing the blind spot you're going to do these like see these things online where you look look here and look at this point and and then look at this point and it's if it's in your blind spot it it your brain will just fill in the the missing bits cool the peripher vision is so cool makes you realize all the Illusions for vision science is so it makes you realize just how incredible the brain is the brain is doing crazy amount of post-processing on the vision signals from your eyes um it's insane so um and then and then even once you get all those Vision signals uh your your brain is constantly trying to Fig to to forget as much as possible so human memory is perhaps the weakest thing about the brain is memory so because memory is so expensive to a brain and so limited your brain is trying to forget as much as possible and distill the things that you see into uh the smallest smallest amounts of information possible so your brain is trying to not just get to a vector space but get to a vector space that is the smallest possible Vector space of only relevant objects um and I think like you can sort of look inside your brain or at least I can like when you drive down the road and and try to think about what your brain is actually doing consciously and it's it's cons it's it's it's it's it's like you'll see a car that's because you're you don't have cameras you you don't have eyes in the back of your head or the side you know so you say like you you're basically your your head is like a you know you basically have like two cameras on a slow gimbal um and and what's your and eyesight's not that great okay human and eyes are you know like um and people are constantly distracted and thinking about things and texting and doing all sorts of things they shouldn't do in a car changing the radio station so having arguments you know is like um so so then like say like like uh like when was the last time you looked right and left and you know or and rare word um or even diagonally you know forward to actually refresh your vector space so you're glancing around and what your mind is doing is is is trying to distill um the relevant vectors basically objects with a position and motion uh and and and then and and then uh editing that down to the least amount that's necessary for you to drive it does seem to be able to uh edit it down or compress it even further into things that Concepts so it's not it's like it goes beyond the human mind seems to go sometimes Beyond Vector space to the sort of space of Concepts to where you'll see a thing it's no longer represented spatially somehow it's almost like a concept that you should be aware of like if this is a a school zone you'll remember that as a concept which is a weird thing to represent but perhaps for driving you don't need to fully represent those things or maybe you get those kind of um well you indirectly you you need to like establish Vector space and then actually have predictions for uh that those Vector spaces so like um you know like if uh you know like you drive past say say a a bus and and you see that there's there's people before you drove past the bus you saw people crossing like or some just imagine there's like a a large truck or something blocking site um but you before you came up to the truck you saw that there were some kids about to cross the road in front of the truck now you can no longer see the kids but you you you need to be able but you would now know okay those kids are probably going to pass by the truck and cross the road even though you cannot see them so you have to have um memory uh you need to remember that there were kids there and you need to have some forward prediction of what their uh Position will be it's a really hard problem relevance so with occlusions and computer vision when you can't see an object anymore even when it just walks behind a tree and reappears that's a really really I mean at least in academic literature it's tracking through occlusions it's very difficult yeah we're doing it um I understand this yeah so some of it it's like object permanent like same thing happens with the humans with neural net like we're like a toddler grows up like there's a there's a point in time where uh they develop they have a sense of object permanence so before a certain age if you have a ball uh or a toy or whatever and you put it behind your back and you pop it out if they don't before they have object permanence it's like a new thing every time it's like whoa this toy went poof disappeared and now it's back again and they can't believe it and that they can play peekaboo all day long because peekaboo is fresh every time but then we figure out object permanence then they realize oh no the the object is not gone it's just behind your back um sometimes I wish we never did figure out per yeah so that's uh so that's an important problem to solve yes so so like an important evolution of the neural Nets in the car is uh um memory C memory across both time and space um so uh now you can't remember like you have to say like how long do you want to remember things for and and it there's there's a cost to remembering things for a long time so you you you know like run out of me memory to if you try to remember too much for too long um and and then you also have things that are stale if if if they're remember them for too long and then you also need things that are me remembered over time so even if you like say have like fragant like 5 Seconds of memory uh on a Time basis but like let's say you you parked at a light and you and you saw use a pedestrian example that people were waiting to cross the cross the road and you can't you can't quite see them because of an occlusion uh and but they might wait for a minute before the light changes for them to cross the road you still need to to remember that that that that's where they were um and that they're probably going to cross the road type of thing um so even if that exceeds your your your timebase memory it should not exceed your space memory and I I just think the data engine side of that so getting the data to learn all the concepts that you're saying now is an incredible process it's this iterative process of just it's this this hydronet many hydronet we're changing the name to something else okay I'm sure it'll be equally as Rick and Morty like there's a lot of there yeah we've rearchitecturing the cars so many times it's crazy also every time there's a new major version you'll rename it to something more ridiculous or uh or memorable and beautiful sorry not ridiculous of course if you see the full the full like array of neural Nets that that that are operating in the car it's it kind of boggles the Mind there so there's so many layers it's crazy um so yeah um but and we we started off with uh simple neural Nets that were uh basically image recognition on a single frame from a single camera uh and then uh trying to knit those together with you know it with the c I should say we we're really primarily running C here because C++ is too much overhead and we have our own C compiler so to get maximum performance we actually wrote Our Own C compiler and are continuing to optimize our C compiler uh for uh maximum efficiency in fact we've just recently uh done a new Rev on a on a c compiler that will compile compile directly to our autopilot Hardware um so you want to compile the whole thing down and with your own compiler like so efficiency here because there's all kinds of comput there CPU GPU there's like basic types of things and you have to somehow figure out the scheduling across all those things and so you're compiling the code down that does all okay this is so that's why there's a lot of people involved there there's a lot of hardcore uh software engineering at a very sort of bare metal level uh cuz you we're trying to do a lot of compute uh that's constrained to the you know our fullof driving computer so and we want to try to have the highest frames per second um possible um with with in a s very finite amount of compute um and power so um we really put a lot of effort into the efficiency of our compute um and and uh so there's actually a lot of work done by some very talented software engineers at Tesla that uh at a at a very foundational level to improve the efficiency of compute and how we use the the trip accelerators uh which are basically um dot you know doing Matrix math do do products like a Brazillian do products you it's like what what what are new orlet it's like computer wise like 99% dot product so you know um and you want to achieve as many high frame rates like a video game you want full resolution High frame rate high frame rate low latency um low Jitter uh so um I I think one of the things we're um moving towards now is no post-processing of the image through the um uh the image signal processor so um like for what happens for cameras is that almost cameras is they um there's a lot of post-processing done in order to make pictures look pretty MH um and so we don't care about pictures looking pretty um we we just want the data we we so we we're moving to just Ro Photon on counts so the system will like the image that that the computer sees is actually much more than what you see if you represented it on a camera it's got much more data uh and even in very low light conditions you can see that there's a small Photon count difference between you know this spot here and that spot there which means that so it can see in the dock incredibly well um because it can detect these tiny differences in photon counts like much better than you possibly imagine um so and and then we also save uh 13 millisecond on a latency uh so um from removing the postprocessing on the image yes yeah it's like um because we've got you know eight cameras and and then there's uh roughly I don't know one and a half millisecs also maybe 1.6 milliseconds of latency um for for each camera and So like um going to just uh basically bypassing the image processor uh gets us back 13 milliseconds of latency which is important um and and we track latency all the way from you know Photon hits the the camera to you know all the steps that it's got to go through to get you go through the um the various neural Nets and the the C code and there's a little bit of C++ there as well um well I maybe a lot but it the core stuff is the heavy duty Compu is len see um and uh and so so we track that latency all the way to an output command to the um Drive Unit to accelerate uh the brakes just to slow down the steering you turn left or right um so CU you got to Output a command that's going to go to a controller and like some of these controllers have an update frequency that's maybe uh 10 Hertz or something like that which is slow that's like now you lose 100 Mill seconds potentially so um so then we want to update the the drivers on the like say steering and braking control to have um more like uh 100 HZ instead of 10 htz and you got a 10 millisecond latency instead of 100 milliseconds worst case latency and and actually J Jitter is more of a a challenge than than than latency because latency is like you can you can you can anticipate and predict but if you but if you've got a stack up of things going from the camera to the to the computer through then a series of other computers and finally to an actuator on the the car if you have a stackup of uh uh of tolerances of timing tolerances then you can have quite a variable latency which is called jedar and and that makes it a hard to to to anticipate exactly what how you should turn the car or accelerate because you know if you got maybe 100 50 200 milliseconds of Jitter then you could be off by you know up to 02 seconds and this could make this could make a big difference so you have to interpolate somehow to to to uh deal with the effects of Jitter so that you can make like robust control decisions yeah have to so the Jitter is in the sensor information or the Jitter can occur at any stage in the pipeline you can if you have just if you have fixed latency you can anticipate um and and like say okay we know that uh our information is for argument sake 150 millisecond stale like so 150 I say 150 milliseconds from Photon second camera to um where you can measure a change in the acceleration of the vehicle um so then uh then you can say okay well we're going to and we know it's 150 milliseconds so we're going to take that into account and uh and compensate for that latency however if if you've got then 150 milliseconds of of latency plus 100 milliseconds of Jitter that which could be anyway from zero Z to 100 milliseconds on top so so then your latency could be from 150 250 milliseconds now you got 100 milliseconds that you don't know what to do with and and that's basically random so getting rid of J is extremely important and that affects your control decisions and all those kinds of things okay um yeah the car is just going to fundamentally maneuver better with lower Jitter um got it and the cause will maneuver with superhuman ability and reaction time much faster than a human I mean I think over time the it tell autopilot full driving will be capable of Maneuvers that um you know uh you know are far more than what like James Bond could do in like the best movie type of thing that's exactly what I was imagining in my mind as you said it um it's like impossible Maneuvers that a human couldn't do you know so well let me ask sort of uh looking back at the six years looking out into the future based on your current understanding how hard do you think this this full self-driving problem when do you think Tesla will solve level four FSD I mean it's looking quite likely that it will be next year and what does the solution look like is it the current pool of FSD beta candidates they start getting greater and greater as they have been degrees of autonomy and then there's a certain level Beyond which they can they they can do their own they can read a book yeah so uh I mean you can see anybody who's been following the full driving beta closely um will see that the um the rate of disengagements has been dropping rapidly so like a disengagement be where where the driver intervenes to prevent the car from doing something right uh dangerous potentially so um um so the interventions you know per million miles has been dropping uh dramatically at some point the and and that Trend looks like it happens next year is that the probability of an accident on FSD uh is uh less than that of the average human and then and then significantly less than that of the average human um so it certainly appears like we will get there next year um then then of course that that then there's going to be be a case of okay we now have to prove this to regulators and prove it to you know and and we we we want a standard that is not just equivalent to a human but uh much better than the average human I think it's got to be at least two or three times uh higher safety than a human so two or three times lower probability of injury than a human um before before we would actually say like okay it's okay to go it's not going to be equivalent it's going to be much better so if you look uh 10 FSD 10.6 just came out recently 10.7 is on the way maybe 11 is on the way somewhere in the future yeah um we were hoping to get 11 out this year but it's uh 11 actually has a whole bunch of uh fundamental rewrites on the neural neural net architecture um and and some fundamental improvements uh in creating Vector space uh so um so there is a some fundamental like leap that really deserves the 11 that's a pretty cool number yeah you know uh 11 would be uh a single stack for all yeah one stack to rule them all um and uh but but there there're just some really fundamental uh neural net architecture changes that are that that will allow for U much more capability but but you know at first they're going to have issues so like we have this working on like sort of alpha software and it's it's good but it's uh it's it's basically taking a whole bunch of cc++ code and and and leading a massive amount of C++ code and replacing it with the neural net and you know Andre um makes this point a lot which is's like neural Nets a kind of eting software you know over time there's like less and less conventional software more and more neural net which is still software but it's you know still comes out the Lin of software but uh let's more more neural net stuff uh and less uh you know heris stics basically um if if you're uh more more more uh Matrix based stuff and less uh htics based stuff um and um you know like like like one of the big changes will be um like right now the neural Nets uh will um deliver a giant bag of points to the C++ or CN C++ code yeah um we call it the giant bag of points yeah uh and it's like so you go to pixel and and and and something associated with that pixel like this pixel is probably car this pixel is probably Lan line um then you've got to assemble this giant bag of points in the C code and turn it into uh V um and uh does a pretty good job of it but it's it's uh it's we want to just we need another layer of neural Nets on top of that to take the the giant bag of points and distill that down to uh Vector space in the in the neural net part of the software as opposed to the heuristics part of the software this is a big Improvement um NE on that's all the way down is what you want it's not all NE net but it's it's it's uh this will be just a g this is a game changer to not have the bag of points the giant bag of points that has to be assembled with um many lines of C C++ uh and and have the and have neural net just sample those into vectors so so that the the neural net is outputting um much much less data it's it's it's it's outputting this this is a lane Line This is a curb this is driveable space this is a c this is a you know pedestrian or cyclist or something like that it's outputting um it's it's really out outputting um prop proper vectors to the the cc++ control control code as opposed to the sort of constructing the the vectors uh in Inc um which we've done I think quite a good job of but it it's it's a we're kind of hitting a local maximum on the how well the SE can do this um so this is this is really this really big deal and and just all of the networks in the car need need to move to surround video there's still some Legacy networks that are not surround video um and all of the training needs to move to surround video and the efficiency of the training uh needs to get better and it is uh and then we need to move everything to uh raw uh counts as opposed to um processed images okay so which is which is quite a big reset on the training because the systems trained on post-processed image images so we need to redo all the training uh to train against the the RO Photon counts instead of the postprocessed image so ultimately it's kind of reducing the complexity of the whole thing so uh reducing reducing lines of code will actually go go lower yeah that's fascinating um so you're doing Fusion of all the sensors so reducing the complexity of having to deal with these cameras cameras really right yes um same with humans I guess we got ears too okay yeah well we'll actually need to incorporate um sound as well um because you know you need to like listen for ambulance sirens or you know fire tracks you know uh somebody like you know yelling at you or something I don't know just there's there's a little bit of audio that needs to be incorpor as well do you need to C bath a break yeah let's true let's take a break okay honestly frankly like the ideas are are the easy thing and the implementation is the hard thing like the idea of going to the Moon is is the easy part but going to the Moon is the hard part is the hard part um and there's a lot of like hardcore engineering that's got to get done at the hardware and software level uh like I said optimizing the C compiler and the just you know uh cutting out latency everywhere like this is if we don't do this the system will not work properly um so the work of the engineers doing this they are like the unsung heroes to some you know but they are critical to the success of the situation I think you made it clear I mean at least to me it's super exciting everything that's going on outside of what Andre is doing yeah just the whole infrastructure of the software I I mean everything is going on with data engine uh whatever whatever it's called the whole process is is just the sh scale of it is is boggles to mind like the training the amount of work done with like we written all this custom software for training and labeling um and to do auto labeling Auto labeling is essential um because especially when you got like surround video it's very difficult to like label surround video from scratch is extremely difficult um like take a human such a long time to even label one video clip like several hours or the aut labeler basically we just apply he like heavy duty uh like a lot of compute to the to the video clips um to preassign and guess what all the things are that are going on in the surround video and then there's like correcting it yeah and then all the human has to do is like tweet like say you know CH adjust what is incorrect this this is like increase increases productivity by effect 100 or more yeah uh so you've presented Tesla bot as primarily useful in the factory first of all I think human robots are incredible from a a fan of Robotics I think uh the Elegance of movement that human um that humanoid robots that bipedo robots show are just so cool so it's uh really interesting that you're working on this and also talking about applying the same kind of all the ideas of some of which we've talked about with data engine all the things that we're talking about with Tesla autopilot just uh transferring that over to the just yet another robotics problem I have to ask since I care about human robot interaction so the human side of that so you've talked about mostly in the factory do you see it uh Al do you see part of this problem that Tesla bot has to solve is interacting with humans and potentially having a place like in the home so interacting not just not replacing labor but also like I don't know being a friend or or an assistant I think the the possibilities are you know endless yeah I me it's it's obviously like a it's not quite in Tesla's primary Mission direction of accelerating sustainable energy but uh it is a an extremely useful thing that we can do for the world which is to make a useful humanoid robot um that is capable of interacting with the world and um helping in in many different ways uh so soly in factories and and really just I mean I think if you say like uh extrapolate to you know many years in the future it's like I I think uh work will become optional so like there's a lot of jobs that if you if people weren't paid to do it they they wouldn't do it like it's not it's not fun you know necessarily like if you're washing dishes all day it's like H you know even if you really like washing dishes you really want to do it for eight hours a day every day probably not so um and then there's like dangerous work and basically if it's dangerous boring uh it has like potential for repetitive stress in injury that kind of thing um then that's really where human right robots would add the most value initially um so that's what we're aiming for is is to um for for the human to drove us to do jobs that people don't don't voluntarily want to do um and and then that we'll have to pair that obviously with some kind of universal B basic income in the future uh so I think um so DC world when there's like hundreds of millions of Tesla Bots doing different performing different tasks throughout the world yeah I haven't really thought about it that far into future but I I guess that there may be something like that um so ask a wild question so the the number of Tesla cars has been accelerating there's been close to 2 million produced many of them have autopilot I think we're over 2 million now yeah do you think there will ever be a time when there will be more Tesla Bots than Tesla cars yeah I I you know actually it's funny you asked this question because normally I do try to think pretty far into the future but I haven't really thought that far into the future with the with the Tesla bot or it's code named op Optimus I call I I call it Optimus subprime because it's not it's not like a giant you know transformer robot um so uh but it's meant to be a general purpose help health Orbot um and and basically like like the things that we're basically like like Tesla I think um is the has the most advanced real world AI uh for interacting with the real world which we developed as a function of to to make self-driving work um and so along with custom hardware and like a lot of you know uh hardcore low-level software to have it run efficiently and be you know power efficient because you know it's one thing to do neural Nets if you got a gigantic subo room with 10,000 computers but now let's say you just you have to now distill that down into one computer that's running at low power in a humanoid robot or a car um that's actually very difficult a lot of Hardcore software work is required for that um so so since we're kind of like solving the N navigate the real world with neural Nets problem for cars which are kind of like robots with four wheels then it's like kind of a natural extension of that is to put it in a robot with arms and legs uh and act you know actuators um so um like like the the the two like hard things are like you basically need to make the have the robot be intelligent enough to interact in a sensible way with the environment um so you need real real world Ai and you need to be very good at um manufacturing which is a very a hard problem TS is very good at manufacturing and also uh has the real world AI so making the human or robot work is uh basically means developing custom uh Motors and sensors uh that that are different from what a car would use um but we we we also we have um I think we have the the the best expertise in developing Advanced electric motors and Power Electronics so it it just has to be for a humanoid robot application not a car still you do talk about love sometimes so let me ask this isn't like for like sex robots or something like that love is the answer yes uh there is something compelling to us not compelling but we connect with um humanoid robots or even legged robots like with a dog and she shapes with dogs it just it seems like you know there's a huge amount of loneliness in this world all of us seek companionship and with other humans friendship and all those kinds of things we have a lot of here in Austin a lot of people have dogs um there seems to be a huge opportunity to also have robots that decrease the uh the the amount of loneliness in the world or help us humans connect with each with each other so in the way that dogs can um do you think about that with testot at all or is it really focused on the problem of of Performing specific tasks not connecting with humans um I mean to be to be honest I have not actually thought about it from the companionship standpoint but I think it actually would end up being it could be actually a very good companion um and it could I you develop like a personality uh over time that is that is like unique like uh you know it's not like they're just all the robots are the same and that personality could evolve to be you know uh match match the the the owner or the you know I guess the owner uh well whatever you want to call it uh the other the other half right uh in the same way that friends do see I think that's a huge opportunity I think yeah know that's interesting like um the because you know like there's a a Japanese phrase are like the wav saavi you know uh the subtle imperfections are what makes something yeah and the subtle imperfections of the personality of the robot mapped to the subtle imperfections of the robot's human friend I don't know owner sounds like maybe the wrong word but um could actually make an incredible buddy basically and in that way the imperfection R2D2 or like a C3PO sort of thing you know so from a machine learning perspective I think the flaws being a feature is really nice you could be quite terrible at being a robot for quite a while in the general home environment or all the in the general world and that's kind of adorable and that's like those are your flaws and you fall in love with those flaws so it's it's a it's very different than autonomous driving where it's a very high stakes environment you cannot mess up and so it's yeah it's more fun to be a robot in the home yeah in fact if you think of like C3PO and R2-D2 yeah like they actually had a lot of like flaws and Imperfections and silly things and they would argue with each other and um were they actually good at doing anything I'm not exactly sure they definitely added a lot to the story um but but but there's there sort of quirky elements and you know that they would like make mistakes and do things like it was like uh it made them relatable I don't know um endearing so so yeah I think that that could be something that uh it probably would happen um but our initial focus is just to make it useful uh so so um I'm confident we'll get it done I'm not sure what the exact time frame is but uh like we'll probably have I don't know a decent prototype towards the end of next year or something like that and it's cool that it's connected to Tesla the car so so like it's using a lot of you know would use the autopilot inference computer and um a lot of the training that we've done for the four cars in terms of recognizing real world things could be applied directly to the to the robot um so it but but there's there's a lot of custom actuators and sensors that need to be developed mhm and an extra module on top of the vector space uh for love yeah that's me okay we can add that to the car too that's true um yeah it could be useful in all environments like you said a lot of people argue in the car so maybe we can help them out uh you're a student of History fan of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History Podcast yeah that's great greatest podcast ever yeah I think it is actually ites it almost doesn't really count as a podcast it's more like a audio book yeah so you were on the podcast with Dan I just had a chat with him about it he said you guys want military and all that kind of stuff uh yeah it's uh it was basically um uh I it should be titled engineer Wars uh essentially like like when there's a rapid change in the rate of Technology then um engineering plays a pivotal role in in Victory and battle um do you how far back in history did you go did you go World War II it was mostly well it was supposed to be a deep dive on Fighters and bomber uh technology in World War II um but that ended up being more wide- ranging than that um because I just went down the total rout hole of like studying all the the the fighters and bombers World War II and like the constant rock paper sciss this game that like you know uh one country make this plane then make a plane to beat that and that try make plane to beat that and then and really what matters like the the pace of innovation um and also access to highquality uh Fuel and uh raw materials so like Germany had like some amazing designs but they couldn't make them uh because they couldn't get the raw materials uh and uh they they had a real problem with the oil and and and uh fuel basically the fuel quality was extremely variable so the design wasn't the bot neck it was uh yeah like the the US had kickass fuel uh that was like very consistent like the problem is if you make a very high performance aircraft engine um in order to make high performance you have to um the the the the the fuel the aviation gas uh has to be a consistent mixture and uh uh it has to have a high high octane um like high octane is the most important thing but also can't have like impurities and stuff uh because you you'll fou up the engine and and and Germany just never had good access to oil like they try to get it by invading the cuses MH um but that didn't work too well never works well C of him umet everybody nice to meet you so there always was Germany was always struggling with SH with basically shete oil um and so they could not uh they couldn't count on a on high quality fuel for their aircraft so then they had to add all have all these additives and and stuff uh so um uh where whereas the US had awesome fuel um and they provided that to Britain as well um so that allowed the British and the Americans to design aircraft engines that were uh super high performance better than anything else in the world Germany Germany could could design the engines they just didn't have the fuel and then also the like the the uh the quality of the aluminum Alloys that they were getting was also not that great and so you know did you is this like uh you talked about all this with Dan y awesome broadly looking at history when you look at Jenis Khan when you look at Stalin Hitler the darkest moments of human history uh what do you take away from those moments does it help you gain insight about human nature about human behavior today whether it's the wars or the individuals or just the behavior of people any aspects of History yeah I find history fascinating um um there's a lot of incredible things that have been done good and bad um that they help just help you understand the nature of civilization um and individuals and does it make you sad that humans do these kinds of things to each other you look at the 20th century World War II the cruelty the abuse of power talk about communism Marxism and Stalin um I mean some of these things do I mean if if you like there's a lot of human history um Mo most of it is actually people just getting on with their lives uh you know and and it's not like human history is just uh non-stop war and disaster those are actually just those are intermittent and rare if they weren't then you know humans would soon cease to exist um uh but there just that Wars tend to be written about a lot and whereas like uh something being like well a normal year where nothing major happened was doesn't get written about much but that's you know most people just like farming and kind of like living their life you know um being a villager somewhere um and every now and again there's a war and so um and um yeah I have to say like there aren't very many books that I where I just had to start reading because it was just too too dark but uh the book about Stalin the cour of the red Zar I could I had to stop reading it was just too too bad dark rough yeah um the 30s uh there's a lot lot of lessons there to me it in particular that it feels like humans like all of us have that Theo soit in line um that the line between good and evil runs through the heart every man that all of us are capable of evil all of us are capable of good it's almost like this kind of responsibility that um all of us have to to to tend towards the good and so like to me looking at history is almost like an example of look you have some charismatic leader that uh convinces you of things it's too easy based on that story to do evil onto each other onto your family onto others and so it's like our responsibility to do good um it's not like now is somehow different from history that can happen again all of it can happen again and yes most of the time you're right I mean the optimistic view here is mostly people are just living life and as you've often memd about uh the quality of life was way worse back in the day and keeps improving over time through Innovation through technology but still it's somehow notable that these blimps of atrocities happen sure yeah I mean life was really tough for most of History um I mean really for most of human history um a good year would be one where not that many people in your village died of the plague starvation freezing to death or being killed by a neighboring Village it's like well it wasn't that bad you know it was only like you know we lost 5% this year that was uh yeah you know that would be part of the course like just just not starving to death would have been like the primary goal of most people in through throughout history just making sure we'll have enough foods to last through the winter and not get not freeze or whatever so um now food is is plentiful I have an obesity problem um you know so well yeah the lesson there is to be grateful for the way things are now for for some of us we've spoken about this offline I'd love to get your thought about it here if I sat down for a long form in-person conversation with the president of Russia Vladimir Putin would you potentially want to call in for a few minutes uh to join in on a conversation with him moderated translated by me sure yeah sure I'd be happy to do that you've shown interest in the Russian language is this grounded in your interest in history of linguistics culture General curiosity I think it sounds cool sounds cool not looks cool so uh well it's it's you know it's it's a it takes a moment to read cilic um once you know what the cic characters stand for actually then reading Russian becomes a lot easier because there are a lot of words that are actually the same like bank is Bank mhm um and uh so find the words that are exactly the same and now you start to understand cic yeah you if if you can sound it out then uh it's much there's at least some commonality of words what about the culture you uh you love grade engineering physics there's a tradition of the Sciences there you look at the 20th century from rocketry so you know some of the greatest Rockets some of the space exploration has been done in the Soviet in the former Soviet Union yeah so do you draw inspiration from that history just how this culture that in many ways mean one of the sad things is because of the language a lot of it is lost to history because it's not translated all those kinds of because it it is in some ways an isolated culture it flourishes within its within its borders um yeah so do you draw inspiration from those folks from from the history of science engineering there I mean the sovet Union Russia and um and Ukraine as well and uh have a really strong history in space flight like some of the most advanced and impressive things in history were done uh you know by the Soviet Union um [Music] so um one can cannot help it admire the impressive rocket technology that was developed um you know after the sort of fall of the Soviet Union the there there's the the there's much less that that that happened um but uh still things are happening but it's not not quite at the um frenetic Pace that was happening uh before the Soviet Union kind of dissolved into separate republics yeah I mean I I you know there's Ros Cosmos the Russian agency I um I look forward to a time when those countries with China are working together the United States are all working together maybe a little bit of friendly competition but I think friendly competition is good um you know governments are slow and the only thing slower than one government is a collectional governments so yeah the Olympics would be boring if everyone just crossed the finishing line at the same time yeah nobody would watch yeah uh and and people wouldn't try hard to run fast and stuff so I think friendly competition is a good thing uh this is also a good place to give a shout out to a video titled the entire Soviet rocket engine family tree by Tim Dodd AKA everyday astronaut it's like an hour and a half it gives a full history of Soviet rockets and people should definitely go check out and support Tim in general that guy is super excited about the future super excited about space flight every time I see anything by him I just have a stupid smile on my face cuz he's so excited about stuff I love people like that is uh really great if you're interested in anything to do with space um he's in terms of uh explaining rocket technology to your average person he's awesome the best I'd say um and um I should say like the PARTA reason like uh I switched us from like rafter at one point was going to be a hydrogen engine um but but hydrogen has a lot of challenges it's very low density it's a it's a deep cryogen so it's only liquid at a very you know very close absolute zero requires a lot of insulation it's um so there's lot a lot of challenges there um and um and I was actually reading a bit about uh Russian rocket engine development and um at least the impression I had was that that uh or Soviet Union Russia and Ukraine uh primarily were uh actually in the process of uh switching to meth methyls um and there were some interesting test stand data for ISP like they were able to get like up to like a 3802 ISP with a meux engine and I was like w okay that's that's actually really impressive so um so I think we could you could actually get um a much lower cost like in optimizing cost per ton to over cost per ton to Mars um it's uh I I think um methane oxgen is the way to go um and I was partly inspired by the Russian work on the test stands uh with methalox engines and now for something completely different do you mind doing a uh bit of a meme review in the spirit of the great the powerful PewDiePie let's say 1 to 11 just go over a few documents printed out we can try let's try this I present to you document numer Uno I don't okay Vlad palor discovers marshmallows yeah that's not bad so you get it because uh heing things yes I get I don't know three whatever um oh that's not very good this is um grounded in some engineering some history uh yeah give this an eight out of 10 what do you think about nuclear power U I'm in favor of nuclear power I think it's uh in a place that is not subject to extreme natural disasters I think it's a nuclear power is a great way to generate uh electricity um I I don't think we should be shutting down nuclear power stations yeah but what about chobble exactly um so uh I think I think people there's like a lot of fear of radiation and stuff um and it's I I guess the problem is like a lot of people just don't un they didn't study engineering or physics so they it's just the word radiation just sounds scary you know so they don't they they can't calibrate what radiation means um but radiation is much less dangerous than than you think um so um like for example Fukushima you know um when the Fukushima uh problem happened uh to the tsunami the I got people in California asking me if they should worry about radiation from Fukushima and I'm like definitely not not even slightly not at all that is crazy um and just to show like look this is how like the danger is so much overplayed compared to what what it really is that I actually flew to Fukushima and I actually I donated a a a solar power system for water treatment plant and uh and and I made a point of eating locally grown vegetables um on TV in Fukushima like I'm still alive okay so it's not even that the risk of these events is low but the impact of them is is impact is greatly exaggerated it's just great human nature it's people people don't know what radiation is like I've had people ask me like what about radiation from cell phones quoting quing brain cancer I'm like when you say radiation do you mean photons or particles like that don't know what what do you mean photons particles do you mean uh let's say photons what what frequency or wavelength and they're like I have no idea um like do you know that everything's radiating all the time like what do you mean like yeah everything's radiating all the time photons are being emitted by by all objects all the time basically so um and if you want to know what it's it's what it means to stand in front of nuclear fire go outside the sun is a gigantic you know thermonuclear reactor you're staring right at it yeah are you still alive yes okay amazing yeah I guess radiation is one of the words that can be used as as a tool to to fear Monger by certain people that's it and I think people just don't don't understand so I mean that's the way to fight that uh that fear I suppose is to understand is to learn yeah just say like okay how many people have actually died from nuclear accidents since like practically nothing and uh say how many people have have died from you know coal plants and it's a very big number MH so like obviously we should not be starting up coal plants and shutting down nuclear plants just doesn't make any sense at all coal plants like I don't know 100 to a thousand times worse for for health than nuclear power plants uh you want to go to the next one this really bad it's uh that uh 90 180 and 360 degrees everybody loves the math nobody gives a shit about 270 it's not super funny I don't like 20 three yeah um this is not uh you know LOL situation yeah uh that's pretty good the United States oscillating between establishing and destroying dictatorships it's like a Metro is that a Metro what is yeah yeah yeah it's uh I know 7 out of 10 it's kind of true oh yeah this is uh this is kind of personal for me next one oh man is this Leica yeah well no this is or it's like referring to Leica or something as leica's uh like uh husband husband yeah yeah hello yes this is dog your wife was launched into space and then the last one is him with his eyes closed and a bottle of AA yeah Lea didn't come back no they don't tell you the full story of you know what what the love the impact they had on the loved ones true that one gets an 11 for me just the Soviet Shad out oh yeah it this keeps going on the Russian theme first man in space nobody cares first man in the moon well I think people do care no I know but um there is yar's names will will will will be forever in history I think there is something special about placing like stepping foot onto another totally for on land it's it's not the journey like uh people that explored the oceans it's not as important to explore the oceans as to land on a whole new continent yeah yeah this is about you oh yeah I'd love to get your comment on this Elon Musk after sending $6.6 billion to the UN to end world hunger you have three hours um yeah I mean obviously $6 billion is not going to end world hunger so um so I mean reality is at this point the world is producing uh far more food than it can really consume like we don't have a caloric uh constraint at this point so where there is hunger it is almost always due to um like like Civil War or Strife or some like um it's it's it's not a thing that is extremely rare for it to be just a matter of like lack lack of money it's like you know it's like some there's a Civil War in some some country and and like one part of the country's literally trying to starve the other part of the country um so it's much more complex than something that money could solve it's Pol it's geopolitics it's it's a lot of things it's human nature it's governments it's money monetary systems all that kind of stuff yeah food is extremely cheap uh these days it's like it's um I mean the US at this point um you know among low-income families obesity is is actually another the problem it's not like obesy it's not hunger it's it's like too you know too many calories uh so it's not that nobody's hungry hungry anywhere it's just it's just this is uh not not a simple matter of adding money and solving it what do you think that one gets just I don't know two just going after Empires world uh where did you get those artifacts the British museum shout out to Monty Python we found them yeah the the museum is it's pretty great I mean yeah in Middle Britain did take uh these historical artifacts from all around the world and put them in London but uh you know it it it's not like people can't go see them uh so it is a a convenient place to see these uh ancient artifacts is is London for you know for for a large segment of the world so I think you know unbalance the British museum is a net good although I'm sure the a lot of countries would argue about that yeah it's like you want to make these historic artifacts accessible to as many people as possible and the British museum I think does a good job of that even if there's a darker aspect to like the history of empire in general whatever the empires however things were done it's it is the history that happen you can't sort of erase that history unfortunately you could just become better in the future it's the point yeah I mean it's like well how how are we going to pass moral judgment on on these these things like it's like if uh you know uh one is going to judge say the British Empire you got to judge you know what everyone was doing at the time and how were the British relative to everyone um and I think there brtish would actually get like a relatively good grade relatively good grade not in absolute terms but compared to what everyone else was doing um they were not the worst like I said you got to look at these things in the context of the history of the time um and say What were what were the Alternatives and what are you comparing it against yes and I I I I do not think it would be the case that um Britain would get a uh a bad grade in in when looking at history at the time now if you judge history from you know from what is morally acceptable today you're basically going to give everyone a failing grade yeah I'm not clear it's not I don't think anyone would get a passing grade um in in their morality uh of like you go back 300 years ago like who who is getting a passing grade basically no one and we might not get a passing grade from Generations that uh that come after us uh what does that one get uh sure uh six seven for the Monty Python maybe I always love Monty Python they're great uh Life of Brian and the quest of Holy Grail are incredible yeah yeah D those serious eyebrows BR you how important you think is facial hair to to great leadership well you got a new haircut is that is that is does how does that affect your leadership I I don't know hopefully not it doesn't um is that the second no one yeah the second is no one first there is no one competing with no one too those are like epic eyebrows so sure it's ridiculous give it six or seven I don't know uh I like this like Shakespeare analysis of memes my he had a he had a flare for drama as well like you know Showmanship yeah yeah it must come from the eyebrows all right um invention great engineering look what I invented that's the best thing since ripped up bread yeah cuz they invented they're just sliced bread am I just explaining memes at this point this is what my life has become um he's a m m explainer I'm a meme what it like a you know like a scribe that like runs around with the Kings and just like writes down memes I mean when was a cheeseburger inventor that's like an epic invention yeah like like wow you know that versus just like a burger or or Burger I guess a burger in general is like you know um then there's like what is a burger what's what's a sandwich and then you start getting it's a pizza sandwich and what is the original it's it's it gets into an ontology argument yeah but everybody knows like if you order like a burger or cheeseburger whatever and you like you get like you know tomato and some lettuce and onions and whatever and you know mayor and ketchup and mustard it's like epic yeah but I'm sure they've had bread and meat separately for a long time and it was kind of a burger on the same plate but somebody who actually combine them into the same thing and bite it and hold it make makes it convenient it's a materials problem like your hands don't get dirty and whatever yeah it's top well that is not what I would have guessed but everyone knows like you if you order a cheeseburger you know what you're getting you know it's not like some obtuse like I wonder what I'll get you know um you know uh fries are I mean great I mean they're the devil but Fries Are Awesome um and uh yeah Pizza is incredible um food Innovation doesn't get enough love yeah I guess is what we're getting at great um uh what about the uh Matthew mccon austinite here uh President Kennedy do you know how to put men on the moon yet Nas no President Kennedy be a lot cooler if you did pretty much sure 66 or something I suppose and this is the last one that's funny someone drew a bunch of dicks all over the walls cistin Chapel boys bathroom sure I'll give it nine it's super it's it's really true all right this is our highest ranking meme for today I mean it's true like how did they get away with that lots of nakedness I me dickpics are I mean just something throughout history uh as long as people can draw things there's been a dickpic it's a staple of human history it's a staple consistent throughout human history you you tweeted that you aspired to Comedy your friends with Joe Rogan might you uh do a short standup comedy set at some point in the future maybe um open for Joe something like that is that is that really standup actual just full on standup full on standup is that in there or is that I've never thought about that um it's extremely difficult if at least that's what uh like Joe says and the comedians say huh I wonder if I could um I mean only one way to find out you know I I have done stand up for friends just uh impromptu you know I'll get get on like a roof uh and they they do laugh but they're are friends too so I don't know if if you got to call you know like a room of strangers are they going to actually also find it funny but I could try see what happens I think you'd learn something either way um yeah I kind of love um both the when you bomb and when when you do great just watching people how they deal with it it's it's so difficult it's so you're so fragile up there it's just you and you you think you're going to be funny and when it completely Falls flat it's just it's beautiful to see people deal with like that I think I might have enough material to do stand up I've never thought about but I might have enough material um I don't know like 15 minutes or something oh yeah yeah do do a Netflix special Netflix special sure um what's your favorite Rick and Morty concept uh just to Spring that on you is there there's a lot of sort of scientific engineering ideas explored there there's the there's the butter robot it's great uh it's a great show you yeah Dr Mor is awesome somebody that's exactly like you from an alternate Dimension showed up there El yeah that's right that you voiced yeah RI Mor certainly explores a lot of interesting Concepts uh like what's the favorite one I know the butter robot certainly is uh you know it's like it it's certainly possible to have too much sentience in a device um like you don't want to have your toaster be like a super genius toaster it's going to hate hate life cuz all it could just make is toast but if you know it's like you don't want to have like super intelligence stuck in a a very limited device um do you think it's too easy from a if we're talk about from the engineering perspective of super intelligence like with Marvin the robot like is it it seems like it might be very easy to engineer just a depressed robot like it it's not obvious to engineer robot that's going to find a fulfilling existence same as humans I suppose but um I wonder if that's like the default if you don't do a good job on building a robot it's going to be sad a lot well we can reprogram robots easier than we can reprogram humans so I I guess if you let it evolve without tinkering then it might get sad uh but you can change the optimization function and have it be a chery robot you uh like I mentioned with with SpaceX you give a lot of people hope and a lot of people look up to you millions of people look up to you uh if we think about young people in high school maybe in college um what advice would you give to them about if they want to try to do something big in this world they want to really have a big positive impact what advice would you give them about their career maybe about life in general try to be useful um you do things that are useful to your fellow human beings to the world it's very hard to be useful um very hard um you know are you contributing more than you consume you know like uh like can you try to have a positive net contribution to society um I think that's the thing to aim for you know not not to try to be sort of a leader for for the sake of being a leader or whatever um a lot of time people who a lot of time the people you want as leaders are the people who don't want to be leaders [Music] so um if you can live a useful life that is a good life a life wor having lived um you know and I like I said I I would I would encourage people [Music] to use the mental tools of physics and apply them broadly in life they are the best tools when you think about educ ation and self-education what do you recommend so there's the university there's uh self-study there is a Hands-On sort of finding a company or a place or a set of people that do the thing you're passionate about and joining them as early as possible um there's uh taking a road trip across Europe for a few years and writing some poetry which uh which which trajectory do you suggest for in terms of learning about how you can become useful as you mentioned how you can have the most positive impact what i' encourage people to read a lot of books just read like basically try to ingest as much information as you can uh and try to also just develop a good general knowledge um so so you at least have like a rough lay of the land of the the knowledge landscape um like try to learn a little about about a lot of things um cuz you might not know what you're really interested how would you know what you're really interested in if you at least aren't like doing it peripheral exp exploration of broadly of of the knowledge landscape um and and you talk to people from different walks of life and different uh Industries and professions and skills and OCC occupations like try you learn as much as possible man search for meaning isn't the whole thing a search for meaning is yeah what's the meaning of life and all you know but just generally like I said I I would encourage people to read broadly um in many different subject areas um and and and then try to find something where there's an overlap of your talents and and what you're interested in so people may may be good at something but or they may have SK skill at a particular thing but they don't like doing it um so you want to try to find a thing where you have you're that's a good a good uh combination of of your of the things that you're inherently good at but you also like doing um and um and reading is a super fast shortcut to to figure out which where are you you both good at it you like doing it and it will actually have positive impact well you got to learn about things somehow so read reading a broad range I just really read it you know at one point when as a kid I I kind I read through the encyclopedia uh so that's pretty helpful um and uh also things I didn't even know existed all lights obviously and it's like as broad as it gets encyclopedias were digestible I think uh you know whatever 40 years ago go um so um you know maybe read through the the condensed version of the encyclopedia veranica I'd recommend that um you can always like skip subjects where you read a few paragraphs and know you're not interested just jump to the next one so read the encyclopedia or skim through it um and um but you know I put a lot of stock and certainly have a lot of respect for someone who puts in an honest day's work uh to do useful things and and just generally to have like a not a zero some mindset um or or a like have have more of a grow the pie mindset like the if if you sort of say like when when we see people like perhaps um including some very smart people kind of taking an attitude of U like like like doing things that seem like morally questionable it's often because they have at at a base sort of aaic level a zero some mindset um and and they without realizing it they don't realize they have a a a zero some mindset or or at least they don't realize it consciously um and so if you have a zero some mindset then the only way to get ahead is by taking things from others if it's like if the if the pie is fixed then the only way to have more piie is to take someone else's pie but but this is fult like obviously the pie has grown dramatically over time the economic pie um so the real in reality you can have overuse this analogy you can have a lot of you can have there lot of pie yeah P Pi is not fixed um uh so you really want to make sure you don't you're not operating um without realizing it from a zero some mindset where where the only way to get ahead is to take things from others then that's going to result in you take trying to take things from other which is not not good it's much better to work on uh adding to the economic P may you know so you know creating like I said create creating more than you consume uh doing more than you yeah um so that that's a big deal um I think there's like you know a fair number of people in in finance that uh do have a bit of a zero some mindset I mean it's all walks of life i' I've seen that one one of the one of the reasons uh Rogan inspires me is he celebrates all there's a lot there's not not creating a constant competition like there's a scarcity of resources what happens when you celebrate others and you promote others the ideas of others it it uh it actually grows that pie I mean it every like the uh the resource the resources become less scarce and that that applies in a lot of kinds of domains it applies in Academia where a lot of people are very uh see some funding for academic research is zero some it is not if you celebrate each other if you make if you get everybody to be excited about AI about physics above mathematics I think it there'd be more and more funding and I think everybody wins yeah that applies I think broadly yeah yeah exactly so last La last question about love and meaning uh what is the role of Love In The Human Condition broadly and more specific to you how has love romantic love or otherwise made you a better person a better human being better engineer now you're asking really perplexing questions um it's hard to give up I mean there are many books poems and songs written about what is love and what is what exactly you know um you know what is love baby don't hurt me um that's one of the great ones yes yeah you you've earlier quoted Shakespeare but that that's really up there yeah love is a many Splender thing uh I mean there's um because we've talked about so many inspiring things like be useful in the world sort of like solve problems alleviate suffering but it seems like connection between humans is a source you know it's U it's a source of Joy it's a source of meaning and that that's what love is friendship love I I I just wonder if you think about that kind of thing when you talk about preserving the light of human consciousness and us becoming a multi multiplanetary species I mean to me at least um that that means like if we're just alone and conscious and intelligent it it doesn't mean nearly as much as if we're with others right and there's some magic creat when we're together the uh the Friendship of it and I think the highest form of it is love which I I think broadly is is much bigger than just sort of romantic but also yes romantic love and um family and those kinds of things well I mean the reason I guess I care about us becoming multiplet species in a space Fring civilization is foundationally I love Humanity um and and so I wish to see it prosper and do great things and be happy and um and if I did not love Humanity I would not care about these things so when you look at the whole of it the human history all the people has ever lived all the people alive now it's pretty we're we're okay on on the whole we're pretty interesting uh Bunch yes all things considered and I've read a lot of history including the darkest worst parts of it and uh despite all that I think on balance I I still love Humanity you joked about it with the 42 uh what what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing is like is there a non-numerical representation yeah well really I think what Douglas Adams was saying in hedg guide of the Galaxy is that um the universe is the answer and uh what we really need to figure out our what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe yeah um and that the question is the really the hard part and if you can properly frame the question then the answer relatively speaking is easy uh so so so therefore if if you want to understand what questions to ask about the universe you want to understand the meaning of life we need to expand the scof and scale of Consciousness so that we're better able to understand the nature of the universe and and understand the meaning of life and ultimately the most important part will be to ask the right question yes uh thereby elevating the role of the interviewer yeah as the most important human in the room AB inter good questions are you know it's a hard it's hard to come up with good questions absolutely um but yeah like it's like that that is the foundation of My Philosophy is that um I I I am curious about the nature of the universe and uh you know and obviously I will die I don't know when I'll die but I won't live forever um but I would like to know that we are on a path to understanding the nature of the universe and the meaning of life and what questions to ask about the answer of that is the universe and um and so if we expand the scope and scale of humanity and and Consciousness in general um which includes silicon Consciousness then you know they were that that seems like a fundamentally good thing Elon like I said um I'm deeply grateful that you would spend your extremely valuable time with me today and also that you have given millions of people hope in this difficult time this divisive time in this uh cynical time so I hope you do continue doing what you're doing thank you so much for talking today oh you're welcome uh thanks for your excellent questions thanks for listening to this convers ation with Elon Musk to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Elon Musk himself when something is important enough you do it even if the odds are not in your favor thank you for listening and hope to see you next time